After the death of his mother and wife within the space of a few short hours, Teddy Roosevelt left his home on the East Coast for life as a rancher in the Dakota Badlands. The cowboys who encountered the future president with his glasses, fancy, fringed, custom buckskin outfit, high-pitched nasally voice, and the manners of a Harvard elite were skeptical. They laughed at him behind his back, calling him a dude (a derogatory slang word for an Eastern tenderfoot or city slicker). Some cowboy predicted that the “four-eyed dude with a squeaky voice” wouldn’t last a week in the Badlands. Most assumed he’d be helpless, scared, and soft.
They weren’t entirely off base in their assumptions. To some degree, he was helpless. In his autobiography, Teddy describes his early days in the Dakotas as a time of learning everything he needed to live and work on a ranch:
“I had to learn to ride, to shoot, to rope, and to box. I was fond of boxing, but I had never had a chance to try it except in a very limited way, and I found that I had to learn practically all over again. So it was with riding and roping. As regards shooting, I had had a good deal of practice, and was a reasonably good shot with the rifle.”
They were also right in assuming he was afraid. Roosevelt wrote of his experience: “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gun-fighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.”
Teddy’s strategy for dealing with fear and how he dealt with fear is surprisingly effective and brilliant. It also runs contrary to much of what we practice in our day and age. It has become quite common to simply avoid anything that may cause anxiety or fear in our lives. That experience of discomfort is seen as unacceptable in all circumstances. The problem with simply avoiding all fear/anxiety is that it tends to make the problem worse.
The sensation of fear is a product of our automatic response to danger. When the amygdala (the brain’s threat detection system) perceives a threat, real or imagined, it signals the hypothalamus which fires up the fight, flight, or freeze response. This is basically a cascade of hormones that floods our brains in order to protect us from whatever danger we are facing. Adrenaline, cortisol, and a slew of other neurotransmitters and hormones, create the sensation of fear. We can reinforce the inclination to experience fear in response to perceived threat by giving in over and over again and cementing whatever it is that triggered our fear as something to be afraid of.
Roosevelt’s described approach matches some of the most popular therapeutic approaches for dealing with overcoming fear and anxiety. The most obvious and effective is Exposure Therapy. Exposure therapy involves exposing yourself to the stimulus that your brain perceives as a threat in small doses and gradually increasing that exposure. In doing so, you train the amygdala not to perceive the thing you fear as a threat. In addition, the reasoning part of your brain begins to regulate the fear response.
Another modern approach to dealing with anxiety that we find in Roosevelt’s words is something called Self-Perception Theory. The idea behind this is simple. When you perceive yourself in a certain way based on your actions that align with that belief, your brain accepts it as truth and adjusts its chemical responses accordingly.
A final idea that’s worth understanding when dealing with things that cause us to experience fear or anxiety is something called stress inoculation. When we are in stressful situations, our bodies release cortisol, which prepares us for dealing with life or death encounters. Regular exposure to stressful situations with a sense of control over what is happening trains our bodies not to release cortisol. So the act of approaching scary situations with a sense of control trains our brains to not be afraid.
The 26th president summarized the matter of facing fear far better than I can: “Most men can have the same experience if they choose. Whenever you are afraid of something, act as if you were not afraid. Eventually you will develop courage and self-command. In the West, I learned not only to be prepared to face danger, but to accept hardship and physical discomfort as part of the day’s work.”