Fear, Fun & Fright

With Halloween upon us and this month’s topic being anxiety, this seems like a good time to talk about fear.

Fear can be a wonderful thing. It’s that skip of heart when someone jumps out on you. It’s white knuckles wrapped around the safety bar on a roller coaster. It’s your hand gripping the arm of your chair or the reluctant peer through your fingers when watching a horror or thriller – the peer you somehow can’t quite resist.

Fear can be a lot of fun. There are whole industries built around exploiting this natural human emotion: Fairground rides, movies, ghost tours … and let’s not forget Halloween! From a very young age kids love dressing up in ghoulish costumes. And let’s face it.. it can be a lot of fun for adults, too.

But the thing is, fear isn’t always fun. In fact, for some people, it literally ruins their lives.

In our last few posts we’ve talked about anxiety & more specifically, last week about phobias which are anxiety disorders built on an irrational fear of something that actually presents a very little danger, if any at all. It’s even possible to develop a phobia of phobias called Phobophobia, defined as an experience of a fear of fear, itself.

So what’s the deal with fear?

It is a natural human emotion that helps keep us safe. It gives us a seemingly natural aversion to things that are potentially harmful, but as with phobias, it can run out of control and make life difficult.

The thing to understand is that although fear is a natural human emotion, most of the fears we have are learned and some of these are entirely unnecessary. For example, where I live in the world, there is very little chance of anyone being harmed by a spider. Yet, fear of them is incredibly common and completely disproportionate to the actual level of threat. It’s fears like these which we aren’t born with. We learn these fears from others, usually caregivers or parents.

Fear is about perception & interpretation. It works by using our ability to notice something, determine whether or not it’s safe, and trigger the right processes needed to protect us. But our senses can deceive us. What we interpret as dangerous isn’t always so and if you need convincing of that, think back to the rollercoasters and films mentioned earlier.

However, fear also expands to the cognitive realm: Consider news outlets which peddle endless amounts of sensational stories focused on our fears & mistrust, politicians who exploit our fears & prejudices for power, and the conspiracy theory peddlers who make money out of tapping into to your fears on social media. Otherwise quite rational & logical people can be entirely sold on an idea that appeals to their emotions like fear, despite the often very shaky representation of information, complete misrepresentation of facts, or outright deliberate attempts to deceive.

If we put all this together we can see how we need fear to protect us, want fear when its fun, but need to overcome fear when fright begins to ruin our every day lives as individuals but also as a society. The good news is that we have a brain which is great at learning new stuff and we can learn to embrace the fears we do want and overcome the those that we don’t want, the ones that are getting in the way.

If you would like to talk about a fear feel free to contact BroadMinds Therapy for help & advice. We offer a free consultation with no obligation to book further sessions. Call (+353) 0899420568, email help@broadmindstherapy.org , message us via this website, or visit our facebook page http://www.facebook.com/jpbroad for more information.

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Thanks for taking the time to read this article.