Instant Genius - How to overcome fear, according to a neuroscientist

Episode Date: August 17, 2025

We all know the feeling: thoughts racing through your mind, nervous flutters in your belly, your heart beating hard in your chest. When your whole body is screaming at you that you’re in danger, it can feel impossible to not listen. But fear doesn’t have to hold you back. In this episode, we speak to Professor Abby Marsh, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University, in the US, who recently starred in National Geographic’s new series, Limitless: Live Better Now. In this series, scientists – including Abby – teach actor Chris Hemsworth how to conquer fear, pain and cognitive decline. Today, Abby tells us about what fear is, how it manifests in our bodies and brains, and techniques we can use to overcome or harness it, so we can live more emboldened lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello, welcome to the Instant Genius podcast. I'm Hattie Wilmoth, a trends editor at BBC Science Focus. We all know the feeling. Thoughts racing through your mind, nervous flutters in your belly, your heart beating hard in your chest. When your whole body is screaming at you that you're in danger,

it can feel impossible to not listen. But fear doesn't have to hold you back. In this episode we speak to Professor Abbey Marsh, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in the US, who recently starred in National Geographic's new series, Limitless, Live Better Now. In this series, scientists, including Abby, teach actor Chris Hemsworth how to conquer fear, pain and cognitive decline. Today, Abby tells us about what fear is, how it manifests in our bodies and brains, and techniques we can use to overcome or harness it so we can live more emboldened lives. Avi, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me. So we're here today to talk about fear because you've been involved in a National Geographic documentary series with Chris Hensworth, where as far as I can tell, you just kind of torture him in various different ways. My main thought while watching these three episodes were, well, how did you get into a agree to this and like, why, why are you doing this? So he gets pepper sprayed, he made to swim across an icy river, electrocuted multiple times. And in your episode, made to climb up an enormous wall. I mean, like, honestly, the biggest wall you can think of and then, like, double it. It's like 400 feet tall or something ridiculous. I think it's 600 feet, yeah. 600 feet? Oh, my goodness.

Just beyond comprehension. They kept, like, doing these amazing shots of it, and I still didn't quite get the scale of it wrapped around my head. So my first question to you. is what was the point of all this? Why make Chris climb a massive, massive wall? I should emphasize it was not against his will. That was so surprising to me. I'm very pleased to say he was a willing participant and I came away really respecting his, admiring his desire to test his limits the way he does in the show. I think as a really useful lesson to everybody else about.

how beneficial it can be to do things that are hard because they're hard. And the episode that I was in was about risk. And so he was climbing in February in the Swiss Alps a 600-foot high wall that was actually a dam that has climbing a climbing route up it, but is normally closed in the winter. It's usually only open in the summer. So I think, you know, the Swiss government believes it is indeed sort of mad to try to climb it in the middle of February. And that's certainly how I felt when I was standing at the base of it. And what I think the purpose of the episode was, was to demonstrate that, A, oftentimes people can do things that they didn't, they weren't sure that they could do. And the fact that Chris was able to complete the dam, I think is really

incredible. But also the benefits of doing things that we don't know that we can do, right? There's actually a benefit to doing something harder psychologically. There's something called the IKEA effect where we actually value activities that are harder more than ones that are easier. And the IKEA effect refers to the fact that people are actually willing to pay more for furniture they put together themselves rather than that comes pre-assembled because the effort is what makes it rewarding. Amazing. And in your episode, it was all about not just risk, but also fear.

So can you explain to me why we feel fear? What is it? Sure. I mean, fear is an evolutionarily ancient emotion that's shared by all sentient creatures. as far as we know. And it's a really useful emotion. Its goal is obviously to keep us alive and out of harm's way. The problem is that fear is not necessarily telling us the truth, right? I mean, again, it's evolutionally ancient. I mean, it's even way past lizard brain into like our sort of ancient caterpillar brain, practically. And so I think we're in a cultural moment right now where there's a

tendency for people to treat their emotions as telling them the truth, right? If you're afraid of something, then the danger is real. And that is definitely not the case. Sometimes our emotions tell us to avoid things that in fact won't hurt us and could even benefit us. So the real growth and wisdom, I think psychologically, and the benefits come from learning when you should listen to your emotions and when you should override them and decide that your fear shouldn't be the ultimate decision maker. So fear is an emotion that is generated in the subcortex of the brain originally. It's supported by structures that include the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and a structure called the pariaqueductal gray in the midbrain.

These are regions that work together in a circuit when we confront things that have the potential to harm us. And they work very fast, so they can work sort of below the level of conscious awareness. This is why it can be so hard to control our fears, because it's not happening in the parts of the brain that we have a lot of control over. And when we experience fear, right, when our brain senses that there's something out there that may harm us. Activity in these structures works in a coordinated way to cause us to feel things and to act in ways that will protect us from dangers. So hormones like adrenaline and cortisol

flood our system, prepare us for action. Our muscles tense. Our hands start to sweat, which may seem counterproductive, but a little bit of hand sweat actually can help you grip things better. So it's thought that maybe that's an ancient protective mechanism. Your heart beats faster, your lungs breathe in more air. And this is what is commonly called, fight or flight response. And how does this relate to the prefrontal cortex? Because I think that's the one that's kind of brought up in the episode. And it's funny because I know the prefrontal cortex because people talk about it on the internet as like, why would you get married young or have a baby young or like move to a new country or get a tattoo when your prefrontal cortex hasn't developed?

Like that's like the kind of internet cliche. So it actually is a prefrontal cortex. Yeah. So the prefrontal cortex is the slice of brain that's sort of right under your forehead. And it runs, oh, I don't know, back about to your temple. And this is the last region of the brain to develop. So if you do longitudinal studies looking at children's brain development over time, it's the last section to be fully sort of in its adult state. And that includes things like extra connections being pruned away. So actually one of the biggest changes in the adolescent brain is connections you don't need getting pruned away to make your brain more efficient.

And then also the brain becomes more myelinated. as you finish adolescence and move into adulthood. And that means that each neuron becomes better insulated. So basically your brain is very, your prefrontal cortex is very inefficient. It works, right? It's not like there's nothing happening there. It's just still, you know, a little bit of a mess, just like adolescents are in general. And then it's, you know, much more streamlined and much more efficient.

By the time you hit about age 25, although there's a lot of variation across people. And the prefrontal cortex does a lot of things. And it's often referred to as the executive region. So it's not the region that's responsible for big functions like memory, at least not by itself, emotion, learning, at least not by itself. But it's sort of regulating function across a lot of other brain phenomena. And so it can play a major role in helping us regulate our emotions. For example, if you're trying to override an emotional impulse or an emotional response, the prefrontal cortex is playing a major role in helping you shift away from that automatic. impulsive response that your emotions might give you. It also was really important for helping to think

about the future. So it's really important for thinking about abstract things, like our values, right? Like what is personally meaningful to us. And those sorts of things aren't really easy to think about until you move into adulthood, right? I mean, you don't really have a fully formed personality until you move into adulthood. And that's partly why, because the prefrontal cortex is helping you think about what is it that I want to have done. right? What is the activity that's consistent with my values? And when it comes to facing challenges that are scary in a really primitive way, but that you know you will benefit from in the distant future, that's where the prefrontal cortex is really your best friend. And when is it useful to

shut the prefrontal cortex up, to ignore it, to kind of overcome it? Yeah. So the prefrontal cortex is also part of a set of structures in the brain called the sort of midline network. that's involved in, among other things, rumination. So self-directed thinking when you're worrying about what you're going to be doing tomorrow, when you're worrying about something that you did last week, and that really self-directed way, that is also activity that the prefrontal cortex in concert with other structures is involved in. And ruminating is one of the most unpleasant states that a person can be in.

It's interesting if you ask people to report on their emotions when they're experiencing different states, rumination tends to be at the bottom. But it is a state that's really easy to slip into because it does serve its functions sometimes, right? Sometimes we do need to worry about what we're going to be doing tomorrow. But it can be taken to an excess in a way that can be harmful and certainly unpleasant. And so one of the goals that Chris had during his climb was to experience a state called flow, where you are focused on a challenge that's external to you, that's personally meaningful, and that is a really good match for your skills, right? So it's not too hard, which, you know, meaning too hard meaning impossible, in which case you're going to just experience

frustration and stress. And it's not too easy because when people are doing things that are too easy, they get bored, right? And those are both very unpleasant states. And many people report that the most pleasant state they can be in is this state right in the middle called flow, where your skills and the task at hand, again, are in perfect balance. And when you're, you're in, you're in a good place. And when you're working towards a goal that is like that, and again, it has to be something that's personally meaningful to you, that seems to shut off rumination completely. People lose their sense of self. It's sort of like they lose their sense of time and they become less sensitive to fatigue, less sensitive to pain. It feels like you're sort of out of the flow of time almost

as you're working systematically towards a goal that you can tell that you were getting closer and closer to achieving. Again, with a state of almost total unsolved consciousness, And this is among the many reasons it's so important to tackle difficult challenges is because if you do, you are more likely to experience a flow state. So what's happening in the brain when we go into a flow state? So I will say the science on this is still pretty new. We don't know as much as we would like to, in part because there are a lot of things that we want to know about the brain that you can't study in humans. So for example, we can't really measure in real time the activity and receptors for neurotransmitters like, dopamine in the human brain. We can in the rat brain, but it's pretty hard to know if a rat is

experiencing flow. So, but what we think is happening during a flow state, using the tools that we have at hand, is that people probably are experiencing an increased release in the neurotransmitter dopamine, because dopamine is typically released when we are working towards goals that we care about or that we desire. It's not really, some people call dopamine the pleasure hormone. It's not really that. That's endorphins or endogenous opioids. Dopamine is the hormone that tends to be released in anticipation of achieving a goal or getting a reward in the future. And when people are systematically working towards a goal, we think what's happening is that dopamine is being reduced in sort of a steady rhythmic way that gives this, this energized, positive,

energy and emotion that's consistent with a flow state. And we also think that activity in regions like the prophoma cortex in the moment quiets down, which again is associated with that loss of self-consciousness and the lack of awareness of time during the state. And it's momentary, right? I mean, flow state, you know, it could last for hours, I suppose, if you're working on a challenge that's exactly in perfect balance, but it can sometimes just last for moments. And finally, what we know about the flow state is that your autonomic nervous system also seems to be in balance.

And so, again, the autonomic nervous system is regulating your organs and your glands in the body outside of the brain. and most people are familiar with the fight or flight system, those high autonomic arousal system that prepares you for danger. And then there's another branch of the autonomic nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system or rest and digest. And that is the system that just as it sounds like is active when we are in sort of a, you know, a resting state and not doing anything particularly taxing. Both of those states at their extremes can feel unpleasant. Right. Very high levels of sympathetic activation obviously can feel very stressful and very high levels of parasympathetic activation can be associated with boredom or fatigue. And a flow state seems to be a state in which those two systems are in balance where you're seeing elevations in both sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation. And that suggests that you're sort of exactly in the sweet spot of the middle zone between those two extremes.

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So we've talked about blow. What are some of the other ways that we can kind of overcome or harness this fear response? There's a number of ways. One of them is to approach challenges in a playful way. And I know this was something that was also a goal of Chris's because he really enjoys seeing the way his kids tackle risky and challenging situations in a way that is harder for adults to do for a number of reasons, right? I mean, when you have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, you are more aware. of the future negative consequences that could happen when you do risky things. And also, you know, adults are more susceptible to injury than adolescents are for various reasons. And, you know, when you

have a fully established adult life, you could argue that you have more to lose from getting a serious injury. So it's not unreasonable that adults sometimes confront risks with a little bit more trepidation than kids do. However, there's a lot, I think, to be gained by trying to connect again to that more playful, fun-loving sense of challenge and risk that's so easy for kids. And one of them is that, you know, for kids, everything is new. And novelty is intrinsically enjoyable for most people, right? You get that sense of curiosity about novel situations that's also associated with increased dopamine.

And because kids are young, everything is novel for them. So it's really easy for them to get into that curious, excited state of experiencing something for the first time. When you've been around the block a little longer, that's a little harder. And so adults, I think, have to go out of their way more to try things that are new in a way that doesn't just come to you easily when you're older. And so I think adults are more likely to experience that same sense of curiosity and excitement and wonder that kids experience all the time when they go out of their way to try things that they've never done before and get that same sense of curiosity and excitement. And that's what we call positive risk taking. I think risk taking sometimes gets a bad name,

you know, risk taking, we tend to associate with dumb risks like driving too fast in your car or taking dangerous drugs or things like that. But there's another side to risk taking that's called positive risk taking. And positive risk taking literally refers to taking risks that enhance your well-being, that increase your sense of self-efficacy and enjoyment and well-being. And I think what the show really demonstrates is the benefits of doing that. And there's another thing as well that Chris does, which I found quite funny, to be honest, he gets really, really angry at one point, and that's like, without giving spoilers, that's quite an important part of his trip up the wall. He just gets really mad at it. Why is that helpful for

overcoming fear? Raid is an incredibly useful emotion, actually, and it's not even a necessarily negative state. I think rage sometimes gets a bad rap. It can be unpleasant for other people, but when you're directing it in a physical challenge, you know, no harm done. So rage seems to be an emotion that evolved to take over when the sort of baseline reward-seeking system isn't getting the job done, right? When you're tackling a challenge and you're frustrated by it because you're finding it harder than you expected it would be, or maybe it's a little bit more difficult than your skills are able to accomplish, that is when people tend to get enraged. And it's better than the alternate, right? The other thing you could do is give up, right? You could feel sad. Well, I guess I can't do it.

And if you really want to tackle a challenge, it's way better to experience rage in the moment. And some of the benefits of rage include even higher levels of autonomic arousal, right? Those activation hormones like cortisol and adrenaline flooding your system. Rage seems to make your muscles stronger. Rage makes you impervious or at least more impervious to pain. And so it really seems to be an emotion that's incredibly functional and useful for tackling physical challenges that are beyond maybe the bounds of what we could accomplish at baseline. And, you know, again, I don't know if this is, I don't, I'm not going to give any spoilers

away, but I certainly didn't talk to Chris about digging into a rage state as maybe an alternate if the flow state or the curiosity by itself wasn't working. But I was extremely impressed that that was the mindset he shifted to as things got more and more challenging. And it definitely seemed to work. And this might be veering slightly more towards the kind of pain side of things, which was an earlier episode. but one of the other things he did is swear a lot.

What's swearing useful for? There's some really interesting evidence that cursing can reduce pain, that when people swear, you know, it's very common for, you know, people who normally don't talk like sailors to, you know, bang their thumb with a hammer and out comes a curse word before you can even think of it. But what's so interesting is that there is a little evidence that that reduces your pain in the moments. And it may also increase muscular output. And so, you know, again, it's important to be judicious about when and how we swear.

But again, when you're tackling something that is painful and difficult and you're at the sort of limits of your physical abilities, judicious curse word might not be the worst thing. And most of us aren't kind of faced with enormous walls to climb up in our day-to-day lives. You know, the things that cause us to feel scared might be an upcoming event or an email. that's a bit nasty or something like that. Thinking about the things we've already talked about, how can we practically use those tools in that moment to calm ourselves down and feel a little bit less afraid?

That's a great question. The most important tool that we can develop when it comes to regulating our emotions in the face of day-to-day challenges is practice. And so, like I said, fear is generated by these unconscious, evolutionarily ancient systems deep in the brain, and our emotional regulatory systems in the moment are these cortical regions that are connected to them. But, you know, there are times when

it's impossible to truly regulate waves of fear or rage that are bubbling up from deep in the brain. But if you develop a habit of regulating your emotions, over time, your brain can learn to get much better at doing these things automatically. And so you could say that confronting risky or emotionally challenging situations routinely acts a little bit like a psychological vaccine in the sense that it would cause your brain to get better at automatically regulating its emotion over time through the power of learning, basically. When you learn over time that doing something risky or dangerous, again, judiciously chosen, right? You don't want to do things that are reckless. But when you were doing things that are scary and you learn that you can do them, your brain sort of teaches itself that it doesn't need to generate this massive fear response in those situations, right?

It's like, oh, I guess the situation wasn't as scary as I thought. I guess I'm capable of more than I thought I was doing. And over time, that will help you regulate your emotions automatically. It kind of makes me think of this trend on the internet where people do kind of rejection therapy, where they go out and they, like, try things where they know people are going to say no to them. Like they do things which are deliberately uncomfortable and make themselves feel awkward and scared in order to kind of take on the fear of rejection head on.

Do you think that's a useful strategy? Like going up to people in shops and saying, can I have that for free? And like going out to other people on the street and say like, I love your outfit. Can I have your coat? That kind of thing. I mean, you know, in this...

I think it's a, I think if you are afraid of rejection, learning that having somebody reject a request is not the end of the world is a brilliant strategy. Absolutely. Because it will mean that the next time you get rejected in a situation that's more meaningful, your brain has learned, again, under the hood that it can handle it. You know, it really is just not that big a deal. And so you won't feel as much anticipatory anxiety and you won't feel as big a crash when the rejection actually happens. Yeah, there's no substitute for actual practice and the kinds of situations that you're, you're going to confront in the future. This is a real truism of clinical psychology, that the only long-term way to regulate negative emotions like anxiety is to just practice, practice, practice, expose yourself to the kinds of things that make you anxious and teach your brain that the world is not going to end when it does the thing it's scared of. You know, there are a lot of people who conceptualize the brain is basically a prediction machine. That's what it's doing all the time. It's taking an information about the world around it and trying to make predictions about what's going to happen next. That's what fear is, right? I'm taking an information about this big,

is snarling at me and I'm making a prediction that it might attack me next. But the brain makes wrong predictions all the time, right? It's just using sort of statistical regularities to make these predictions. So it's not like it's always going to be right. And in fact, when people get disorders of emotions, like anxiety disorders, it means the brain is making incorrect predictions. Not that a snarling bear is going to hurt me, but that this bird that landed on the ground is going to hurt me. A bird phobia turns out to be much more common than I realized. Or that this tiny spider crawling on the windowsill is going to hurt me, right? And that's a real phobia is when you have a huge fire-to-flight response to something that isn't actually dangerous, which all of us

have in various moments in our lives. In any case, so the brain can make errors in its predictions. And anytime the brain is predicting one outcome and then something different happens, you get what's called a prediction error signal on the brain. When the brain is sort of like surprise, it's like, oh, well, that's not what I thought was going to happen. And those are incredibly important for learning. So those prediction error signals tends to result in more learning than when the thing your brain thought was going to happen actually happens. This is why it's so important to expose yourself to scary situations is because the brain is predicting something terrible might happen. And then you actually do the thing the brain is, you know, making predictions about and nothing terrible happens. And maybe you even enjoy it.

And you get this big prediction error signal, a bit of what's called a positive prediction error. It's a better outcome that you thought you were going to have. So A, that's a really great opportunity for learning, which neuroplasticity is another word for learning, right? The brain is like, oh, I may need to adjust my future expectations about situations like this. And then also, just as a bonus, those positive prediction error signals are really rewarding, right? It feels really good to get a reward you weren't expecting compared to a reward that you were expecting. And so that's one of the reasons tackling challenges that we think we may not be able to successfully accomplish is particularly rewarding and it feels even more pleasurable than doing things that are easy.

I just keep thinking about two specific examples of like what you're saying and how they affected me in my own life, which is very like self-centered of me. When we were talking about flow state, I was imagining my kind of, I don't know, 12 year old self having piano lessons and my piano teacher would always tell me off in a kind of joking way, but also serious, for thinking too much. And I realized now that the goal was getting into flow state of like completely forgetting myself and what was going on and just relying on the muscle memory of playing the piece because when you're doing something like playing the piano, if you get too caught up in like, oh, I'm going to do this wrong, what's going to happen next? This bar is really tricky. I'm not sure I don't know if I'm going to play this right.

Your brain kind of trips you up and you don't just rely purely on like confidence and knowing that you can do this well. So that was one thing I was thinking of, like, the flow state of like getting and, like, learning to play the piano for me, a lot of that was just learning to get into flow state. Absolutely. And just sort of trust yourself in that moment. And that's a good example of the way that your prefrontal cortex can trip you up. It's trying to maintain control of a situation that doesn't need to be controlled, right? Your, these subcortical behavioral learning systems know what to do and they just want to roll out the behavior on their own without interference from other parts of the brain, but when you're in a worried state and you're trying to be

very vigilant to potential errors, that's sometimes when you get tripped up. So, I mean, that's, you know, one of the reasons people choke under pressure sometimes is they're thinking too hard about what they're doing rather than sort of having faith that all the learning that they've done in the past is just going to unspool and they'll be able to do the things that they are intending to do. But it's really funny when your teacher is like telling you to stop thinking because your thinking is really getting in the way of you right now, kind of counterintuitive. Absolutely. I think most athletes will know that too. People who are really good athletes will say that often when they're experiencing peak performance, they're not overthinking what they're doing. They're just having faith that their body knows what to do and letting it do its thing. The other thing I was thinking of was a very painful moment when I was about 15 and I was in a school production of Peter Pan and someone messed up their lines and it caused me to not know what to say next because I was completely thrown off.

and I was so, so embarrassed and so scared. And the only thing that got me through the rest of that scene was feeling really angry. And so it was like thinking about the rage state, I mean, it was really good. I was playing Captain Hook, so the anger was appropriate. But, you know, I was meant to be like screaming at all these children that they were going to die because I was going to throw them with my pirate ship. And that kind of, the anger brought on by the fear, that was really helpful. So it's not quite Chris Hansworth, like, you know. But just thinking about kind of more everyday experiences of when these kind of things can come into play, that was what stuck in my mind for me.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think, you know, the so-called negative emotions get a bad rap. I mean, emotions are called negative because they feel and pleasant in the moment, but that doesn't mean they're bad. But I think rage is a really good example of that. Again, if you're directing your rage at another person in an inappropriate way, then obviously that has ethical consequences. But the rage is associated with a lot of sense of power and confidence and, again, sort of strength, both physically and psychologically. And so I think it's a really adaptive state to tap into when you're frustrated and experiencing a challenge that you're not sure what to do. Switching into that mindset, I think is sort of brilliant. I mean, if people take away one, two or three things from this episode, like little nuggets of wisdom to carry with them in their daily lives, what do you hope those little nuggets will be? Well, I hope that people will take away the idea that doing things that are very risky and challenging is an important part of living.

living, satisfying and meaningful life. There's nothing more satisfying than accomplishing a goal that we weren't sure that we could accomplish. And it's easy to just avoid doing those things because, right, we anticipate the effort. We anticipate the potential for failure. And I think it's important to override those kinds of worries and do these difficult things. Because, again, tackling a difficult challenge feels especially rewarding. And in the long run, there seems to be a connection between pursuing goals that we find intrinsically difficult and having a sense of well-being. And there's all sorts of both psychological and maybe even health benefits to having higher

levels of well-being. So, you know, push past as hesitations and push past as worries because I think the outcomes of doing things that are difficult and even risky is really impressive. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Abbey Marsh. To find out more about how to overcome fear, you can watch her episode in Limitless Live Better Now by National Geographic out on Disney Plus. If you liked what you just heard, then please consider subscribing to Instant Genius wherever you like to listen to podcasts. If you'd like to watch our presenters and guests speaking in person,

then you can also check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio system. combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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