I’m afraid, are you?

What are you afraid of?

My heart races, breathing fastens, sweat beads begin to form under my armpits, palms tremble and sweat, i can’t move but i can think, i become very alert; hyper-vigilant, and i can feel the energy surge in my body. This is what happens when fear grips me. Apparently when i’m excited too. Happens to you too, right?

Fear is fundamentally composed of stress and anxiety. When we’re are afraid, we can either Freeze, Fight or take Flight. Interestingly, a research done by the Huberman lab on mice found out that contrary to popular belief, the fight response was the highest level of autonomic arousal rather than freeze response. Meaning that you are more likely to fight or confront your fear, even though not reflexively, than freeze. Freeze was the lowest arousal response. Your brain is for you, not against you. I fall more in love with my brain the more i learn about it.

Fun fact: People think that the heart rate goes up when excited or scared and it goes down when we are calm. Really, the default of the neural inputs to the heart and to the breathing system etc., are to be very activated. The brain provides the calmness.

I fear not achieving my life’s purpose, and horrified of losing loved ones. In addition, I may not be completely over my fear of frogs, heights, and other things. I know people who are petrified by the idea of failure, death, or by different phobias and this is completely ruining their lives or at least taking the joy out of it. Fear is definitely a negative emotion. Good news is we can undo fear. We can trick our brain out of it too (remember excitement has the same features as fear).

I learned this some time ago and it has hugely helped:

It was discovered by psychologists in the 50’s. That to overcome fear, you voluntarily expose people to their objects of fear instead of overprotecting them which is a definite path to psychopathy. The psychoanalysts would walk people through their fear by taking them back to the past: behaviorists came along and introduced exposure therapy. For instance; in the case of fear of elevators; they’d start by showing you a picture of one, then tell you to imagine an elevator, then take you to a place where you can see it but stand afar, and eventually the fear would disappear; slowly but surely you would jump on it. Even better, they further discovered that this works even in a hyper-stimulated state i.e., you don’t have to be calm to be exposed to what you’re trying to avoid.

Shortly after this discovery, a theory propped up that people are at the core, afraid of death hence treating one fear was just moving the ball down the road and not treating the root cause. This was proven wrong because when people were exposed to about 3 things they were afraid of, they would volunteer and expose themselves to many more things that made them fearful. They didn’t become less afraid but became braver. It transformed people’s conceptualization of themselves from; Being a passive victim of malignity to active challengers. At a very minute scale, i try to do this and it works. You can do it too.

Another thing i recently learned is that it’s not enough to weaken the connection with the object associated with fear, it has to be strengthened by a new positive experience. i.e., extinguish the fear and replace it with a positive experience.

Note: Be careful to be truthful and listen; to yourself (body) and others. Ask honest questions. The answers may not be too nice but are necessary. This applies to when you want to guide someone out of fear too.

Is it possible to be both a coward and a truthful person?

Fear is the pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

-Aristotle

Psalms 23 : ,4: i will fear no evil,