Tag: Fear

  • Send It Culture and Fear Suppression (Part 2)

    Send It Culture and Fear Suppression (Part 2)

    Last week we looked at how send it culture teaches us to suppress our fear instead of listening to it, and how that suppression can cost us our judgment over time. This week we are picking up on the question, if suppressing fear isn’t the answer, then what actually is?

    Functional Fear vs. Non Functional Fear

    Let’s talk about fear because not all fear is doing the same job. Being able to tell the two types of fear apart is a skill worth building on its own.

    Functional fear is protective, it is an active response altering us to real danger. It’s your body flagging that something real is happening right now. It’s the feeling you get when the line you were looking at is truly unsafe, or your gut is alerting you to how the conditions don’t quite add up today.This type of fear is a helpful emotion that kicks us into taking actions that keep ourselves safe. 

    Non-functional fear, on the other hand, is often an old, learned pattern that misinterprets safety and slowly erodes our well being. It’s a learned pattern showing up from a past fall, a past close call, or maybe even a fear you picked up elsewhere that isn’t actually about the moment right in fornt of you. This fear paralyzes us, inhibits action, and leads us to avoidance. 

    Suppressing fear treats both types of fear the same way, as something so silence. Fear management on the other hand tries to do something different. Instead fear management attempts to listen and to observe the fear in question, then it tries to decode what the said fear is trying to tell you. 

    How to Manage Fear Instead of Suppressing It

    There are two simple check-ins that can help you shift from fear suppression into fear management. 

    First name the fear outloud. Even if this is just to yourself, take a moment to slow down with a few deep breaths. In this moment by regulating your nervous system you are essentially brining your system back inside the window of tolerance. From here you can move with a more level head by scanning your system. Ask yourself, are you actually ready or are you preforming readiness because that is what is expected of you? Is this fear telling me something true right now, or is this an old pattern unrelated to the situation at hand?

    If the fear is true, respect it and adjust, but if it is an old pattern, acknowledge it without letting it make the call for you. 

    None of this makes you less capable. Learning to work with fear rather than override it is what makes us more resilient in our sports over time. If there is one thing you take away, remember this: suppressing fear might get you down that trail today, but learning to manage our fears is what will keep us on the trails for years to come. 

  • Send It Culture and Fear Suppression (Part 1)

    Send It Culture and Fear Suppression (Part 1)

    You’re at the top of the trail, looking down at a feature you’ve walked many times before but never ridden. Your stomach drops and you feel nauseous when your riding partner rolls up behind you and enthusiastically says, “you totally got this today, full send!”. 

    You pick up your feet, place them onto your pedals, wobble a bit finding your balance, and send it.

    That moment might have felt great because you sent it, but actually deserves a second look since something specific is happening in your body right before you commit. It might even change your perspective on how you ride, climb, or ski.

    What Is Send It Culture?

    Send it culture is the code we are all familiar with, especially within mountain communities. Commit fully, contain your hesitation, and push through fear. It rewards the person who overrides doubt, and punishes the one who pauses as they are playing it too safe. 

    What Happens in Your Body When You Override Fear

    Fear is a signal given to us by our nervous systems. It scans the terrain, checks your position, and flags anything that doesn’t quite add up. When you override that signal instead of listening to it, you’re suppressing information your body worked hard to give you. When you listen to it, you drop into what you need in the moment. 

    Understanding the Window of Tolerance

    Let’s talk about what is going on in your body. Your nervous system operates within different zones of what we call the window of tolerance. 

    In the optimal zone (inside the window), you can handle stress and still think clearly, make informed decisions without being overtaken by emotions, and still act with real judgment.

    Push past the top edge and you land in hyperarousal (outside the window). Here you land in flight or flight mode. Your body floods with adrenaline, your focus narrows, and you become reactive instead of responsive. This high stress state can show up as panic, anger, racing thoughts, anxiety, or hypervigilance. 

    Drop below the bottom edge (also outside the window) and you land in hypoarousal instead. Here, you enter a “freeze” state where you shut down, you go numb, and you check out. 

    Both edges outside the window mean the same thing: you’ve left the zone where you’re in charge of yourself.

    How Send It Culture Pushes You Past Your Limit

    Committing to something that feels risky to you asks you to sit close to the edges of the window. This isn’t always bad though, maybe that feature is truly out of your skillset and the freeze state that you got stuck in helped to prevent you from really hurting yourself. 

    The issue is that send it culture asks us to push through our discomforts being close to the limit, and to override it completely. It asks us to doubt those signals, and ignore our hesitations because doing so comes across as weakness. Instead, this information from our bodies is worth taking note of. 

    There is a cost to ignoring these signals. On a high consequence trail, there’s a big difference between two riders who both feel that something is off. One will read it as information and adjust, while the other will grind through it, because in this culture, backing down isn’t part of the story people like to tell.

    The Cost of Chronic Fear Suppression

    Suppressing your body’s signals comes with a cost, do it often enough and you’ll probably start to think that they have just disappeared. However without us knowing, they actually resurface elsewhere.

    Your baseline anxiety creeps up, and you’re suddenly more irritable over minor things because your body doesn’t have anywhere to put what it’s been holding onto. Over time you learn a pattern of disconnection from yourself until you are no longer sure you can trust what your body is telling you at all. And on those high consequence trails, this erosion in the trust of your own judgment is now a safety risk. 

    So you’re probably wondering, what’s the alternative to suppressing fear altogether then? Part 2 walks through how to work with fear instead of overriding it, including a simple way to tell the difference between fear worth listening to and fear that’s just an old pattern showing up again. Stay tuned for next week’s blog post!