Yukon writer Eva Holland faces fear in her new book

The timing of Eva Holland's new book — released this week — is a bit of a mixed blessing for the Yukon writer.

The COVID-19 pandemic means there's no book tour, or signings, or public readings right now for Holland. But the book is timely because it deals with something many people are grappling with these days — fear. 

Nerve: A Personal Journey Through the Science of Fear is about why we feel afraid of things, and how we might process or even overcome those fears.

Holland spoke this week to CBC Yukon's Dave White.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to write this particular book?

It was sort of three factors that came together.

The first being my mom's sudden death in July 2015. My mom had lost her parents when she was quite young, and so I had always been very aware of the impact that had on her, and was very scared of the same thing happening to me. So that was sort of like a nightmare coming true when she did die.

And when I then, a few months later, kind of came through the most acute period of grief, and realized I wasn't going to be impacted in sort of the same lifelong ways that she was — in terms of you know, persistent depression and that sort of thing — I had this moment of like, 'Oh, I've faced my worst fear and come through it and survived.'

So that was kind of empowering and it got me thinking about my relationship to fear more generally, and my other fears. Specifically, I had a long-standing fear of heights and then a more recently acquired fear of winter driving resulting from a series of accidents on the Alaska Highway.

So initially I was thinking just in terms of a personal project. Then I decided that maybe it could make a book, and I'll look into the science and what's actually happening in our brains and our bodies when we feel this way.

Is your fear of heights something that's always been with you?

As far as I can remember, yeah.

I didn't really see the pattern for a long time. I had a broad sort of discomfort with heights, and then sporadic freakouts about heights. And it took me sort of a bizarrely long time to be like, 'Oh you're like deeply afraid of heights,' partly because of the way it manifested itself, I guess, was very specific to exposure, in the sense that I could fall — it was never about airplanes or elevators or even you know, like a good sturdy bridge. It was all about steep slopes, or dangling, or being at risk of falling. 

Any of my friends who've been out hiking or climbing with me, they all know that I'm afraid of heights because they've all seen me cry!

You're known as an adventurous person. So was it hard for you to write about yourself that way, to be that honest?

Yeah, it was. There's lots of stuff in the book that's embarrassing or potentially embarrassing, depending on how you look at it.

One of many interesting things about working on this book was that when I would tell people what I was working on, they would tell me about their fears. It would be people I'd known for years who would tell me that they were totally paranoid about sharks, or they were afraid of heights too, and I'd never known that.

It's this kind of thing that huge numbers of us experience regularly and we don't always talk about it very much. So that was kind of like really cool and validating to hear from people in that way while I was working on the book.

Your book is mix of personal experience, and science — you're reaching out to people who study this sort of thing. How did speaking to scientists affect your ability to process your own fears and the things you go through?

It was huge, it made a really big difference.

I feel much more equipped to understand what's happening to me now. As I show in the book, I do various therapies and things to try to sort of work through some of my fears, and some of those worked really well. So I now am sort of objectively in better shape than I was before I started the book, emotionally. 

I was thinking about it the other night, you know, with everything going on in the world. I woke up in the night and my heart was just racing, I could hear it. It was too loud, too fast. You know, I was just kind of freaking out.

And it was helpful to be able to think, 'OK, you know what's happening right now, you know what systems are being activated, you understand what your body is doing right now — it's trying to prepare you to react to the threat that you perceive.

Unfortunately, my body can't do anything about the current threat. But just being able to sort of think through what was happening, that it was sort of like this fight-or-flight response getting revved up, was helpful to calm me down.

There's a little bit of that fear in everyone right now.

Absolutely. And it's such a scary thing, and it's so hard because there's nothing we can do except sort of wait and stay home.

I think that's why people are baking bread and making elaborate internet videos and things — just to feel like it's something to do, besides sort of wait and see.

It's a hard thing, to wait and see. We're built for action really, to respond.