Why Am I Scared Of Riding? What Your Brain Is Actually Doing
You have spent a long time asking why you are frightened. You have probably never been asked how you do it. That sounds like a strange question until you see the answer, because the how is the only part you can actually change.
Watch: how you actually interpret the world, and what it has to do with riding fear.
The short answer
Roughly two million pieces of information reach you every second, and your brain keeps about seven. It deletes, distorts and generalises the rest, without asking you. Riding fear is not a flaw in your nerve. It is your brain quietly changing which seven it hands you, so the ones you get are the frightening ones.
In this article
You have asked why. You have never asked how.
If you have riding fear, you have almost certainly thought about it a lot.
You have thought about why you have it. You have thought about how bad it is to have it. You have thought, more times than you would admit out loud, about how much you wish you did not have it.
What you have probably never once thought about is how you do it.
That sounds like an odd thing to say. Fear does not feel like something you do. It feels like something that happens to you, which is exactly why it feels so out of your hands.
But if we want to stop doing something, it makes sense to look at how it is being done. And that starts one step further back than most riders ever go, with how you take in the world at all.
Five ways in, and two million bits a second
There are only five ways anything gets into you. Your eyes, your ears, your feelings and touch, your smell, your taste. That is the entire list.
Take all five away and you would not know your horse had shaken his head. You would not know he was in a good mood or a foul one. You would not know there was a dog about to shoot out from behind the shed, or a rubbish bin sitting where it was not yesterday.
Now here is the number. Scientists estimate that about two million pieces of information come in through those five doors every single second.
That sounds absurd until you stop and count. Sitting where you are right now, you are reading these words and also hearing whatever is in the room. You are feeling the chair against your seat bones. You are feeling your clothes on your legs, your socks on your feet, your feet on the floor. There may be birds outside, or traffic, or a kettle. All of it, all at once, all the time.
You would go completely mad if you had to deal with two million pieces of information every second. So your brain does not let you.
Delete, distort, generalise
To stop you drowning in it, your brain does three things with that flood, constantly, unconsciously, twenty four hours a day.
- It deletes Most of it never reaches you at all. You were not aware of your socks until I mentioned them. The information was always there. You were simply not given it.
- It distorts It bends what is left to fit what it already expects. The same shadow in the corner of the arena is nothing on a Tuesday and something on the day after a bad ride.
- It generalises One event becomes a rule. This happened once, therefore this is what happens.
None of that is a fault. It is the only reason you can function. A brain that refused to delete anything would leave you unable to cross a car park, let alone ride a horse.
Seven chunks, and which seven you get
What comes out the other side of that filtering is small. Somewhere around seven chunks, plus or minus two. That is what you are actually aware of at any moment. Seven, out of two million.
And this is the whole thing, so I want to say it as plainly as I can.
Nothing is wrong with your nerve. What has changed is which seven you get handed.
Before, walking out to the paddock, your seven were the weather, what you were going to work on, whether you had remembered the gloves, how he looked, the feel of the rein, the smell of the place, the sound of his feet.
Now the seven are his ears, that corner, the tightness in your own stomach, the tension in your hands, the gate, what happened last time, and what could happen this time.
Same paddock. Same horse. Same two million pieces of information arriving. A completely different seven reaching you.
You are not imagining the ride you are having. You are having a genuinely different ride, because you are being handed a genuinely different set of facts.
Why being right about it has never helped
Here is the part I most want you to hear.
You already know it is not logical. You worked that out on day one. You know the horse is fine, you know you have ridden for years, you know riders half your ability get on without a second thought.
Knowing all of that has not helped you once, and there is a reason for that which has nothing to do with willpower.
The filtering happens before you get the information. By the time your thinking, reasoning, sensible mind receives the seven chunks, the selecting has already been done. You are arguing with a conclusion, not with the process that produced it.
Which is also why "just relax" is such well meant, useless advice. It is aimed at the wrong end of the chain, and it puts the responsibility on the one part of you that was never in charge of this.
This is not something anyone taught you to fix, because it is not something most coaches were ever taught themselves. They were handed a brilliant manual for the horse. Nobody handed them one for the rider.
Try this at the stables this week
Try this at the stables this week
Count your seven
- Walk out to your horse the way you normally would. Change nothing.
- Stop before you reach him. Right there, ask yourself: what am I actually aware of right now?
- Name them out loud, one at a time, until you run out. Most people land somewhere between five and nine.
- Write them down before you do anything else. Not later, in the car. Then.
- Do it again on a day when you feel fine, and compare the two lists.
The comparison is the point. Riders are often genuinely shocked at how narrow the anxious list is, and how much of it is about what might happen rather than what is happening.
You are not looking for the right answer here. You are looking at your own filter, which most people never see in their whole lives.
Three things this finally explains
A filter does not expire. It sits there doing its job, faithfully, for as long as it takes, which is why fear can come back after two years off exactly as it was.
If the filter has not changed, more rides means more repetitions of the same narrow, watchful seven. You are not building evidence. You are rehearsing.
Not their fault. They can change your position, your horse and your exercises. None of those are where the selecting happens.
What actually changes it
If the filter is doing the choosing, then the work is at the filter. Not at the horse, not at your position, and not at your willpower.
That is unconscious work, and the good news buried in that sentence is that most of it does not happen on a horse at all. You do not have to ride your way out of this. Riders are usually surprised by that, because every piece of advice they have been given assumed the opposite.
It is also why this can move faster than people expect once it is done in the right order. Not always, and I am not going to promise you a timeline. But the reason it has not shifted so far is almost never that you did not try hard enough.
In the free class below I take you through what the filter is actually made of and what changing it involves. It costs nothing and there is nothing to buy on it.
