What Little Fear will do to Your Brain
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Fear is a bad feeling of perceived risk or danger, whether it's real or imaginary. Fear can also be described as a sense of utmost dislike towards certain conditions, objects or things such as: fear of darkness, fear of ghosts, etc.
Fear could underlie some phenomena of behavior modification, though these phenomena will be explained without adducing fear as an element in them.
Furthermore, application of aversive stimuli is additionally typically ineffective in producing change within the behaviour supposed to be modified
Fear is “a chain reaction in the brain,” in line with how Stuff Works. fear begins with a daunting stimulus and ends with your body making ready to safeguard itself from danger. For example:If one thing scare you, like seeing a big snake, hearing a door slam in an empty flat, or feeling a knife pressed into your throat. you're feeling dread, anxiety, and panic. Your heart races, your breathing quickens, and your muscles tense up. Your body goes into fight-or-flight mode, able to do everything it has to cause you to safe.
That entire reaction involves 5 completely different parts of your brain:
It start in the thalamus, which receives signals from your body’s senses. From there, there are 2 completely different ways the fear reaction can take: the low road or the high road. The low road is the fastest, basest, least-rational response to critical things. If one in every of those signals is critical, like feeling a knife at your throat, the thalamus alerts your amygdala. The amygdala cause emotional alert and makes the hypothalamus to get the adrenal glands ready and rush blood to every muscles in the body to allow you get off the danger.
If the signal isn’t critical, the brain takes the more rational high road response. If you see one thing that’s not life-threatening however still scary, like a cockroach skittering across the ground, the amygdala alerts the pre-frontal or sensory cortex. The cortex alerts the hippocampus and spurs it to match this threat to past ones. The hippocampus is that the brain’s memory center. If it determines that this worry information may be a threat but not critical, the hippocampus heightens your senses to an almost superhuman degree and triggers your fight-or-flight response.
As useful as that response is, the speed and thoroughness of it may be prejudicious.
“once the fear pathways are ramped up, the brain short-circuits more rational process ways and reacts straightaway to signals from the amygdala. when in this fearful state, the brain interprets them as negative and remembers them that means.”
That’s unfortunate, because the brain stores all the main points from that particular stimulus time of day, images, sounds, smells, weather, etc. in your memory. while that creates the memory “very unstable : it might also trigger the total gamut of physical and emotional responses each single time an identical fear stimulus shows up.
Fear could also have long term consequences on the body, including “stress, depression, accelerated ageing and even premature death,”
Until you can develop the attitude of attacking fear, nothing you can still do but to remain in big fear. The was I suggested to overcoming fear is the frequent use of fear extinction. Fear extinction is just like making a brand new response to the fear causing stimulus, which means creating positive associations with the issue that freaked you out