Fear

Mind-Killer #4

If you recall from my overview article about the mind-killers, I adopted this term from the Litany Against Fear in Frank Herbert’s Dune. So, from an origin story perspective, fear is, in fact, the mind-killer. However, as it relates to the RARE SENSE® theory and practice, it’s our fourth one.

Fear is an emotion like sorrow or anger whose gaze is pointed in the opposite direction. Whereas those are reactions to something that look backward into the past, fear focuses on the future. It isn’t concerned with what already happened but with what might occur.

It also serves a specific purpose—to keep us from harm. Fear is a trigger that not only alerts us to danger but also tries to protect us from it through physical processes. When we are afraid, our brains alter our bodies to give us the greatest chance of dealing appropriately with a potential threat. Our autonomic nervous system shifts from a sympathetic state to a parasympathetic one. Our adrenal glands fire while blood and oxygen are diverted toward our muscles and away from things like digestion, which are less critical now. Our field of vision narrows. We can then use this heightened condition to fight, run away (flight), or freeze. Fear significantly impacts our physiology, and we feel it viscerally.

Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Like any other mammal, for most of human history, we faced daily, legitimate, mortal threats from predators, other members of our species, and Mother Nature. An essential function of our brains is to mitigate these risks to the greatest extent possible and ensure our survival.

Today, we call the structures that do this the limbic system. It’s composed of parts like the amygdala, hippocampus, and thalamus. There’s some scientific contention about whether these various components represent a system, but it doesn’t matter to laypeople. The critical piece to understand is that a portion of your brain creates a fear-based response at times with the intent of keeping you alive, and it’s deeply rooted in your biology. For our purposes here, I will continue to refer to it as the limbic system.

However, modern humans are rarely in any real danger. Life has become comfortable and safe. Our homes and society largely protect us from the elements, animals, and nefarious individuals. Regardless, we still feel fear at times. We also experience its accompanying somatic byproducts because we still carry the vestiges of a primitive limbic system that has yet to evolve into something more attuned to current living conditions.

Of course, occasionally, this is completely warranted. If a car crash is imminent, fear hopefully does its job and assists us in avoiding it. Much more often, though, we are simply anxious or nervous. These are nothing more than less intense forms of fear, and we can detect their physiological impact via sensations like sweaty palms, racing heart rate, and butterflies in our stomachs. Luckily, we recognize there’s no real danger in these circumstances, and the feeling eventually subsides. That just might not happen until the scary movie or big presentation is over.

We also worry about things like our health, politics, the environment, etc. Some measure of that is healthy. It can help you objectively assess a situation and make better decisions. But many of us take this response to extremes and make it omnipresent. Maybe we grew up in an environment that wasn’t safe, and now we view the whole world that way. Our profession might put us at risk daily, so we are constantly on edge.

This situation can be further exacerbated by all the external messaging in media and advertising constantly telling you to stress about everything. Whether it’s regarding some illness or the possibility of nuclear war, we receive a constant barrage of fearmongering from outside sources every day.

As a result, we can get locked into a perpetual state of assessing the current terrain of life and fixating on what lies ahead. This is where we run into trouble—when modern fears extend beyond acute scenarios and become chronic. Because this is no different than our instinctual primal response. We’ve simply habituated it, teaching our brains to always be on high alert and our nervous systems to constantly be in parasympathetic mode. That can take the form of anxiety, catastrophizing, or hypervigilance, to name a few examples. Anyone dealing with those behavior patterns probably wouldn’t describe themselves as being afraid all the time. But biologically, they are.

This obviously negatively affects our minds. However, it can also have disastrous consequences on our bodies. It doesn’t take a medical degree to understand that constantly spiking your cortisol and shunting your digestion isn’t healthy. It’s also a case whereby the energy incessantly created by the limbic response essentially has nowhere to go. When an animal freezes (aka “plays dead”) to deal with a predator, it utilizes a process called “tremoring” once the threat has passed to bleed off its internal energy. Humans don’t do this. But if we are constantly in a hypervigilant state, we may develop similar sensations like shaking, numbness, tingling, dizziness, brain fog, or panic attacks, to name a few.

When this happens to people, most have no idea what’s going on. Since they are already in such a heightened state, many react with even more fear. They become fixated on these sensations, assuming they indicate a disease. This further compounds the problem, which continues to snowball. It creates a closed feedback loop that can eventually leave you physically debilitated. Many sufferers end up bedridden and unable to function for years as a result.

Interestingly, it doesn’t even take a conscious fear-based response to trigger limbic impairment. A physical one like a virus or bacteria can also do it if our overall health is worn down enough. This means that even a subconscious defense mechanism like the immune system can generate the same scenario. Unfortunately, many people never realize this and end up chasing a physical solution to what’s essentially a mental problem.

I know this struggle all too well. While storytelling was my first mind-killer, fear was my most prevalent and destructive. In 2011, continuous ruminations on how I felt I’d failed my teammates on active duty slowly morphed from regret to dread. Alongside a shameful story of the past, a dark and fearful one emerged about the future. Because men I considered far better than me had died in combat or training and I had not, I felt there must be some fatal disease coming to take me out. I started to believe that any twinge or gurgle in my body was proof of a terminal condition.

As a result, they got worse. I began getting tremors and numbness in my extremities. I’d be tired and dizzy all the time. And I had my share of panic attacks. Like so many others, I had no idea what was happening then. Years later, when I suffered my acute mold exposure and my system collapsed, I experienced these symptoms again but on an entirely new level. It got ten times worse.

These two stages of my life represent separate times when I had to learn how to counter systemic fear differently. They were, without a doubt, the most brutal internal battles I’ve ever had to fight. As I discovered in both cases, practical self-directed exercises can help anyone escape fear’s clutches, regardless of how badly this mind-killer affects you. In my next article, I’ll discuss how to do this through the countermeasure of curiosity.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.