The Truth about Fear.
Fear: a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid. A specific instance or propensity for such a feeling, concern or anxiety; solitude.
Fear is a vital response to physical and emotional danger - if we didn't feel it, we couldn't protect ourselves form legitimate threats. But often we fear situations that are far from life - or - death, and thus hang back for no good reason. Traumas or bad experience can trigger a fear response within us that is hard to quell. Yet exposing ourselves to our personal demons is the best way to move past them.
Around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the U.S., life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it's been in a decade, and despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991. As reported in The Atlantic, 2015 was "the best year in history for the average human being."
So how is it possible to be living in the safest time in human history, yet at the same exact time to be scared.
According to Glassner, "we are living in the most fear-munging time in human history. And the main reason for this is that there's a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears."
For mass media, insurance companies, BIG PHARMA, advocacy groups, lawyers, politicians and so many more, your fear is worth BILLIONS. And unfortunately for them, your fear is also very easy to manipulate. We're wired to respond to it above everything else. If we miss an opportunity for abundance, life goes on; if we miss an important fear cue, it doesn't.
"The more we learn about the brain, the more we learn it's not something that's suppose to make you happy all the time," says Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neurobiology professor who runs a lab studying fear. "It's mostly a stress-reactive machine. Its primary job is to keep us alive, which is why it's so easy to flip people into fear all the time."
In other words, our biology and psychology are as flawed and susceptible to corruption as the systems and politicians we're so afraid of. In particular, when it comes to assessing future risks, there is a litany of cognitive distortions and emotional overreactions that we fall prey to.
Many believe the amygdala, a tiny, almond-shaped region deep in each hemisphere of the brain, is the home of our emotional responses, specifically fear. The author Daniel Goleman has coined the term "amygdala hijacking" to describe what inflammatory rhetoric and imagery are designed to do: trigger the emotional brain before the logical brain has a chance to stop it. This is what both the right and the left believe their opponents media are doing to people.
Despite what countless psychologists, journalists and teachers assert, fear doesn't occur in the amygdala, according to neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. A more accurate way to put it would be "threat detection and response," The triangle of neurons on the amygdala, known as the lateral amygdala, parses through stimuli coming in from the outside world, looking for, among other things, threats. If it senses danger, than the neurons start firing, signaling the central amygdala to a defense response in the body. This whole process is an unconscious physiological response (perspiration, increased heart rate, shortness of breath) and behavioral reaction (freeze, fight or flight), not an emotion.
"We need to recognize that emotions are not innate hard-wired states. Emotions are very complicated: They morph and change, and go back and forth, and you can have many emotions as you can conceptualize." Fear, then, is actually experienced in the conscious mind - the cerebral cortex - where we assemble the experience and then label it as an emotion, or at least categorize with other experience that feel similar.
Make sense?
Most of this has nothing to do with what's happening politically in this country. "What we're talking about is anxiety, not fear," Fear is a response to something one anticipates. Might be a threat in the future. "It is a worry about something that hasn't happened and may never happen."
The biological difference, is the worry and nervousness that we label as anxiety originate not in the amygdala, but predominantly in a small area of the stria-terminals - the pathway connecting the amygdala to the hypothalamus - know as the bed nucleus. It is this area that researchers believer is hyper-activated during generalized anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety.
This may seem like a small distinction. But in actuality is everything. Where fear is about a danger that seems certain, anxiety is, "an experience of uncertainty," That uncertainty is the exact lever that politicians regularly use to try to influence your behavior.
REALLY, FEAR IS JUST A STATE OF MIND. FEAR IS AN ILLUSION CREATED BY YOUR OWN THOUGHTS.
