The Right Kind of Scared 👻

At the top of our climbing tower, clipped into the zip line and looking down at a drop that seemed much smaller from the ground, a boy’s heart pounds exactly the way it does in a haunted house. The difference is what happens next. In a haunted house, the zombie lunges, you scream, and a second later you’re laughing, because some part of you always knew he was a college kid in makeup. Researchers in Denmark who wired 110 people with heart-rate monitors found that visitors enjoyed a haunted house most when they got a “just-right” amount of fear. On the tower, the fear doesn’t end on its own. It stays put until the boy decides to push off, and the same is true behind the boat before he yells “Hit it!” for the first time, or at the head of his first set of rapids. Helping boys through that kind of fear, with all of the necessary support, is a big part of what we teach our staff every June.

What happens inside him in those moments is worth understanding. When the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, senses danger, it sends a distress signal that floods the body with adrenaline, and Harvard Medical School notes that the wiring is so fast the cascade can start before the brain has fully processed what it is looking at. The same system can overreact to things that are not life-threatening at all. In other words, at the top of the zip line a boy’s body has a hard time telling the difference between unsafe and uncomfortable, and it answers both with the same racing heart.

That is why we teach the difference out loud. Unsafe means something is dangerous, and when something is unsafe, the adults step in every time. Uncomfortable is something that might feel unsafe but is really just outside a boy’s comfort zone, and that is where we let him stay for a while, with a counselor beside him. Our staff manual describes the whole philosophy in one sentence: we push each camper outside of his comfort zone “while providing them with a community of support, warmth and empathy.” The research on child development says almost exactly the same thing. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child describes “positive stress,” the brief increases in heart rate and mild rises in stress hormones that come with a new challenge, as essential to healthy development, and it finds that even harder stress becomes tolerable when it is buffered by relationships with adults who help a child adapt.

So much of what our counselors learn is how to be that adult. Dr. Deb Gilboa, a physician and resilience expert who has led our staff training for several summers, including this past one, gives them the line I hear repeated all summer: “Managing discomfort is a skill that builds resilience because nobody grows when they’re comfortable.” Our counselors also learn a hand signal for “flipping your lid,” based on psychiatrist Dan Siegel’s hand model of the brain, which shows how the thinking part of the brain goes offline when the alarm system takes over. A boy who has flipped his lid can’t be lectured into courage. Our manual gives counselors an order to follow instead: safety first, then connection, then regulation, and only then learning. The lesson at the top of the tower comes last, after a boy knows he is safe, knows someone is with him, and has had a chance to breathe.

There is a lesson in this for parents, too, and it is one I need as much as anyone. Dr. G likes to remind adults that “it is not an adult’s job to keep kids happy at any given moment.” A large study led by psychologist Mark Seery found that people with some adversity in their lives reported better mental health and well-being than people with a great deal of adversity, and also better than people with none at all. A childhood with no discomfort in it is not the safe option. It just postpones the first time a kid learns that a pounding heart is not the same as danger.

Tomorrow night, kids everywhere will walk into the dark on purpose, scream, and come out laughing. Let them. And next summer, when your son is at the top of the tower with his heart pounding, know that the harness has been checked, his counselor is at the bottom, and the only thing left for him to do is push off.

Happy Halloween! 🎃

Carry On,
Andy

Sources

• Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School, updated July 2020
• Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (positive, tolerable and toxic stress)
• Seery, Holman and Silver, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010 (University at Buffalo summary)
• Alison Wood Brooks, “Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014 (APA summary)
• APS Observer, Nov. 2020 (Andersen et al., Psychological Science)
• TrueSport, Feb. 2021 (Deb Gilboa, MD, quoted)
• Daniel J. Siegel, MD, hand model of the brain, Greater Good in Education, UC Berkeley
• North Star parent resource: Helping Your Camper Deal With Anxious Feelings
• North Star Staff Manual 2026 (Counselors)
• North Star Trip Program Operating Procedures and Risk Management Plan