Your leg is vibrating like a sewing needle, breath is shallow, heart is beating out of your chest. This is the feeling of fear. Your hands are wet, stomach churning. A desperate reach, far out to your left. You wrap your hands around a familiar and welcome shape as you lift a nearly empty mug of coffee to your lips. Attempting to bring the blog you’re writing to the finish line before your next appointment…Wait a minute, I thought I was writing about a spicy climbing moment?! Man, I even got myself going there. Let me take a deep breath, ground myself and get back on track.
Feeling of Fear and How the Body Responds
To start, let’s discuss the different responses to a feeling of fear. The mammalian brain has three major responses to fear; fight, flight or freeze. Every climber knows these visceral feelings of fear well as adrenaline and cortisol surge through the body. This is fight or flight. Climbing challenges you to master yourself in the face of this most primal emotion: the feeling of fear.
You can either overcome and push through to the top or you bail and make your way down. But inevitably, you will also find yourself in a situation where the fear is so overwhelming that it locks you up; this is freeze. When you’re placing gear from a precarious position, about to lunge to the lip of a boulder, desperately fighting rope drag to clip the chains. Or, simply out of your comfort zone climbing outside for the first time.
Understanding Functional Freeze as a Feeling of Fear
The context in which these feelings arise makes sense even to the outside observer. Many of us who appear in our daily lives like we have it all together on the outside. Though in reality, they are actually struggling internally. Stuck in a space where it feels like we’re pressing the gas and brakes at the same time. This is a blended nervous system state I’ve become quite familiar with from my days as an engineer dealing with chronic stress, known as functional freeze.
There are many reasons I climb, though what consistently rises to the top is that it’s a microcosm for life. Climbing and life will present you with obstacles that activate these ancient circuits to hijack your mind and body. If you accept them as challenges, they are gifts in disguise.
The Reward Waiting on the Other Side of Fear
Climbing allows you test the limits of your mind and body, forces you to grow beyond them and in return provides you with a full-on experience. These experiences often include with amazing people, where together you apply your complete focus, resourcefulness and creativity to find the best solution for you to go from start to finish. Move by move, breath by breath, flowing, pausing, lurching through a choreographed dance until you reach the top. When you can finally releasing a sigh of relief, as you relish in the biochemical rush of a process ran to its completion, a sweet reward earned through maximum effort, all on the other side of fear.