IS FEAR A MENTAL PROBLEM?

By Majed G Taifour

“Who sees all beings in his own self, and his own self in all beings loses all fear.” — Isa Upanishad, Hindu Scripture

Fear is incredibly complex…

People usually confuse fear with anxiety, panic, and even phobia — while, in fact, they’re not one and the same. Fear is one of the most powerful emotions, which negatively impact your mind, while anxiety is a form of fear that is associated with worry.

To this day, health professionals use anxiety to describe persistent fear. Panic, on the other hand, occurs when you become overwhelmed by the physical and mental feelings of fear — this is why people in the middle of a panic attack find it hard to breathe — an experience similar to having a heart attack. Whereas phobias result from extreme fear of an animal, place, or situation. And people with phobias develop an overwhelming need to avoid contact with the specific causes of their anxiety or fear. And even the thought of coming in contact with these causes could make them agitated, anxious, and panicky.

Anyone may experience anxiety, panic, or phobia at some point in time. But only when such experiences become severe, and last for a long time, health professionals intervene, labeling them as mental health problems.

But is fear also a mental health issue?

To begin with, experts believe that fear is a chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals that cause a racing heart, fast breathing, and energized muscles. This is known as the fight-or-flight response.

In fact, fear originates from the brain, a profoundly complex organ with more than 100 billion nerve cells, forming an intricate network of communications that controls everything you sense, think and do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thoughts and actions, while others produce autonomic responses. The fear response is almost entirely involuntarily. This is why you do not consciously trigger it until it has run its course.

So, why do people fear?

Scientists believe that if they don’t, they would not be able to survive for long. They may even be walking in front of a speeding car, or jumping off rooftops. Therefore, the purpose of fear is to survive.

But if that was the case, then why do people put on those wide-eyed faces of fear every time they tremble of sheer terror?

To answer that question, English naturalist Charles Darwin performed an experiment. He went to the reptile house at the London Zoological Gardens, where he stood calmly, as close to the glass as possible, while a puff adder, a sort of a venomous viper, charged towards him. And every time it lunged, he jumped back in fear.

Later on, he wrote this in his diary: “My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.” In saying that, he established that the response to fear is an ancient reflex that has been untouched by the nuances of modern civilization. As such, fear is an intrinsic instinct that promotes people’s survival. And although the circumstances may have changed, fear still serves to protect them today, as it did thousands of years ago.

However, there’s more to fear than just instinct — there’s also anticipation. And whether people like it or not, they anticipate horrible things to happen, even though most of them never do.

Again, scientists view this as a good thing…

In fact, if you had never felt the rain, you would have never anticipated the lightning or ran for cover until the storm passed by. Some scientists have even established a connection between excitement and fear. One of them is psychologist Arthur Aron.

While conducting a study on the fear of heights, he made one group cross a 450-foot-long, unstable-feeling bridge, suspended over a 230-foot drop, while another group walked across a stable-feeling bridge over the same height.

At the end of each bridge, Aron’s charming female assistant met the participants, asked them a set of questions related to an imaginary study, then gave them her phone number in case they wanted to learn more, and just let them go.

The outcome was surprising…

Out of the 33 men who walked across the stable bridge, only two called. While, of the 33 who walked across the swaying bridge, nine called. And Aron’s finding was that the state of fear actually inspired in those nine participants a sense of sexual attraction, and the charming assistant played a major role in that.

Besides excitement, scientists discovered another side to fear — conditioning. In the 1920s, American psychologist John Watson aspired to learn why some people feared dogs, while others considered them as part of the family. So, he experimented on an 11-month-old infant, whose name was Albert.

First, he tried to make little Albert fear white rats. But the toddler loved those animals and showed joy just at the sight of them. So, Watson recurred to conditioning, by pairing the white rats with a negative stimulus. And whenever little Albert reached out to the rats, a petrifying, loud noise sounded in the background.

The results were astonishing…

Not only did little Albert fear the white rats, but he also cried whenever he saw any furry animal… including Santa Claus, with his big white beard.

Like little Albert, some people are afraid of snakes, even though they might never have seen one before. How is that so? Does this mean that fear is an instinct embedded in our consciousness? In other words, are there universal fears deeply rooted in our minds?

Many of you may remember the popular American television game show, the Fear Factor. Hosted by Joe Rogan, the show, which ran its last episode in September 2016, was a competition reality series, in which contestants needed to decide if they had the guts to face their greatest fears.

The NBC reality series pitted contestants against one another, competing for a cash prize of $50,000 if they performed such tasks as sticking their heads into a box filled with spiders, or eating worms, and rat smoothies.

The idea behind the show was to perform a classical conditioning experiment in order to create a phobia or an intense and irrational fear of what is in the box. The objective was to put to test those universal fears buried deep inside the subconscious minds of the contestants.

However, what the show unveiled was much more intriguing. In fact, what it uncovered was that the contestants’ fears spoke volumes about their personal life experiences. This is very much similar to what behavioral scientists refer to as exposure therapy. A person, for example, who happens to be afraid of snakes might visit a snake farm, time after time, until his fear of snakes dissipates, and then he builds up the courage to touch one.

At first, he might get within ten feet of the snake, then within five, until he gets close enough to one. And when that occurs, a memory is created in his subconscious mind: “Snakes won’t harm you.” And although the fear of snakes remains, the new memory overrides it. As American psychiatrist Karl Augustus Menninger explained it: “Fears are educated into us, and can if we wish, be educated out.”

To a certain extent, this reminded me of what Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh once said: “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

I guess the answer to that is… fear is only as deep as the mind allows it to be!