Have you ever been scared? Scared to the point that your body’s sympathetic nervous system is releasing all the fight-or-flight hormones?

You feel your heart pounding in your chest.
Your senses are acutely aware of noises you may not otherwise pay attention to.
Then the moment passes.

According to an Israeli researcher, our experience of fear may not be very accurate because it relies solely on memories that we have from what could be seconds, even milliseconds ago.

This guy studied the concept of time-dilation, or the idea that during a time of intense fear, time appears to slow down to a snail’s pace because we are able to process things and make complex decisions in what would normally be considered “too short of a time period”.

How does the brain do this? Does our brain process time “more slowly?” Do our senses and thoughts speed up? Neither? Both?

After throwing people into a net 150 feet below, the scientist concluded that though subjects “thought that time was moving more slowly” during the experience, they could only feel that sensation “after the fact”.

And, that the entire experience of intense fear is based on short-term memory processes of milliseconds and seconds before. These memories could even be called unreliable. The bottom line is that the supposed “time dilation” only occurs because of the number of things we happen to remember during our period of intense fear. During a fearful time, we remember more details so we think the experience lasted longer than it did.

Coupling these interesting findings with our brains’ natural ability to “fill in the holes”, it would seem like the biggest thing we have to fear is possibly an unreliable memory of an experience we may or may not have filled in with details that never happened. Our brain does this with images, sounds, and details in the experiences we have.

That’s why this picture makes sense:

Also of interest:  Article I read that inspired me to write this

Ok, back to chemistry.

According to traditional psychological paradigms, when we undergo a loss, we experience five distinct stages in order to cope with that loss.  (I passed my human behaviour class by memorizing DABDA or Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance).

The stages do occur in that order but the duration and severity of them can vary from person to person and situationally as well.

So, although I thank you, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross for your stages of dealing with death/loss, I think there’s something to be said for those of us not who cannot deal with loss but choose to avoid  it for as long as possible.

More succinctly: “what’s the deal with not being able to let go?”

In medicine, when we’re presented with a patient who may or may not survive a trauma in a way that will allow them to live a “normal” life, we offer them a chance to sign an Advance Directive form. By them signing the form, they can prohibit us from administering heroic measures in order to save their life.  We have to let them go because they get to make the choice of living the way they want to live, or dying so they don’t have to live a certain way.

When signing the form, there’s often times no going back.

What if we were to create our Advance Directive form for our relationships with others?  Could we write, “no heroic measures to recuscitate this relationsip” and “if the condition of this relationship leads to _____, ______, ______” then we’d have to figuratively pull the plug, no going back.  We can decide the extent of our treatment plan but if all fails or the conditions worsen, we have to let go.

The comparison to medicine is uncanny:

An Advance Directive needs to be signed by someone when they are in a state of mind that they can understand what they are signing and the decisions they are making.  If the person is unconscious or unable to comprehend what they need to decide, then someone else needs to make the decision (relative, spouse, medical professionals).

The bottom line is that this decision is made when a person is level-headed, clear-minded, and so on.  When have you been able to describe a person in the midst of relationship-chaos as any of those things?  To add to Kubler-Ross and her DABDA…one could say that there should be an additional stage that comes before all of those:  Idealization.

There’s that stage when you know you need to walk, but focus on the positive traits, despite how few they may be in our partner.  That makes it harder to let go.  But, if we were to write our Advance Directive while sitting with a cup of coffee one night, regardless of who we’re with, just based on our own needs and limits, and actually stick to it then we’d know to let go when the time came.

Also of interest: Psychology Today Article on Anger in Ex-Relationships

The pretense of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, is that we are able to make quick decisions based on relatively little information and discusses the downside of stereotyping, with the upside of the other adaptive mental processes we use to do this.

In a more general context, this is a concept called heuristics, which is when we find simple rules to make good decisions in a complex situation.  In most cases, too much information can be detrimental to your decision making; it just ends up confusing you.

The term for that — where your excessive analysis of the situation leads to a) a lack of a decision and b) emotional distress — is called analysis paralysis.

In sports, its called a “choke”, in board games, its called “running out of time and losing your turn”, and in life, its called “cognitive distortion”.

Tips on avoiding this very annoying situation:

1) Mental tallying:  when deciding whether he wanted to marry his wife, after only knowing her for a week, Charles Darwin decided he had to tally up the pros and cons of marrying her.  Turns out one of the “pros” he wrote on his list was, “for companionship, better than a dog, anyhow.”  But this mental tallying of a person for the purpose of a life-long relationship only took a week — and the man had a point: generally speaking, it doesn’t take that long to mentally tally.

2) Blink’s point was that the decisions we make spontaneously, with little information, are often just as good/correct as ones given more information and more time to think, thanks to our ability to do something called “thin-slicing”.  You’ll have to read the book for the exact numbers.

3) Maya Angelou said, very succinctly, “when people show you who they are, believe them.” Often times, getting more information about something, someone, a situation, will serve to reinforce what you already believe, which may or may not be right in the first place.  When it comes to people, just remember that most of the time, what you see is what you get.

My advice to you — if you’ve got a spontaneous, super-strong feeling about something, follow it.  It will often take a while for our conscious cognitive processes to catch up and explain what our subconscious already knew.