A Closer Look at Fear

Imagine you are sitting home late one night.  A storm is raging outside, rain is pattering against all the windows, and the wind is howling so loud it sounds like a large animal is waiting outside your door.  Suddenly, all the lights in the house start flashing, until finally the go out completely.  You're sitting in the dark....alone.  Then you hear a noise from upstairs.  Footsteps.  Someone is in the house.  You feel yourself start to panic, you start to breathe faster and heavier, you become lightheaded.  Just as you're about to run for the door, you look up the stairs and see your dog come racing down.  He had been upstairs the entire time, you simply forgot.

And yet....

Even if you had rememberd that your dog was upstairs, would you have immediatly dismissed the footsteps?  Or would you have wondered if something or someone else had found their way into your home?

What you just experienced, just for that split second, was fear.  But why?  And how?  What exactly causes us to be afraid?

According to Discovery Health, fear is a chain reaction in the brain that triggers our fight-or-flight response.  The stimulus for this reaction can appear in many forms, from a bee, to a clown, to an auditorium full of people waiting for you to speak.  Strangely enough, fear is an autonomic response, which means that we don't conciously trigger it, or even know what is going on until it has run its course.  

Additionally, fear is created in the brain and is entirely subconscious.  In the process of feeling fear, we are actually using two different paths in which to "handle" whatever it is that is scaring us.  By taking the low road, we are literally taking no chances with what has scared us.  Sure, those footsteps upstairs could belong to the dog, but then again they could also belong to someone who isn't supposed to be there.  It is much less risky for us to assume they are the footsteps of a stranger.  On the low road, one does not take the time to analyze and ask questions.  

Contrarily, the high road to fear response takes a much more methodical approach.  Your brain passes along the information of the footsteps upstairs and tries to establish context.  The brain will ask questions such as, "Have I come across this stimulus before?  Are there other possibilities?"  This all happens at a much slower pace, and yet it happens in conjunction with your reaction on the low road.  Therefore, by the time you have reacted to the footsteps as possibly being an intruder, your brain is working out the possibility that the footsteps could, in fact, be something entirely different.  The high road takes longer to travel.  This is why you can literally feel yourself calming down after a startling incident, because your brain has taken the time to tell you that no, in fact, there is nothing to fear from that particular stimulus.  

The overall purpose of fear is to promote survival.  If we weren't afraid, or better yet, didn't know what to be afriad of, we would get ourselves into all kinds of precarious situations that would ultimately lead to disasterous results.  Fear serves as a protecting agent against a number of things.  For instance, many of us have never been bitten by a poisonous snake, and yet we know that if we come across a rattlesnake we shouldn't reach down and try to handle it.  The fear of being bitten has been conditioned in us, and we have learned over time the consequences of handling poisonous snakes.  

To boil it all down, your brain is what allows you to feel fear.  Over time you learn to be more afraid of certain stimuli, and on that same note you learn how to determine if it is entirely rational to be afraid of something (i.e. the footsteps upstairs).  Of course, we will at times fear irrationally.  Sometimes we will feel afraid for no particular reason, or at least no rational reason.  This most often happens to people who are considered heavy media users.  People who are considered heavy media users consume more than 16 hours of media content in an average day.  Aside from an overall lack of satisfaction with their lives, they are also prone to irrationally fear normal, everyday situations based on the premise that something bad could happen.  The term "You've been watching too many movies," can be adequately applied to these situations. 

So, there's our lesson for today.  Now that we are all a bit more educated on the basics of fear, we can dive into the really good stuff and start exploring some of the tantalizing stimuli.