Fear

Fear is an emotion that is biologically wired into our brains. It protects us from danger and death. Fear is a necessary emotion that helps us live in this world. Unfortunately, we do not need this emotion as much as we actually experience it. When the fear response turns on in reaction to the fears, worries, stressors, and pain of everyday life, sometimes it does not turn off before the next fear hits us. When this happens, our arousal system does not have time to turn off the stress hormones that flood our bodies. Excess stress hormones can affect our brains and our bodies.

Fears are developed when we experience a negative emotional or physical painful reaction to something in our environment. After repeated exposure to the same negative emotional or physically painful reaction, our brains start to become hardwired to expect this consequence whenever something that even resembles the environmental trigger, fear develops. Because fear generates physically uncomfortable and sometimes painful bodily sensations, we learn to start fearing the bodily sensations as well as the actual fear stimulus. An example of this is illustrated by the following case scenario:

Carrie was only five years old when she was bit by a snake in the back yard. She became very afraid of going out into the back yard. Soon Carrie started to panic whenever she was outside of the house, even on the way to the car. It was not long before Carrie started crying whenever her mother said it was time to go to town. Her fears generalized to many different triggers that were not even related to a possible encounter with a snake.

Most of us have not developed phobias such as this one, but certain fears that we experience do tend to generalize to other areas. An angry parent might cause a child to have generalized fear whenever the child sees an angry face. We walk around every day with underlying anxiety that we do not even know where it came from or why we feel this way. Pain, trauma, abuse, and other highly emotional experiences are stored in an area of our brain called the amygdala. We do not even need to have conscious awareness of why we feel stress or anxiety; it might just come on us because one of our senses was triggered by something in our environment. Like a person caught in a house fire, smelling smoke 2 years later and feeling nauseated and fearful, never connecting the smell as the trigger for his underlying fear.

Fear is an emotion and bodily response that can be learned from our parents or other people with whom we share our lives. It is common for a certain type of fear to be shown in several family members. It is also common for certain fears to be culture bound or religion bound. What might be feared in one area of the world may not be feared in another area of the world.

To learn more about how you can overcome your fear, see our workbook on overcoming fear at Lotusholisticlife.com