Get Back on the Horse (It's Neuroscience, Not a Metaphor)
“Get back on the horse.”
It's the most common piece of advice given after something scares you, and most people think it's an old adage, but it's more than that. There's real neuroscience behind exactly why it works — and why avoiding the thing instead makes it so much worse.
Last week I wrote about my son's engine failure on a flight home, and my decision to get him back in the air before the fear had time to set. The comments turned into a collection of near-misses.
Maria B. was flying Sky Harbor to Portland over Thanksgiving when her plane was forced down near Gunnison, Colorado — everyone down the slides, after a bomb threat mid-flight. She never found out if it was real. She got a nice dinner, a night in Denver, and was back in the air the next day.
Joseph Barna was climbing out of Sky Harbor when he heard a loud bang at 300 feet. He turned to see the man across the aisle white as a sheet — then saw why. The right engine was visibly imploding, pieces coming off the back of it, as the plane leveled out mid-climb.
They are both back in the air flying all the time.
Here's the mechanism behind getting back in the saddle. When something frightening happens, your brain doesn't file it away and move on by default. It waits to see what you do next. If you avoid the thing that scared you, your brain reads that avoidance as confirmation: that was dangerous, good thing we ran. The fear doesn't fade. It gets reinforced — and it can quietly calcify into something much bigger than the original event ever was. That's because we store that new memory emotionally in the amygdala.
But if you go back — relatively soon, while it's still uncomfortable — and the catastrophe doesn't repeat itself, something different happens. The brain updates the newly forming memory. The threat gets rewritten as survivable. This is the actual basis of exposure therapy, and it's well established in behavioral psychology: the fear doesn't fade because time passes. It fades because you show up again before avoidance gets to win.
“Get back on the horse” isn't a metaphor. It's neuroscience discovered by cowboys.
I couldn't get on the plane for my son. All I could do was make sure he didn't have the option to quietly let the fear make the decision for him instead.
What's the thing you avoided a little too long — and what did it cost you to finally go back?