On Fear
(Poem by my favorite poet Emily Dickinson)
Why are we afraid? Have you ever wondered why we humans have fear even though we no longer live in the jungle where a wild beast or creature is waiting to pounce on us. Fear of the unknown, the unexpected, tends to manifest itself differently for each of us. I remember an incident from my childhood, growing up in an apartment in Chennai. We used to live on the second floor. There was a stairway that led downstairs from our flat and a door to the outside world was at the ground level. My mom would send me down to close the door at night and lock up. There was some space on the side of the stairwell that was not well lit. I remember (being the sissy that I was) having this fear when I walked down of some stranger lurking in the shadow on the side of the stairs or under the stairwell. I would run down the stairs lock up and run straight back up without looking under the stairs. It was only when I closed the front door upstairs and locked up, that the fear would let up. Even to this day that sort of fear still exists — suspecting the car that follows me on the last leg of my journey home in the middle of the night (probably some poor neighbor returning home late at night), the fear of creepy crawlers that might have gotten into my shoe in the garage over night, etc. You could say some of this was related to my Pavlovian reflex, some intuition I had built over the years or that I was born with that made me wary of surprises. I am sure if you introspect you too can discover how you are impacted by fear.
I discovered a few years ago that we all have this strange thing called muscle memory. If we faced some trauma or injury, we never fully recover. Our fear of pain causes us to forever remember this and this restricts our range of motion. Dr. Stuart an alternative healing specialist demonstrated it using my family member’s hands during one of our visits. He demonstrated that her range of motion on one side was restricted. Strangely it took him only minutes to correct it. Not really sure what he did, but by pressing at the right nerve centers he was able to erase that muscle memory restoring her range of motion within minutes. Perhaps the same happens with fear, our behavior is impacted by what we experienced at some point in our lives. Wonder if there is a way to press on some nerve centers and bypass our fears. It’s easier to find what triggers our emotions but it’s not that simple to conquer them, leave alone find the nerve centers that will help us forget the triggers.
It turns out that even our basic understanding of fear is erroneous. You might be more advanced in your thinking than me, but I was always of the impression that when we experience fear our body reacts to protect us with our fight or flight response. It was only after reading “Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland”, I realized that things actually worked quite the opposite. In her book she quotes research from neuroscientist, Antonio Demasio ( Descartes Error, Looking for Spinoza) that explains our experience of fear happens after our amygdala has been informed of the threat and has signaled to our hypothalamus to react to it. The fear feeling we experience is the sensory recognition of the state of our body after our fight or flight response has been activated . So by the time we feel the feeling of fear, our body has already reacted to it. Although this appears to be intuitive, if you are like me you too probably never realized it.
Our fear exhibits itself in many ways but often is instigated by a common trigger. Many years ago, we were standing in the Bangalore Cantonment station waiting to board a train. As the train rolled in to the platform (track) the locomotive gave off a shrill hoot startling my infant son, who started to howl. He was probably the only sane person in the station that day. But we noticed soon after that he had developed a phobia for loud sounds that stuck with him for many years. In a way it was good for there wasn’t much heavy metal and hard rock we got to hear in our house during his teens.
I distinctly remember another incident from my childhood that aroused my fear of water. Many years ago I was spending my summer vacations in Kerala with relatives. Alwaye, the town we stayed in had a lovely river, Periyar that ran through it. Often a bunch of us young lads would run to the river (Pozhai) to take a dip. Most of them were good swimmers except me the city boy. I had this natural fright of drowning but they dragged me along telling me they would teach me how to swim. I was a tall kid and could keep my head above water most of the time. One day we went to a different ghat and I didn’t know it was deeper there. As soon as I stepped in I was underwater and panic set in. My cousins were around and got me out but that incident scared the daylights out of me. Luckily on our way back they fed my favorite sherbet with goli soda ( which to this day I long for ) dampening my fear. I have tried unsuccessfully to learn to swim many times since then, to get over my phobia of water. But that fear still lingers. It is still one of the things that I want to learn so I can fulfill my bucket list of going snorkeling and seeing the beauty of the oceans and the coral reefs. Maybe that dream will help me overcome my fear eventually.
There is one other aspect to fear that we all experience. We know it better as anxiety. Every time a plane takes off or lands; when you have a health condition and have imagined the worst even before the results are out;when your teenager is late returning from a trip to their friends; we experience this anxiety attack. A gut wrenching experience almost like fear but wholly imagined. Our brain seems to foresee the worst possible outcomes for every circumstance and starts reacting to it. I have noticed that I get irritable, feel my heart racing, have difficult being calm, etc. Some of us have greater trouble dealing with this than others. But clearly this too is experienced by everyone but how we exhibit it maybe different for each of us. No wonder families use tracking apps to see where their family members are. Just the knowledge that someone is active on Messenger is gratifying to know, for the parental anxiety is eliminated.
Understanding ourselves needs us to introspect on our fears and phobias and our anxieties. We may not conquer these but knowing our triggers and making small adjustments could help us not necessarily overcome them but find our own ways to deal with them. When people have emotional breakdowns often times it’s their frustration and imagined reality that causes their situation to get worse. In the Covid world we all walk outside imagining that every stranger that crosses our path is carrying the virus. Strangely this is a fear we mutually have. The next time you encounter fear or your phobias or feel anxious just don’t dismiss it, try to ruminate on it.
