Neurology - Know more about your 'Brain & Behaviour' Back

Are you just afraid? Or suffer from Phobia? Or panicking?

Fear is an unpleasant and often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger.  It is completely natural and helps us to recognize and respond to dangerous situations and threats. However, healthy or protective fear can evolve into unhealthy or pathological fear, which can lead to exaggerated and violent behavior. Realistic fear is based on a correct perception or judgment of a life situation that has caused harm to you. If someone or something hurts you, you have a reason to fear it in the future. This causes you to avoid the person or the threat. Precautionary fear is based on a perception or judgment of a situation that can possibly harm you. It stems from knowledge of possible danger e.g waiting to cross a busy road for safety reasons. Displaced fear deals with an individual’s recall of past fears or occurrences and injecting them into a current situation which is actually not a threat. This type of fear is particularly relevant to conflict. Displaced fear affects the way people handle conflict situations. Fear arises from a sense of lack of control over / knowledge about a life situation. It causes you to feel anxious, insecure and to experience a complete lack of positive feeling. There is a growing tendency for you to become hesitant or procrastinate. You are not able to think sensibly or logically. Fear imposes limitations upon your potential and ability and in the process ruins your relationships with others.  You fear diseases, old age, loneliness, insecurity, victimization, ridicule, poverty, death, accident, ghosts and a whole lot more. There are legitimate fears as there are unfounded fears. Whatever they are, legitimate or otherwise, if you summon your courage and confront the situation / them directly and gain control, they simply wither away and eventually die. A fear reaction happens whenever we sense danger or when we are confronted with something new or unknown that seems potentially dangerous. The amygdala, a small, almond-shaped part of the brain, is involved in the recognition of threat signals, including body language, and facial expressions.  It forms a part of the limbic system or your "emotional brain”. It is also connected to your hippocampus or "memory center”.  The amygdala receives its main inputs from the visual, auditory and somatosensory cortices or "seeing, hearing, and touch sensing centers” in your brain. This is the Cortex – Amygdla – Hippocampus threat loop.  The main outputs of the amygdale are to the hypothalamus, which controls hormone production in the body and the important neuro-chemicals in the brain.  When faced with visual, auditory, and somato-sensory inputs from the environment that signal a threat, the amygdale, stimulates the hypothalamus to pump out hormones that stimulate our adrenal glands which then pump out  adrenaline and cortisol, and the brain to pump out noradrenaline. These cause the heart rate to increase and breathing to speed up; pupils to dilate to let in more light, enabling one to see better; metabolism of fat and glucose in the liver to increase to provide the energy that might be needed to escape; body to start sweating to cool itself down; to step up production and release of endorphins or pain controlling hormones; and the brain’s decision-making centres to become primed for action.  This is the fight or flight response of the body.  Remember that our bodies are 200,000 year old models with very few upgrades. Our brain was created for the cave man to deal with the threats from the natural elements and the dangerous beasts, such as the sabre toothed tiger. When faced with danger, therefore, the cave man had to flee or fight to survive. Suppose that are presented with threat stimuli from a modern day beast such as your angry boss. The angry expression and body language of your boss in response to something you did, triggers your amygdala to check with your memory center. If such behavior in your boss has produced severely adverse outcomes for you in the past, your amygdala is activated much more than that of the boss’ secretary who may be present in the same situation. The hormones and chemicals secreted as a result prepare you to fight or run from this threat. However, if you cannot fight, or run (as happens in many situations today) the sensations produced by your racing heart, gasping breath, trembling muscles, and pouring sweat, combined with the hyperalert brain create the emotion of fear.   Difference Between Fear and AnxietyFear is a reaction to an actual danger signal. The physical and mental tension of anxiety is very similar to fear but with one important difference. With anxiety, there isn't usually anything actually happening right then and there to trigger the feeling. The feeling is coming from the anticipation of future danger or something bad that could happen, but there is no danger happening now. Everyone experiences anxiety from time to time. It can be mild or intense or somewhere in between. A little anxiety helps us to stay on our toes and motivates us to do our best. A moderate amount of anxiety helps the body and mind get prepared to cope with something stressful or frightening. Sometimes anxiety can get out of proportion and become too intense or too lasting, and it can interfere with a person's ability to do well. (For more on anxiety see The Health Planters issue -9) PhobiaA phobia is an intense, unreasonable fear of situations, objects, activities, or persons, which is out of proportion to the actual danger or harm that is possible. The fear and distress is so intense that the person will do whatever they can to avoid coming into contact with the object of their fear, and often spend time thinking about whether they are likely to encounter it in a given situation. In fact, if you have a phobia, you probably realize that your fear is unreasonable, yet you still can’t control it.  Phobias vary in severity among individuals. Some individuals can simply avoid the subject of their fear and suffer only relatively mild anxiety over that fear. Others suffer fully-fledged panic attacks (see below) with all the associated disabling symptoms. Most individuals understand that they are suffering from an irrational fear, but are powerless to override their initial panic reaction. Phobias result from ahyperactivity of the threat loop (see above).  This hyperactivity may be due to genetic wiring, as phobias run in families. The most convincing evidence in support of the genetic model of phobias is provided by fear conditioning experiments using rhesus monkeys. Wild rhesus monkeys fear snakes while domestic rhesus monkeys do not. In the experiment, domestic rhesus monkeys are shown a video in which other rhesus monkeys respond fearfully to both snakes (fear-relevant stimuli) and flowers (neutral stimuli). Later, when exposed to videos of snakes, and videos of flowers, the monkeys all exhibited a fear response to snakes but not to flowers. Phobias occur be due to a constant overstimulation of the threat loop caused by a sudden overwhelming / repeated exposure to a threat stimulus. This is known as conditioned phobia.   When someone develops a phobia, they quickly learn that they feel anxious when they are near the object or situation they fear - and that they feel relief when they avoid it. They learn that avoidance can reduce their anxiety (at least for the moment) and increase the likelihood that they will avoid the feared situation or object next time. The difficulty is that these avoidance behaviors have to keep increasing and happening even sooner to provide the same relief. Pretty soon, a person finds himself spending time worrying about the possibility of encountering the feared situation and avoiding anything that might bring him into contact with it. With a phobia, the pattern of anxiety, avoidance, and worry about the possibility of contact tends to grow bigger and interferes more with life over time. Symptoms of phobia include shortness of breath or smothering sensation, Palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate, Chest pain or discomfort, Trembling or shaking, Feeling of choking, Numbness or tingling sensations, Hot or cold flashes, Sweating, Nausea or stomach distress, Feeling unsteady, dizzy, lightheaded, or faint, Feelings of unreality or of being detached from yourself , feelings of losing control, going crazy, or dying. In addition to the physical symptoms, people with phobias do everything they can to avoid their phobic stimulus. If you have a phobia, your avoidance of the feared situation may disrupt your life and be a source of tremendous stress and anxiety.

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