Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)
Lets talk about fear, does that make you feel fearful? Does that make your stomach churn, your heart pick up its pace or sweat ooze out of your palms? In a nutshell fear, “Is a pure and fundamental emotion and is preprogrammed in the amygdala.” It is just a fact of life, a fact of our very species and a fact of our species survival. We need triggers and emotions that will get us moving, metaphorically, to survive being eaten by predators or falling prey to natures natural dangers.
“There is an archetypal list of feared objects: snakes, insects, heights, night, and small, dark, damp spaces that may hide creepy, crawly and slimy things.”
Fear, along with anger, are our emergency triggers that tell our lizard brains what to do when facing situations of danger bringing grave harm or death into the mix. When we fact the Lions and Tigers and Bears of life fear is triggered, “The fear program is broadcast into the body via the sympathetic nervous system and the hormone adrenalin, secreted by the adrenal gland. Energy is mobilized through the release of glucose. The heart races and pumps more blood. Respiration accelerates to increase the oxygen content of the blood and all muscle tissue is put on alert.” Then we humans tend to do one of four things, we freeze, we submit, we take flight or we fight. It all depends on nature and our DNA or it is enhanced through experiences that train our conditional response systems of a primal origin.
If we are properly programmed we go directly into fear but if we are not properly programmed then we all prey to panic where we tend to freeze, not in survival mode, where we take a frozen state of body and mind even tho the more prudent actions would be to run and this is what the predator relies on to catch its prey. This is one of many reasons why education and understanding are paramount especially in these more modern and complex times because more and more threats are there vs. in the old days of lions and tigers and bears. In short, the current information teaches us that, “The neural mechanisms of fear as a hierarchical network with the amygdala as point of convergence of threatening stimuli. The central nucleus of the amygdala projects to the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG), the hypothalamus and the brainstem that coordinate flight, freezing, avoidance reactions, submissive postures, reduced pain sensitivity and autonomic arousal.”
For this article we focus on the fear that comes from a confrontation that is either social as in the social monkey dance fight or the predatory process and/or resource actions that often lead to grave bodily harm and death. Either one, if not properly understood and trained for along with a modicum of experience will lead to fear and panic. By training, practice and the reality of experiences from reality based training and actually hands-on create a mind-state and mind-set where our primal conditioned response mechanism is triggered allowing us to use fear and anger for a controlled emotional state and proper appropriate use of those primal conditioned programs to handle the dangers of life.
Understand fear, make fear your ally and then program your primal conditioned system to respond appropriately and allow yourself to control your fear rather than your fear controlling you because your odds of survival increase significantly in this way.
Bibliography (Click the link)
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