Understanding The Fear That Lies Within

I have thought long and hard about what fear is, what it does, and even why it happens. I've tried to read different articles about different hypothesis' of fear and what different scientists or doctors believe that fear is. Theres easy scientific definitions of fear, its an emotional response triggered by a perceived threat, we know that. The hard thing about determining what fear is by drawing a line between your "comfort zone" and what you are deathly afraid of. The fact that your body acts so harshly in response to fear is what I find interesting. That pump of adrenaline and sharpened senses, your muscles bulge and tighten and your heart rate races, everything you feel when you are in "fear mode" when your body lets you choose fight or flight. It's easy to define external fears in yourself, what are you afraid of? Spiders, snakes, heights? Look up the ongoing list of phobias (http://phobialist.com/) its incredible what some people can be afraid of. Your external fears I believe can be easily conquered, identifying why you're afraid of something can help with coping mechanisms of it. Internal fears is what is hard to identify with because they aren't exactly tangible. A fear of being rejected or having low self esteem are some internal fears. When you categorize what fear is compared to other emotions like sadness, joy, and anger, fear doesn't seem to fit. One event can spark anger into thousands of people, say for instance a democrat getting elected into office, people might fear it also but in reality they could just be angry because their party didn't win. As with joy and sadness, watching a movie could make the whole audience joyful or sad depending on the movie. Fear ,however, is harder to evoke onto many people at once, national threats against society like 9/11 and terrorist threats generally do the trick, but an emotion like joy is pretty common across the board, an instance joyful for one would most likely be joyful for another being. The emotion of fear is different, look at external fears. I'm not afraid of spiders, but anyone with arachnephobia would beg to differ, some people let fear run their whole lives, by trying to live distant from a place with a lot of indigenous spiders.

Fear is also one of the only emotions I have personally experienced that I can't control my body functions, your heart rate increases, blood pumping harder/faster to your muscles getting ready to fight or flight. Joy, sadness, anger you can fake or surpress. Fear is harder than that. Fear is by my standards the most complex emotion because you can evoke it yourself. Which is where I'll save this blog for later.

I'm not looking for a specific audience response, I don't think anyone is going to be particularly scared or afraid of what I'm going to talk about in class. I think it might just open their eyes.