Oscar-winner 'Free Solo' offers an important lesson for overcoming your fears via CNBCMakeIt
National Geographic's"Free Solo" this week won an Academy Award for best documentary feature after capturing the journey of 33-year-old Alex Honnold as he achieved the seemingly impossible: Scaling 3,000-feet of Yosemite National Park's El Capitan rock formation without so much as a rope.
But, according to Mark Synnott, a long-time friend of Honnold's and author of a new book chronicling the ascent, when the scan indicated that Honnold's amydgala was"perfectly normal," it revealed something altogether more interesting about humans' mental capacity to master their greatest fears. "The reason he is able to free solo huge rock walls is because he has meticulously trained his mind, over the course of decades, to control his innate fear response," the author of"The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life" told CNBC Make It.
" worked on my climbing skills so much that my comfort zone is quite large. So these things that I'm doing that look pretty outrageous, to me they seem normal," Honnold told Synnott in a 2015 interview for National Geographic. Synnott acknowledged that Honnold took that to a"rarified extreme" to conquer El Capitan. But he said everyone is capable of mastering their greatest fears to a"certain degree."
Synnott's perspective is echoed by Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University who specializes in the study of the amygdala. LeDoux noted in Synnott's book:"By self-exposing, training himself in those situations, he's going to reduce the amygdala activity, because that's what exposure does."
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