Why do we fear

If a fear or phobia affects your life in negative and inconvenient ways, speak to your primary care provider, who can help determine the kind of treatment you might need. How to choose a therapist and get the most out of your sessions. Fear Is Physical Fear is experienced in your mind, but it triggers a strong physical reaction in your body.

Fear Can Become Pleasure But why do people who love roller-coasters, haunted houses and horror movies enjoy getting caught up in those fearful, stressful moments? More Resources. Behavioral Health. You Might Also Like. Whether fear is caused by something not life-threatening, such as a scary movie or an overwhelming meeting at work, or something more dangerous, such as standing on the edge of cliff, we still physically feel it.

While we may be able to push past fear in an intellectual way, what happens physically is largely automatic and can leave us feeling drained. Like many other basic emotions , fear causes physiological reactions in our body. Fear starts in the brain and the physical effects throughout our body help us adjust so we can have the most effective response to a dangerous situation. On an instinctual level, our body is preparing us to fight or flee. Fear starts in the part of the brain called the amygdala.

It also triggers release of stress hormones and sympathetic nervous system. Because of the very automatic nature of the fear response, we usually experience it in three stages :. Still, the physical response we experience is the same.

Most of the physical symptoms we experience when it comes to fear come from the changes in our cardiovascular system. Some of the different types of anxiety disorders that are characterized by fear include:. Repeated exposure to similar situations leads to familiarity, which can dramatically reduce both the fear response. This approach forms the basis of some phobia treatments , which depend on slowly minimizing the fear response by making it feel familiar.

Phobia treatments that are based on the psychology of fear tend to focus on techniques like systematic desensitization and flooding. With systematic desensitization, you're gradually led through a series of exposure situations. For example, if you have a fear of snakes, you may spend the first session with your therapist talking about snakes.

Slowly, over subsequent sessions, your therapist would lead you through looking at pictures of snakes, playing with toy snakes, and eventually handling a live snake. This is usually accompanied by learning and applying new coping techniques to manage the fear response. This is a type of exposure technique that can be quite successful. Flooding based on the premise that your phobia is a learned behavior and you need to unlearn it.

With flooding, you are exposed to a vast quantity of the feared object or exposed to a feared situation for a prolonged amount of time in a safe, controlled environment until the fear diminishes. For instance, if you're afraid of planes, you'd go on up in one anyway. The point is to get you past the overwhelming anxiety and potential panic to a place where you have to confront your fear and eventually realize that you're OK. This can help reinforce a positive reaction you're not in danger with a feared event being in the sky on a plane , ultimately getting you past the fear.

While these treatments can be highly effective, it's important that such confrontational approaches be undertaken only with the guidance of a trained mental health professional. There are also steps that you can take to help cope with fear in day to day life. Such strategies focus on managing the physical, emotional, and behavioral effects of fear.

Some things you can do include:. Fear is an important human emotion that can help protect you from danger and prepare you to take action, but it can also lead to longer-lasting feelings of anxiety. Findings ways to control your fear can help you better cope with these feelings and prevent anxiety from taking hold.

For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database. Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Fear and the defense cascade: Clinical implications and management. Harv Rev Psychiatry. Javanbakht A, Saab L. National Alliance on Mental Illness. It also may include sweating and trembling or tightening of muscles in the arms and legs.

The posture of fear can either be one of mobilizing or immobilizing- freezing or moving away. The universal function of fear is to avoid or reduce harm. The immediate threat of harm focuses our attention, mobilizing us to cope with the danger. In this way, fear can actually save our lives by forcing us to react without having to think about it e. The evolutionary preset actions of fear include fight, flight and freezing. Whereas some people find fear nearly intolerable and avoid the emotion at all costs, others experience pleasure from feeling fear and seek it out i.

It takes a well-developed capacity for compassion to respect, feel sympathetic toward, and patiently reassure someone who is afraid of something we are not afraid of most of us dismiss such fears.

We do not need to feel another person's fear to accept it and help them cope. Learn to recognize and respond to the emotional expressions of others with our online micro expressions training tools to increase your ability to detect deception and catch subtle emotional cues.

Expand your knowledge of emotional skills and competencies with in-person workshops offered through Paul Ekman International. Delve into personal exploration and transformation with Cultivating Emotional Balance. Build your emotional vocabulary with the Atlas of Emotions , a free, interactive learning tool created by Drs. Paul and Eve Ekman at the request of the Dalai Lama.