Fear and its Impact on our Lives

Do you live in love or fear? According to many spiritual thinkers, love and fear are the only two core human emotions. All the others follow these two core emotions. Happiness, Gratitude, Joy, Co-operation, Forgiveness and the like follow Love while Anxiety, Anger, Aggression, Worry, Stress, Manipulation and the like follow fear.

How Fear Works?

Fear is an autonomic reaction to some stimulus that creates a fight or flight response in our brain. It is not something that we consciously create, we simply experience its effects physically as well as psychologically.

It is a core human emotion that sends a danger signal to our brain and plays a very important role in keeping us away from trouble.

If fear is created and experienced for logical reasons, it has utility but when the emotion is created and experienced repetitively for no logical reason at all, it becomes damaging.

When we create a negative picture about future events in our mind, we create fear which in turn causes worry and anxiety. Negative hormones associated with the emotion get produced in our brains as a result and affect our body as well as mind.

Worrying about the future and feeling anxious is only one of the ways we may be experiencing fear. There are several other things we may feel fearful about: losing a job, old age, a spouse’s infidelity, bankruptcy, disease . . . the list can go on and on.

Only you can stop the impact of fear, check your thoughts, and clear the clutter of useless fears from your mind to live with more peace and positivity.

The Underlying Cause of  Negativity

Nita was a vulnerable and beautiful young girl who got married into an influential and well-off family. As is usual in Indian families, her parents had guided and trained her to be respectful towards her in-laws and to try and please them to win their approval.

Her mother-in-law was not a very nice lady, however and insulted her in front of the other members of the family over small issues from time-to-time right from the beginning of her married life. Nita had a terrible emotional reaction from these humiliating experiences and felt extremely sad for herself.

The negative experiences created a lot of fear in her mind regarding her mother-in-law. Since she lived in the same house, Nita constantly felt fearful and anxious. Before doing anything at all, she thought a hundred times about how her mother-in-law would react to the action.

She wore what her mother-in-law wanted her to wear, woke up at the time she wanted her to wake up and cooked the dishes she liked but despite all this remained in a constant state of fear. After a few years of living in this manner, Nita had to rely on anti-depressants to get from one day to another since her mind was clouded with negativity constantly.

After several rounds of therapy with her psychologist, the root cause of her negative thoughts and emotions was discovered as fear.

Conclusion – Impact of Fear

While fear is an important emotion that is needed to ensure one’s safety from real threats and dangers, it is important to put it to use the way nature intended. Needlessly living with fear and its associated negative emotions, can have a significantly deleterious effect on your quality of life.

Only you and the people really close to you can know what emotion you carry inside your mind. If it is fear, you need to take charge and make some changes. Identify all your fears, their causes and validity.

Dismiss the useless ones (you’ll be surprised just how many of those there are) through some gentle self-counseling and you will feel lighter and more joyful almost instantly. This mental activity will turn out to be one of the best things you ever did for yourself!