I don’t mean what does it FEEL LIKE...I mean what is it really? When you get anxious or scared, or even have a panic attack, what’s going on?
Maybe before we get to that, maybe we should take a step back and think about why we get afraid to begin with. What good does fear do?
Fear is an extra dose of mental and physical power designed to keep you safe.
I know it doesn’t feel like that, I know it can feel just awful, but your response of fear is something that can be an incredibly positive and useful thing when you need it.
At the core, you experience fear in order to protect yourself. Fear is fine, good in fact. It’s not the reaction of fear that’s the problem, it’s the timing.
Picture this...It’s about 100,000 years ago, and two caveman are walking across a field of tall grass in Africa. The sun is setting, so they’re starting to get some relief from the intense sun, and they’re tired from a long day of hunting Wooly Mammoths. All they want to do is get back to their cave and curl up with a big piece of Mastodon meat and chill out by the fire.
All of a sudden they hear a twig snap behind them.The first caveman feels an intense and immediate reaction of fear and runs away.
The other one doesn’t.
The only caveman that ended up relaxing in front of the fire that night was the one that got afraid and ran away.
For a REAL long time, it’s been to our advantage to have a strong and sensitive fear response, the quicker and more intense, the better. It kept us safe and allowed us to make little cavemen with great fear responses. We’re direct descendants of the cavepeople that ran away when a twig snapped.
As useful as having that hair trigger on our fear response was back then, it doesn’t serve us nearly as well now, there’s simply not that much that’s still out to get us.
But from an evolutionary perspective, the safety of modern life is still pretty recent, just a sliver of the past million years, not nearly long enough for your fear to know that it doesn’t need to be so darn jumpy about things.
Even now, your instinctual fear response can keep you safe. If you’ve ever narrowly avoided an automobile accident, you probably felt your fear response in action, although may have not known that’s what it was at the time. Maybe there was a crash in front of you and all of a sudden time seemed to slow down, you became intensely focused, slammed on the brakes, and decided where to steer so you could avoid crashing, all in a matter of a few seconds. You could NEVER have reacted with such speed and precision had it not been for your fear response kicking in. It did what it was supposed to do when it was supposed to do it, and it kept you safe.
Your fear has a purpose.The problem with fear is twofold. First, it can get triggered when it’s not necessary, like when you’re in line at the grocery store, going to a party, speaking in public, far from home, or up in an airplane. Second, it can get tricked into reacting WAY too intensely when the situation doesn’t warrant it. When your fear response is activated, the surge of chemicals throughout your body can be so fast and intense it can overload your mind and you can be left barely able to function, like short circuiting the logical and rational part of your brain that you need to perform normally. Your logic and reasoning gets all but turned off, like the lights dimming in a room, and when that happens you’re not much different than that caveman in the field 100,000 years ago, completely controlled by your fear.
Small amounts of anxiety and fear HELPS us, it keeps us sharp, hyper aware, and can even make us stronger. We've all heard stories of little old ladies lifting a car off someone or performing some other superhuman feat in the throes of panic or fear. The problem is with the swing of the pendulum. What if we could learn to control that fear response so we could use the energy and incredible power it gives us, without letting it slip out of our control and spiral into panic or anxiety that debilitates us or becomes uncomfortable? What if you could teach your mind to not react with such intensity when there wasn’t a need to?
YOU CAN. Ok, buckle up, time for some learnin’...