There is a moment, in fear, when you stop being the one deciding what you're doing or saying. The body has already moved. Your mouth has said things you didn't mean. Your thinking only catches up afterwards, often confused about what just happened.

Data floods into us without pause, through every sense at once: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and the "spidey sense," the felt sense from your body. All of it funnels up through the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, the part we share with everything on the planet, including reptiles. Sitting in there is a small structure called the amygdala, and the simplest way to think about it is as a smoke alarm. What it does next, and why, is worth understanding properly.

You may have heard of Occam's razor. How about Occam's broom? Bear with me as I attempt to link how these concepts apply to anxiety, confirmation bias, and psychotherapy.

For decades, if you went to your GP feeling down or depressed, you were probably told some version of the same thing: that your brain had a chemical imbalance, probably involving serotonin, and that medication would correct it. It was a convenient explanation that seemed to make sense, and so it stuck. By the early 2000s it had moved from clinical shorthand into everyday language, the kind of thing that people took as a given when discussing mental health.

But we now know that the evidence never really supported it.

Fear is one of the most powerful forces in human experience. And one of the most misunderstood. We tend to think of fear as a response to something dangerous — and it is. But what happens when fear becomes the lens through which we see everything?