We can’t completely stop being afraid if we want to survive in this world. If we had no fear, we would be as careless as a two year old playing with a loaded gun.
Without this primitive defensive mechanism, we would not last very long. We use it automatically every time we cross the street, when we avoid dark alleys late at night, when we startle to a loud noise, or when we accidentally fall.
Fear is our most powerful emotion:
- It takes dominance over hunger, thirst , sex, and anger.
- It is our tireless bodyguard who is constantly on the alert, except when we happen to fall asleep.
- Even then, it is likely to arouse us if some unexpected noise occurs.
- There is no way we can just turn off fear the way we can turn off the water from a dripping faucet.
- It is not under our direct voluntary control.
Fear is all about staying alive.
- This fear mechanism has been around for ever, and it is found in the simplest of animals. All animals have some sort of fight or flight mechanism deep inside their brains.
- In human beings, it is fully developed even before we are born!
- It remembers from the beginning all these little insults to our comfort, so that the next time we are in similar situations, it remembers what we did in the past, and it tries to escape before the insult happens again.
- Well before we have anything that vaguely looks like intellegence, this primitive system has developed an enormous catalogue of what to approach, and especially what to avoid.
- This system is absolutely wonderful for surviving in a world of anarchy and chaos. And most animals still live in such a world. Most of the world is still a very brutal place, where many animals need to kill other animals in order to survive. Developing good escape and avoidance skills is absolutely essential.
This modern world is fortunately not as dangerous as complete anarchy.
- In this modern world, and with the addition of a very sophisticated cerebral cortex which takes the first 20 years life to fully develop, we have partly left that chaotic world of being a small fish, who is spending most of its time trying not to be eaten by a bigger fish.
- Using our verbal and non-verbal communication skills, we have learned how to get things that we want in life without having to kill our neighbor in the process.
- We do not need such a constantly active fear mechanism. And the fear can get in the way of interacting with the world in a more carefree way.
- Our fear get out of hand especially in social situations. It was never meant to handle situations where we are afraid of being stupid, or avoiding taking important exams, or being worried about our finances in the future. It was designed to literally run away from physical danger.
- So when we literally start avoiding social situations, the fear assumes there must be something life-threatening about that situation. It thinks it’s doing a good job of saving us from certain death. It is too primitive to know any better.
Retraining our Fear Mechanism
So how can we train this fear mechanism to stay alert for some situations, such as crossing streets, but not to be so active in situations where we feel we may appear stupid?
- Graded Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is the most efficient way to teach this fear mechanism what we need to avoid, and what risky situations we need to approach in order to survive in this modern world,
- Using ERP, we learn to put in new behaviors that are incompatible with what the fear is preparing us to do, which is to run away!
- We have to gradually practice walking towards the situations that we really desire to do, and which we know are not life-threatening.
- Initially, the fear mechanism will automatically try very hard to get us to run away. That is because we have trained it to run away in the past, and it simply remembers our old instructions.
- But if we hold our ground, the fear will be very surprised at the result, (Hey, we are still alive!), and will gradually learn through further trials that the situation is not life-threatening.
It is essential that we start of with easy confrontations. If we try to face too much fear at any one time, the fear will win, we will run way, and we have made our fear little stronger.
- The main point to remember is that fear is a slave to our past escape responses.
- As you stop escaping from non-life threatening tasks, the fear has no choice but to change to match our new non-defensive behaviors.
- But we have to be prepared to face the mismatch of living with increased fear for a while, before the fear gets the message that social situations are not life threatening.
- And the more often you take these risks, and occasionally feel embarrassed, the sooner the fear will begin to go to sleep.
