Fear in the Saddle

Before I will continue with the foals, I want to blog about a topic which is close to my heart. I want to talk about fear in the saddle, about the anxiety, a lot of riders experience when they ride their own horse or sit in the saddle of a new horse.

Fear is an emotion which is not bad. It helps us to survive and not to get into dangerous situations. A person without fear will not live very long. 

So being afraid is a natural feeling, particularly if this fear is based on experience. When we know that our horse is prone to rearing or jumping or bucking, we are afraid. That is a normal reaction. Maybe we have experienced an accident or a close call while riding or being on horseback. Again, this is something totally ordinary and most people can relate to this.

It gets critical when fear dominates our life, makes us stop enjoying our hobby or when our fear gets irrational.

An irrational fear is when my horse bucks when he runs over the field and I get afraid he will buck me off next time I ride him, even though he has never bucked under the saddle.

Also, if I stop enjoying horse riding because I constantly worry, something might go wrong. A horse might have bucked me off and now I am scared every time I mount on any horse.

Even though irrational, these fears are common enough among horse riders and particularly about female horse riders.

Why are women more prone to fear than men? That is a question which has picked my interested a long time ago.

I have people from all over the world riding with me. Men, women and children. Beginner, novice and experienced riders. Most of the time when I had couples coming for a ride, the woman was the expert and the man was the novice, going on the ride to make his wife or girlfriend happy. And most of the time, the person sitting on the horse totally relaxed was the guy while the girl was the one who fretted. Not all women are afraid, however, while men hardly have any issues with fear, women are much more prone to it, despite being the overall better riders.

Apparently is has something to do with brain chemistry and hormonal fluctuations, which of course appear much more often in women than in men, thinking about menstrual cycles, pregnancies or menopause.

But women and men also have different problem-focused coping mechanisms. While men tent to deal with problems actively, head-on, women tend to mull over problems and often keeping them to themselves which can increase general anxiety.

Also, the way girls and boys are brought up certainly plays a role. Boys are much more often encouraged to play rough, to not cry over injuries and to be strong like a man.

Girls are more likely to be cautioned and told to be careful thus being conditioned to be more fearful than boys. Girls are still more likely to be seen as fragile and less capable to take care of themselves, not only in patriarchal societies but also in Western ones. Fear becomes a constant companion to many girls and as a result to women. It becomes almost a feminine trait; nobody is surprised when girls screams at the sight of an insect or a mouse while guys are far less likely to do so. 

While men view a new situation as a challenge, women are often finding it scary.

Women are also more prone to being control-freaks. They find it hard to let go of a situation and let it develop outside their control. This might be partly due to nature and partly due to nurture. There are male control-freaks as well, but men find it significantly easier to just go with the flow.

Empathy also does not help with fear. It is a character trait more often found in women than in men and it makes us feel with other people. We might not have had an accident ourselves, but we are of course aware of all the things happening around us. All the people who got hurt while riding a horse or had accidents and all the things which went wrong. And because women are more empathetic than men, these mishaps can bother us almost as much as if they had happened to us. So, with age, fears do not disperse but often rather accumulate as we learn more about things which can go wrong.

I think whatever might be the reason, it is a fact that women report greater fear and are more likely to develop anxiety disorders than men.

The approach to horse riding is similar. While men see riding a big animal more as a challenge, women see it as a potentially dangerous activity. And they are not that wrong either. Horse riding is a hazardous sport, so it is good to be cautious about it. However, irrational fear is contra-productive.

One of the biggest problems which can be turned into your advantage is visualization. We have all experienced it before. Chances are, if you are afraid, your visualisation will be something like this: You mount your horse which is in a bad mood and will suddenly spook. You get bucked off, the ambulance will come and take you to hospital because you have broken your leg or suffered a head injury.

This is all happening inside your head, even before you mount your horse. The problem is, this will create fear in your head and you might find yourself in a situation of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But whether or not things will happen as you have visualised them, it is enough to make you anxious and this might make your horse jittery as he can feel your fear and gets confused. He might get jumpy and you might dismount and you don’t want to end up in hospital like in your visualisation. This might go so far, that you might even quit riding or limit yourself to stay in your comfort zone always.

However, visualisation can greatly help you to combat your fears and anxieties. You can practice to visualize your ride with a satisfying end, thinking what you and your horse can achieve together.  This helps you a lot to combat fear and to stay positive.

Another big help is the development of trust. Here, the science is still sketchy but studies have shown that the fear-processing circuit of the human brain is overridden by a hormone called oxytocin, also known as trust hormone.

So, the more you trust your horse, the less likely you are to feel afraid of him. Now trust is not the same as love though. You might love your horse to the moon and back, but still are afraid to ride him. Trust is developed by doing things together and by time. 

This of course does not apply to riding a horse which you do not know. In this case, it is experience and routine which help you to cope. The more different horses you ride, the less anxious it will make you.

Fear is generally a good thing. It shows you the limits of your comfort zone. But when you always stick inside your comfort zone, you will never grow. So, it is important to keep pushing its limits, confronting your fears, gradually.

The first step here is to recognise your fear and reframe it. View it as a tool which can help you to identify your comfort zone and which helps you to stay safe.

A good example I found during my research was the example of driving a car. We have all seen accidents happen and we know that it is much more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane or train crash. And yet most of us still drive every day. We drive safely and reduce the risk thus being able to drive around in our car confidently.

The same we have to do while riding horses. It is important to develop a strategy to feel confident and we can only do so by building up trust and routine. This will come over time and when we move step by step, slowly and gradually but confronting our fears and bit by bit push our boundaries a bit further each time we ride.

Now why am I talking about this topic today. I have written about how Rajmani and me had a little tussle during one of our rides in summer. This rattled me quite a bit as I had not experienced something like this before. None of my youngsters had reacted in a similar way before.

So, the next time I got back into his saddle, I had lost my confidence. I did get on, but I did not feel good about it. I needed a couple of rides to get my confidence back. So now I started riding him alone on the farm, getting him used to being ridden and directed by me. He still has some issues and is often reluctant to go into some corners or places without being able to follow another horse. When I apply too much pressure, he bucks. Not in a bad way, but after my experiences with him, I just don’t feel comfortable to risk putting more pressure and maybe causing him to rear up or bolt. So, I rather work my way around. Instead of riding directly into a place, I ride circles or do some backing until I get him closer and closer and finally, we reach the spot. This is working well enough but I was seriously worried about how to take him on a ride outside all alone. I knew he would come to a point where he would refuse and try to turn around or stop and not go forward anymore. And being outside, it might not be possible to work my way around. Of course, I could always dismount and walk him, but the idea going out alone with him, scared me more than I would admit to myself. 

Yesterday I had a great idea. I have started to ground drive him. Sometimes this is also called lunge walking. It means that I have a pair of lines which are attached to the bit and then rung through the rings of a lunging girth all the way to me. I am standing behind him and cue him forward. It is basically like driving him from the ground. I use voice commands, the lines and a long whip to direct him. We tried that a few times on our farm so far, but I have never taken him outside. So why not ground drive him outside I thought. Like this I could get him used to going out alone without having to ride him just yet.

So, this is what we tried out a couple of days ago and it worked just brilliantly. Like I thought, there came the point where he refused to go ahead and it was on a very narrow spot because of some puddles on the ground. But as I was behind him on the ground, I could persuade him to continue and I think something clicked. It was the only time he refused. The rest of the excursion, he behaved like a lamb, turning when I asked him and trotting a bit for a change. He felt good and he learnt an important lesson. That I take care of him and that nothing bad will happen to him while he is with me, even outside. I will continue this exercise for some time and then slowly switch to riding him. When both of us are ready.

So, the bottom line is, even riders with a lot of experiences do reach the limit of their comfort zone and experience fear. The important thing is not to be intimidated by it, but to find safe ways to work around your fear and expand your comfort zone through trust, routine and sometime when the direct way does not work, through a roundabout one.