"How Scary To Live!" What Is Fear? - Self-development

2023 Author: Oswald Adamson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-27 12:13

There is a joke that when Academician Dmitry Likhachev was asked if he was scared to live, he replied: “Life is not scary. It's scary to enter your entrance …"

What is fear? At the level of the body, fear is dilated pupils, rapid heartbeat and breathing, a feeling of tension, and sudden sweating. On the mental level, fear is a special negative emotional state. We call light fear fear, and strong fear horror. In between fear and terror, there is fear and fear.

Fear is fundamentally different from other types of suffering, such as pain, in that it arises not under the real action of dangerous factors, but when they are anticipated. In other words, nothing terrible has happened to us yet, but we are already afraid.

ROLE AND PURPOSE OF FEAR

In the process of evolution, animals that experienced fear got a head start in front of those who did not know it. It turns out that fear plays an important role in the issue of survival - it makes you focus on a threatening object and look for ways out of a dangerous situation. In a dark alley, when any shadow scares, and rustles make us literally flinch, our body is in a state of fight or fly, which means "fight or flight." In other words, fear does not deprive us of strength, but, on the contrary, mobilizes and activates our reserves. Both wrestling and running require instant tension from the body, and fear brings our nervous system into a state of high alertness. In addition to mobilization, fear exacerbates "early warning systems" - hearing and sight. If we consider fear from this side, it becomes clear that it was the fearful, nimble animals that had the most chances of survival,not fearless giants. This is a new perspective in considering the question: "Why did the dinosaurs become extinct?"

WHAT THE RUSSIANS ARE AFRAID

- Rising prices, tariffs, high inflation.

- Unemployment.

- Diseases.

- The collapse of agriculture, problems in the economy as a whole.

- Deterioration of people's lives, poverty, low wages and pensions.

- The growth of corruption, crime, terrorism.

- Housing problems.

- Domestic political problems.

- Deterioration of Russia's relations with other countries, wrong international policy.

- Growth of xenophobia.

(according to FOM)

Besides biological, fear also has a social role. In fact, he is one of the educational tools. Thus, a well-formed fear of judgment "works" as our internal censor and controller. And the fear of punishment forms socially approved behavior in the child.

FEARS OF MEN AND WOMEN

Fear for the future of children and for safety refers primarily to typical female fears. And what are men afraid of? The psychotherapist, trainer of the ISISP Gleb Lozinsky, based on his experience of leading a male psychotherapeutic group, states: “The greatest fear of a man is fear of fear. In culture, it is believed that a man should not be afraid, so he is really afraid to face his own weakness. The second fear is the fear of women. The very first female figure in a man's life is a mother's, his attitude towards her and towards women in general is ambiguous."

"PERSONAL" FEARS AND THEIR NATURE

Psychologists say that each person has their own individual set of fears, including from five to twenty episodes, many of which stretch from childhood. Someone is afraid of worms, the other is afraid of the dark, but the third is afraid of being poisoned by low-quality food. Children's psychologist and psychotherapist Olga Shmakova tells about the mechanism of fear formation: “At the age of three months, almost all children begin to be afraid of strangers,“strangers”. Well, babies “learn” some fears by watching their mother’s reaction. For example, a child falls off the couch, his mother rushes to him in horror and begins to calm him down, regret it. The kid understands that something terrible has happened for his mother. The next time he falls, he starts crying himself, without his mother's "prompting."

COLLECTION OF PHOBIES

Fear of space. This class includes claustrophobia - fear of enclosed space, agoraphobia - fear of open space, as well as fears of heights and depths.

Social phobia - fears associated with social life. For example, fear of public speaking and fear of being ridiculed for an embarrassing action.

Nosophobia - fears of getting sick with any specific disease.

Thanatophobia - fear of death.

Curious phobias:

Pogonophobia - fear of the bearded.

Pedophobia - fear of children, childbirth in the family.

Kaliginephobia is a fear of beautiful women.

Hypnophobia is the fear of being hypnotized.

In order for fear to take root deeply in the subconscious, a special combination of conditions is needed: a terrible event and an altered state of consciousness or an event that entailed long-term trauma. When adolescents watch horror films in the middle of the night, they provide themselves with stories for nightmares and anxieties for many years to come: the dead bloodsuckers rage on the TV screen, and the consciousness clouded with insomnia can hardly separate fiction from reality. The film is quickly forgotten, but the fear remains. Fears about the Red Hand are fixed according to the same scheme - children at night, when everything is scary, tell each other imperishable stories.

EXPERT OPINION

Victoria Merzlyakova, culturologist, specialist in the field of modern culture of business communications

FEAR AND CULTURE

The feeling of fear, like other feelings and experiences (love, happiness, surprise), have always existed in culture, but the forms of their manifestation and associated stereotypes change from era to era. The creation of mythology was in many ways a transition from disorderly Chaos, which inspired terror, to an organized Cosmos with its own laws of the universe.

Modern popular culture has put fear at the service of the entertainment industry. Following the postmodernist guidelines, we try to make the terrible funny. The trend that sees fear as a source of pleasure and relaxation deserves special attention. While watching horror and action movies, negative emotions are translated into vivid visual images - this is how aggression and stress are removed. The feeling of fear has become fashionable along with extreme sports - an attempt to tame and conquer your fear returns a modern person to the world of primitive elements and feelings of one-on-one with nature.

If a neutral life event results in damage to health, all key moments become triggers for the fear reaction. You can face dogs on the street for many years, but after one of them bites you hard, fear will accompany any dog on the horizon.

FEAR AND ANXIETY

How is fear different from anxiety? In the case of fear, we usually know the source of the danger, we can clearly say what we are afraid of. When the source of the danger is not identified or recognized, the resulting state is called anxiety.

FEARS AND PHOBIA

Fear is a sensation experienced in response to a real or perceived threat. It is considered a "normal" phenomenon if it is adequate to the circumstances and prepares the body for the desired response to specific circumstances. If there are no such circumstances, but there is fear, it is inadequate and can be regarded as “abnormal”. This fear is called a phobia.

So, phobia and fear are close relatives. What are their differences? Phobia is intrusive and uncontrollable, and in its most striking manifestations, it accompanies many mental illnesses. Fear helps us survive, because we are usually afraid of what really threatens our physical condition or social status. A phobia is associated with an object or phenomenon that is often harmless to most people. A person suffering from a phobia usually realizes all the groundlessness of their experiences, but cannot do anything about it. In order to cope with a phobia, the sufferer can come up with special circumvention maneuvers, rituals that symbolically "reduce" the degree of danger. For example, the hero of Jack Nicholson from the movie "It Can't Be Better" believes that in no case should you step on cracks in the asphalt, otherwise something terrible will happen. Therefore, he tries to step only on solid fragments of asphalt and whispers to himself a special protective mantra. Phobias force a person to change their lifestyle, while fears only accompany really dangerous situations or thinking about them.

METHODS FOR TREATMENT OF PHOBIA

A good textbook on psychiatry says: "There are many ways to treat neuroses (which include inadequate fears), no less than the means of combating baldness, although the number of bald people is not decreasing." It is worth critically evaluating the methods offered to you, correlating them with the monetary costs.

Rating of magic tricks against fears:

Medication - Relief of symptoms of anxiety at the central or peripheral levels.

Hypnotherapy is the elimination of fear through exposure to a patient who is in a super-suggestible state.

Psychoanalysis - work with early childhood experiences, traumas and impressions that led to the experience of fears in adulthood.

Psychotherapy - clarifying and rethinking the reasons behind the experience of fear, through a conversation with the therapist.

The most effective behavioral therapy is work with fear through the destruction of an inadequate response to a stimulus (destruction of the "stimulus-response" connection).

NLP - a technique for solving specific difficulties with the help of an effective pattern of behavior and thinking, competent goal-setting.

Also, fears can be processed and eliminated by psychotherapeutic techniques that are not associated with the word: dance therapy, art therapy, body psychotherapy, psychodrama.