“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
–Marie Curie
You are woken up by a strange noise at midnight. You listen closely to hear the sound coming to your room from the small opening of your bedroom door that isn’t closed all the way.
Scratching and crawling sounds.
You gingerly get out of your bed and grab the baseball bat next to the closet. “It’s coming from the basement”, you think to yourself. As you slowly step down the stairs, the sound gets louder and louder as you get closer and closer.
You start to hypothesize – It’s a burglar perhaps, trying to get into your house. Or is it something else? Something worse, something more eerie… you cannot help but imagine something paranormal lurking down in the dark basement.
All the thriller and horror movies that you have watched over the years haven’t made it any easier for you either. All those horrific scenes, just the thought of which is enough to scare the shit out of you, start to play back in your mind!!
You start to sweat. Your heart thumping as if it were to burst out of your chest if it beats any faster.
You get to the basement and open the door ever so slowly with your trembling hands.
The door creaks….
Much to your terror you see a pair of eyes staring at you from the dark.
Green glowing eyes enough to pierce through your soul.
Aghast, you hastily reach for the light switch…and BAMMMM!!!
.
.
.
It’s just a cat….Just a freaking cat, scratching and gnawing at your back door, trying to get out. Nothing to be scared of.
Pheww…You breathe a shy of relief.
Pretty anti climactic, I admit. But just think about this—a minute ago you were mortified by fear as the lyrics of the MJ’s song “Thriller” describes it perfectly :
“It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark
Under the moonlight you see a sight that almost stops your heart
You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it
You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes,
You’re paralyzed!!!”
And as soon as you realized that it was just a harmless kitty, your fear was gone in an instant. Why is that?
Types of Fear
All fear stem from the 5 basic fear classifications
- Extinction: Fear of death, Fear of heights (Acrophobia), Fear of drowning (Aquaphobia) etc.
- Mutilation: Fear of being in an accident, Phobias related to insects like bugs, spiders other creepy crawlies, Fear of snakes etc.
- Loss of Autonomy: Fear of having to compromise personal space, Claustrophobia, Agoraphobia, Demophobia etc.
- Dissociation/Segregation: Fear of being abandoned, unwanted, undervalued, trivialized or rejected.
- Ego Defense: Fear of failure (Fear of future), Fear of embarrassment, Fear of public speaking etc.
All the fears and anxieties related to those fears eventually boil down to the above 5 categories.
Physiology of Fear
The region of our brain known as the Amygdala is responsible for emotion of fear.
In the presence of a threatening stimulus, the Amygdala generates the secretion of hormones that influence fear.
The Hypothalamus triggers a “Fight or Flight” response which releases hormones into the body to put the person into a state of alertness, in which they are ready to move, run, freeze or fight until the eminent danger is averted.
Ultimately, what do we actually fear?
We all have fears, of one thing or the other – some may be deep rooted in our subconscious, some are the result of situational stimuli.
So the thing we need to think about is
What are we actually scared of when having to walk into a dark alley at night?
Why are we scared of something as common as a spider dangling from our ceiling?
Why do we fear such a mundane task of speaking in public?
Or what causes the fear of something as profound as death?
Who better to turn to for the answers of all these questions, than the wisest of all wizards ever known? Yes, I am talking about Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.
“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more….”
When I read this particular line in Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince, it struck me and I had one of those ”light bulb above my head” moments.
Even though I am talking about what a fictional character said in a book (well J. K. Rowling wrote the line for Prof. D so….ummm technically it’s her that said the above), but what Professor Dumbledore said to Harry is completely true.
Scrutiny of the Unknown
Let’s look at the “Cat in the Basement” scenario. It was “unknown” to you what was causing the sounds in your basement, hence you were scared.
You were scared of the peculiar sound. You started to manufacture your own fear in your mind. Fear of possibly a burglar or a serial killer or something paranormal perhaps.
But as soon as you turned on the lights and now that you have seen the cat, you “know”. You know it’s not a psychopath serial killer trying to break in. You know it’s not going to be Friday the 13th scenario for you. And you always knew that a small kitty is harmless.
You aren’t scared anymore once you know!!!
You don’t know what lurks in the darkness, but as soon as you turn on the lights you can see what’s happening around you. Now you know.
For the same reason, you aren’t afraid to walk into a cemetery alone for a game of dare during the day as opposed to midnight.
Same applies for the other things that we fear. If you fear a spider or a snake, it’s not the spider itself that you fear but that “uncertainty” of whether the spider or the snake will bite you or cause you harm.
People usually fear for their future. The uncertainty of it is what scares people. How will it pan out? Will it take a turn for the worse?
That is why fortune tellers are such a hit. The promise of being able to gaze into your future gives you that factor of certainty.
That is the reason why people read their horoscope. Even a minute sense of certainty helps minimize their fear.
And above all Death is the most unpredictable phenomenon that has always eluded mankind. You can’t know the why, when and how of it. And maybe that is why we fear death the most.
