The Fear that once was

As I started typing this very post, I couldn't help but notice a tiny twinge of fear, in the very back of my head, in some dark alley that I rarely visit. That fear has grown old and weak, very unlike what it was in the first 2 decades of my life ... It has taken almost a decade of critical thought, intelligent conversation, and hours upon hours of introspective soul-searching to finally beat that monster into a harmless twinge.

What is fear exactly? When it comes down to it, fear is the mind's way of anticipating potentially harmful events in the future and warning itself about them. The classical physical and mental response to fear is the well-known fight-or-flight scenario: The brain prepares itself and the body to either face the potential threat head-on, or to flee the situation as quickly as possible. This is obviously useful for survival, as you wouldn't want to encounter a lion in your cave and start analyzing the situation calming and logically. You want to be able to run away as fast as possible, or perhaps face the lion with your spear or boulder or M16. Evolution works really well when it comes to imminent life-or-death predicaments.

What we tend to forget in contemporary society is that evolution is a pretty good solution for the problem of survival and gene propagation, yet it can be far less than optimal in other scenarios; i.e. evolution has side effects.

What is meant to keep us alive and safe, can also make us miserable for no reason. Consider all the fears that infest the contemporary human mind: claustrophobia, agoraphobia, all sorts of social phobias, fear of spiders/insects/moths/, fear of failure, fear of being alone, fear of the after-life, and one of the most interesting fears of all: the meta-fear: fear of being afraid, or fear of fear itself! (Thanks, Roosevelt).

It seems obvious, yet this harsh survival mechanism can go unnoticed in many of us. Many people experience fear and it's nasty physical manifestations without actually stopping to think about this it or analyzing whether it's appropriate given the current context. What's even worse, is that a lot of fear is learned, not biologically intrinsic.

Parents have the ability to instill a lot of fear in their children, often without either party noticing. I myself have definitely been the victim of such an insidious crime. The fears and paranoias are often formed and bred while life ticks away at it's usual pace; there needn't be any trauma or major catastrophic events for this to happen.

So take 20 minutes, sit down, and think about what fears invade your mind on a regular basis. Are they rational fears? Are they warranted? Most of the time, the answer will be "no" to those questions. Fortunately, most of the time you can get rid of those fears as well. It's not easy, but it's definitely possible. More on that in later posts.

Until next time,

--Shafik