On fear

Fear is a primal emotion.  Fear is an essential element of survival, as if we had no physical and emotional response to real danger, we would get killed fairly easily.

Our fear mechanism as humans developed when real physical threats existed in our everyday environment.  Snakes, bears, lions, and other predators shared our living spaces.  We needed the physiological responses of heightened awareness, diverted blood flow and increased adrenaline to appropriately fight or flee the threatening foe.

And that fear mechanism still serves us well in modern times when confronted with real danger.

The problem is that the initial fear response is not rational, so can be provoked when no real danger is present.

When danger is perceived, there are two pathways that are followed in the brain, psychologists and neuroscientists have dubbed these the high road, and the low road.  The primal survival mechanism is what has been dubbed the low road, and the processing time is very fast.  The high road, where the response is integrated with memory and reasoning, is called the high road and is much slower.  In order to defeat an irrational fear, your brain has to be trained to take the high road.

I will use myself as an example.  I have an irrational fear of bridges.   When I was about six or seven years old, a bridge near my parent's home suffered a catastrophic failure, and a couple of cars fell into the river below.   I guess that is where it started.

The fear grew until it became paralyzing for me to cross a bridge.   I moved to Louisiana, where you can't not cross bridges.  

Initially, I would literally be shaking in fear every time I crossed a bridge.   But I had to.  So I did.  It was exhausting.  I lost ten to fifteen pounds.  Then, I got used to the bridges on my usual pathways;  work, the grocery store, the mall and I could cross those without fear.

Every day, I would talk to myself as I crossed the bridges, reminding myself that there was nothing to fear, that my fear was an irrational response, and that I had a large body of evidence supporting that I was capable of regularly crossing that bridge.

But I still freeze up at unfamiliar bridges.  Sometimes I have to pull off the road to work myself down from panic to drive across an unfamiliar bridge.  And there are bridges that I adjust my route so that I will not have to cross.

What is the point of all this?  When you are afraid, you are not rational.  You are working from a compromised position.  This can save your life, or it can limit your life and make things very difficult for you.

When frightened, it is important to consciously ask yourself, "Is this fear rational?  Is there really something to be afraid of?  Or is this just an inappropriate response to stimuli?"

Sorting through all the data on the high road takes time.  But if you allow yourself to stay in a fearful state when you are having an inappropriate response to stimuli, you are a target for people to use your emotions against you, and for you to use your emotions against your own best interests.

Data is the enemy of irrational fear.  If you feel that someone or something is feeding your fears, look for more data.   Seek data from multiple sources so that you get a well rounded perspective.  Think rationally about what you are afraid of when you are in a calm state.

Fear can control your life, and take away the quality of your life.  Some fears grow so big that professional intervention is the only course of action that will help.

For many of us though, we can combat our fears with reason, but first we have to understand that we can combat our fears with reason, and actively decide that we want to make that investment.