The Chemistry of Courage

One chemical makes you quit. Three can help you keep going.

Strangers gave my first short video four seconds before they scrolled away. I had memorized every line. After I pressed post, I checked the stats over and over for the next two hours. Twenty-four hours later, I gave up and decided I was done making videos.

At a recent workshop, Peter told us almost the same story, except his strangers stayed for eight seconds. He laughed a little, the way we laugh at the things that still sting. His script went into a cubby next to his journals and hundreds of notes on his phone, and he abounded making videos, as well.

When he said it, I thought about the lab.

As a psychology undergrad, I ran participants for a study comparing people from collectivistic and individualistic cultures. I read each person the same standardized script, word for word, every single time. For a long time the data said nothing, and the study kept running anyway. The protocol had been set before the first participant walked in. It decided how long we’d collect and what would count as a result, and nobody got to rewrite it halfway through because the numbers looked thin.

Neither Peter nor I had a protocol. We each had one post, a sample nobody in that lab would have called a result, and we stood alone with it while our bodies made the call.

Most of us run our creative lives the same way. We post, we wait, and we let the first thin numbers decide whether we keep going.

The video wasn’t the first time I let one result decide. Shortly after I arrived in America, at twenty-one, I handed my boyfriend the newest poem I had written in Polish. He read it and said, “This is really stupid, why do you waste your time on poetry?” I walked out and dropped the page into a garbage can on my way. It was the last poem I ever wrote in Polish, and I didn’t write anything again for more than twenty years.

For a long time I believed that moment proved something about me. Today I’d file it as a single trial. My brain read a threat, my body protected me, and I let one data point decide the next two decades.

Courage has a chemistry. Once you can see it working, you can do what good researchers do: set your protocol while you’re calm, so a few seconds of chemistry can’t rewrite it.

1. Cortisol is why your draft is in a drawer

Rejection registers as danger, so your brain protects you by making you quit.

When your brain senses social threat, your stress response floods you with adrenaline and cortisol. Your heart pounds, your cheeks get hot, and your focus narrows to one question: how do I get out of here? That reaction is useful when a dinosaur walks into your kitchen. It is far less useful when the dinosaur is a comment, a silence, or a number on a screen.

Stress chemistry also dampens your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that plans, weighs options, and imagines what could be [1]. That makes the moment right after a rejection the worst possible time to decide what your work is worth, and it’s exactly when most of us decide. Four seconds of scrolling was all the evidence my brain needed. Peter’s needed eight.

This is the moment a protocol exists for. The calm version of you, the one who hasn’t seen a single number yet, should decide when your work gets judged. Cortisol can’t reach that version.

Joan, another writer in the workshop, felt the same pull when an agent waved off the book she wrote for teenagers as old-fashioned. She came to the session with that word still ringing in her ears. The drawer feels like a choice you made. Most of the time, your chemistry made it first and handed you the reasons afterward.

2. Endorphins make it safe to try again

Laughter lowers the stakes. A badly drawn house will do more for your nerve than any pep talk.

The workshop didn’t start with anyone’s project. I asked everyone to pick up a pencil and draw a house, badly and on purpose.

Feel the pencil press into your middle finger. Listen to the scratch of graphite on paper. Give your house a front door and a kitchen table, and a sunroom if you love plants the way I do. Leave out the bathrooms. If you need one, you will have to visit the neighbors.

Peter asked if he could have hallways, and we laughed.

Laughing together triggers the release of endorphins, the brain’s own opioids [2]. Your body uses that same system to dull physical pain, and it seems to strengthen the bond between the people laughing. A room that laughs together first can take risks together later. Nobody in that session felt graded, and I believe that mattered more than anything I taught.

The lab worked the same way. We wrote the stopping rules before anyone had a reason to be frustrated by a number. A protocol needs a calm author, and before anyone in that room decided anything about their work, I wanted them laughing at a house with no bathrooms.

3. Dopamine makes you want the finish line

Your brain gets excited about rewards it can see coming. A goal with a color, a smell, and a taste is easier to see.

Dopamine is tied to anticipation. The neurons that release it respond to signals that a reward is coming, and once a reward becomes predictable, they start firing at the cue that promises it [3]. Researchers link that response to wanting, the pull that gets you out of the chair. My bet is that “finish the book someday” gives that system very little to work with, and a goal you can see, smell, and taste works more like a cue. Someday has no smell.

In the next room of our house, I asked everyone to name the feeling their reader walks away with, and then to describe its color, its texture, its taste. Leah described a kitchen where people arrive heavy and leave lighter and full. I could smell the chocolate chip cookies through the screen, the brown sugar going dark at the edges, and I got hungry right there on Zoom.

Margaret chose the word yearning. I saw dark, loose soil, the kind you sink your hands into before you plant something, cool and damp under your nails. She decided yearning tastes like tea.

Peter got stuck. His piece was about “what matters most,” and when I asked for its color, he said, “It’s nothing I can put a name to.” Margaret called it cloudy. We stayed with the clouds. Some drift by white and wispy, and some hang low and gray, heavy with rain. Slowly his cloud turned into a storm, and the storm started to break.

This is the heart of Future Scripting™. When you write a goal in enough detail, it starts to feel close enough to reach. The research stops short of proving that, but I watched it happen to Peter that afternoon, one cloud at a time.

4. Oxytocin replaces the judge with a reader

Write the thank-you letter your reader sends you before you finish the piece. The critic in your head loses its seat at the table.

Oxytocin is tied to trust, bonding, and feeling safe with other people. In one well-known study, people who had a supportive friend with them and a dose of oxytocin showed the lowest cortisol response to a stressful public-speaking task [4]. Connection pushes back against fear.

We sat down at the kitchen table and wrote the letter our reader sends us after finishing our piece, in present tense and in their own words. For three minutes I stopped talking and let the pencils work.

Leah read hers first: “Reading your piece left me feeling simply hugged.” Joan’s teenage reader said the opposite of the agent: “You rock. You don’t judge me.” Then Peter read his. His reader realizes he has been making those storm clouds himself, and now he sees the sun, a warm one with puffy cheeks, “like a best friend sun.”

Four heads nodded on the screen at the same time.

I can’t promise that a letter releases oxytocin on command. What I watched was four people who had been writing for an imagined critic start writing for an imagined friend. My critics were a boyfriend holding a page of Polish poetry and, decades later, a stranger’s thumb flicking up a screen. Peter had met the thumb too. For one afternoon, at least, someone who said thank you took their seat.

Keep the letter next to your protocol. The protocol tells you when to judge the work, and the letter reminds you who you’re writing it for. When the numbers come back thin, Peter’s reader is still out there waiting for a best friend sun, and eight seconds from a stranger can’t change that.

Peter kept going. He told us about a hike he took that same day and the lesson he found on the trail about cleaning up your life. A few minutes later he had the idea for his blog, short lessons from the trail, one hike at a time.

The script was still in the cubby, but Peter had found his reader, and he knew what to write next. Sometimes the piece in the drawer is how you find the one you’ll finish.

Try it with your own drawer

I used to count those twenty years like quarters that rolled under the couch, lost to staying quiet and waiting until I felt ready. These days I count the ones still in my hand. Nobody gets the lost ones back, and the ones you’re holding still buy something: a page, a finished piece, a message you finally send.

Let’s spend one together.

Pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea and pick up a pencil. Draw a house, badly. Write the piece you stopped opening across the front door, and under it, name who needs this piece and what they are stuck on. In the next room, give the feeling they will leave with a color, a texture, and a taste.

Then sit down at the kitchen table and write the thank-you letter they send you, in present tense, in their words. Copy it onto a sticky note and put it where you write.

Last, do what we did in the lab and write your protocol before the chemistry gets a vote.

Open your calendar and put a finish date on the piece.

Decide how much evidence you’ll collect before you judge it. One post is a single trial, so pick a number that gives the work a fair run. For Peter, that might mean ten trail posts, one a week, with no verdict until the tenth is up.

Write down what counts as done, so a quiet week or a thin number can’t move the line halfway through.

Then tell one person, and mark every step you finish. Teresa Amabile’s research found that making progress on meaningful work, even small progress, was the most common feature of people’s best days at work [5].

I’m writing my own video protocol right now, so those four seconds won’t be my last data point. Mine starts with two short videos by October 30th.

I wish someone had handed me a pencil and a house when I was twenty-one, standing next to that garbage can.

Reply and tell me the one word your future reader leaves with. I read every reply.

P.S. The full workshop recording is waiting for you in the Courage to Create Academy. If your drawer is full and you can’t tell which piece to finish first, book a Power Hour and I’ll dig through your archive with you to find the gold you can’t see yet.

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References

[1] Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 410–422.
[2] Manninen, S., et al. (2017). Social laughter releases endogenous opioids in humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(25), 6125–6131.
[3] Schultz, W., Dayan, P., & Montague, P. R. (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science, 275, 1593–1599.
[4] Heinrichs, M., et al. (2003). Social support and oxytocin interact to suppress cortisol and subjective responses to psychosocial stress. Biological Psychiatry, 54, 1389–1398.
[5] Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The Progress Principle. Harvard Business Review Press.