The Anatomy of Fear
Fear is a primal emotion. In the animal kingdom, fear is associated with survival. Life doesn’t want to slip off a cliff, drown in a lake or be eaten. Fear, then, acts as an early warning system for upcoming danger. It tells the animal to run, hide, jump or stand still.
It would be dangerous to eliminate the animal’s capacity for fear. Researchers induced damage to the amygdala in rats, a brain region that plays a critical role in the perception of fear. What happened? The rats got cozy with their predator, the cat.
In humans, fear is a destructive emotion. Fear debilitates, poisons and limits us. Fear often leads to judgment, misguided aggression and even illness. Fear hampers our decision-making ability; it limits our perceived range of choices.
An athlete fearful of losing the race is at a disadvantage. One can be alert and ready without being afraid or fearful.
Worry is a form of fear. Many of us equate worry with love, however, they are on opposite sides of the emotional spectrum. Worry clouds our judgment and limits our experience of joy and love. You can’t experience worry and love simultaneously.
The experience of fear is associated with specific physiology too. In fear, our muscles tense, our shoulders slouch, our heads drop and our breathing gets shallow (short breaths from our chest, instead of our stomachs).
We are not our fears, even though we often act as such. How do you break out of fear? The reason why fear or any negative emotion lingers is because the mind tends to feed and energize the emotion. The mind creates and reruns fear-inducing images and manufactures scenarios to “justify” the fearful emotion. So first, identify that the program of fear is running. Instead of trying to repress the fear or escape it through distraction like work, TV or the Internet, allow the fear to be there.
Fear, like all other negative emotions, has a limited reserve of energy. By allowing and welcoming the fear, its energy will exhaust itself. Similar to how your car can’t run without gasoline, the fear program can’t run when it has no more fearful energy to feed itself.
At first, the prospect of welcoming the fear may bring up more fear. In those moments, find solace in the Zen teaching, “All fear is illusion. Walk straight through.”
Once you learn to master fear, you will never again be a victim to it. In transcending fear, you can experience true freedom.
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