Fear Is Ingrained In All Of Us – Just Don’t Let
It Take Over!
It’s an evolutionary survival tactic known as our fight-or-flight instinct. The purpose of fear is to use adrenaline to tell us to protect ourselves and move out of harm’s way.
You’ve probably felt different levels of fear throughout your life — in a dark theater watching a scary movie, dealing with an aggressive person, or a situation where you have no control. In the current season, some would say that fear has been cultivated by our leaders and as a result our society is being driven in directions that are both unhealthy and unproductive.
But what is fear, and why do people have fears? Your fear response is your body’s natural warning system. When you feel physically or psychologically under threat, different areas of the brain immediately activate and communicate with one another.
The amygdala is the first responder, located just in front of the hippocampus. The amygdala activation is the first step of your fight-or-flight response by sending messages to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates your fear response based on previous experiences.
Dopamine emitted from the prefrontal cortex determines how you process learned information, including memory, attention, inhibition of impulses, and cognitive flexibility. In neuroscience, this is the part of the brain that dictates post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders.
In this conversation between different parts of the brain, your nervous system releases stress hormones like cortisol or adrenaline, telling your body to stick around and fight or run away from a dangerous situation. Fear can also be an emotional response that triggers positive or negative emotions, as the pathways of fear are similar to excitement.
Fear is our natural biological response when we are in the presence of actual or perceived danger, but if that fear never goes away or is triggered when there is no danger then it can develop into a phobia.
Fears can come from real or imagined dangerous situations, uncertainties, objects, childhood memories, learned memories, the list is endless.
In the same way that the brain initiates the fear, it can also be used to overcome it. Putting your fear into perspective and analyzing whether it is actually something you have control over the outcome can calm those same brain functions that created them.
Instead of letting fear dictate our lives and inhibit our personal growth and well-being, we should learn to detect when fear is keeping us out of harm’s way or pushing us into a nightmare of our own making that breaks us down and stops us from moving forward in life. We’re in control of our lives — and our fears.
From the elocal desk