If you’re in clear and present danger, dial 9-1-1. But, for all other types of fears—physical, mental, emotional and spiritual fears—there are ways to overcome them. They may not be easy. They might downright be difficult and complex. But, if you put in the hard work, you can overcome those fears.
In this Overcoming Fears series, I am discussing these different, generalized fear types and methods to understand and succeed in managing those fears. In this post, I cover fears that people deal with on a regular basis and how fear impacts our health. Then, in the next two posts in the series, I’ll touch on mental, emotional and spiritual fears. Let’s dig into our knowledge of fears to overcome them!
Where Fears Originate
In the scientific journal, Current Biology, Ralph Adolphs, PhD, writes in the article, “The Biology of Fear,”
Could you be in a state of fear without feeling afraid? Is fear applicable to species like rats? What about flies? And how would you know?
Laypeople have no difficulty using the word “fear” in everyday conversation, yet are quickly stumped by questions such as these. So are psychologists and biologists. Despite an explosion of recent findings, spurred in large part by funding to help understand mood and anxiety disorders, the field of emotion research is more fragmented than ever.
And, it’s true. Fear, in its most basic sense, is the anticipatory or awareness of impending danger. But, how we perceive fear is as wide and varied as the human experience itself.
In a biological perspective, Dr. Adolphs examines the root of our fears as being a brain process, as simple as neurons firing to create this experience when our sensory system detects danger. It’s quite the functionalist’s perspective. And, the scientific evidence does bear fruit here. As Seth J. Gillihan, PhD, cites in his article, “Where Do Fears and Phobias Come From?,” “genetic variation accounted for 45% of individual differences in animal fears, and 41% of differences in blood-injection-injury fears.” There is definitely a causal link between our neurological functions and fear-based reactions.
On the other hand, Dr. Adolphs displays how many different types of emotion theories of fear exist, among the many include environmental causes, culture, and survivalism.
So, to say we know where fear originates is a yet-to-be-discovered, maybe-never-answered mystery of life. What we do know, is that we have control and influence over fears we experience in everyday life.
Types of Fears We Feel Regularly
Fears can be distinguished in many ways, but most broadly they can be separated into fear and phobia. Phobia is defined by the fear being extreme or irrational.
From arachnophobia (fear of spiders and other arachnids) to acrophobia (fear of heights) to agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), these common phobias are fears given names in psychological literature. For those who suffer from these phobias, they aren’t academic; they’re experiences in real life that inhibit us from sometimes enjoying pursuing life’s goals. Phobias, if they are hindering you in life, require professional help. But, what are the fears we feel regularly that we have the ability to overcome usually without the guidance of a therapist, counselor, psychologist or psychiatrist?
Overt, conscious fears come in many shades of intensity. The most acute type is fear of physical harm because a car is barreling toward you in a pedestrian walkway, random acts of violence we hear about in the news, or you slip off the back deck and plummet several feet down onto the lawn below. This fear of bodily harm is easy to understand, as it does damage to us physically.
But, other types of harm are lower in intensity, even though they still keep us from living our best lives. Losing weight can be a fear vector because of the myriad ways your body, social life and inner world will experience the change.
And, before the end of our lives, we spend some of it in fear of what will become of us after we have lived this life.
While others have labeled fears in different categories, we can understand these general types of fears are conscious and unconscious fears of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual reasons. And, as it turns out, all of them have deleterious effects on our physical health.
How Fear Impacts Our Health
While fear of immediate physical harm is obvious and should be avoided, the other forms of fear have more subtle forms of harm, so it’s best to examine them each in a bit of detail.
We can lump how fear impacts our health in two ways—physiological effects and neurological effects.
Physiological Health
Fear debilitates our immune system and can cause cardiovascular system impairment, gastrointestinal issues, and diminished fertility. It can even make you age faster.
Neurological Health
Fear can intrude on procedures in our brain that enable us to manage feelings, read non-verbal prompts, think before doing, and act morally. This affects our reasoning in harmful ways, leading to potentially extreme feelings, paranoia and compulsivity. To use the brain-as-computer analogy, fear in prolonged states becomes malware and starts to compete with the brain from running its software properly.
Fear can impede the development of working and long-term memory and cause harm to specific parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus. Fear regulation can be impeded in this negative feedback loop and create persistent memory issues for an individual in prolonged states of fear.
As a consequence of the prolonged fear above, the brain is not only affected, it’s apparent that the mental health of the individual is then taxed. This can lead to downstream disorders such as fatigue, post-trauma stress disorder (PTSD) in acute cases, low mood disorders, clinical depression, among others.
We can even look at fear from an economic perspective. Gallup did a poll in 2017 that asked the question, “Is there any area near where you live — that is, within a mile — where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” 30% of respondents are worried about walking near their own home at night. Businesses around those residences must be impacted with loss of revenue from that one fear factor!
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No matter how you look at the issue, fear can be helpful if it’s to avoid immediate harm to your physical person. Beyond that, fear can only be helpful when we avoid its harmful physical, emotional, mental and spiritual effects. Beyond how fear impacts our health, in the next two articles, I’ll examine how to overcome fears now that we’re armed with this information.