Remember when you were a kid and you had the ability to rollerblade down the steepest hill, without a care in the world? Or, when you would just jump off the highest diving board, feeling almost invincible to the fact that water would be propelled up your nose?
What is fear? Why is it so disabling? Why does it seem that the older we get, the more fearful we become of so many things?
Psychologically speaking, fear is a component of the amygdala, the part of our brain that ignites the fight or flight response, or the get me the f!@# outta this situation because something bad is going to happen part of our brain.
This fight or flight response has deep roots, going back to our initial years as humans. Here, this response enabled us to escape dangerous situations, such as attacks from other tribes, animals, and just to use our general overall intuition, much like an animal in the wild.
Nowadays, our dangerous situations can be slimmed down to very few, in relation to what our flight or flight response was initially developed for.
Further more, it seems that this response system has magnified in scope, transcending into unwarranted fears.
Such irrational fears include paranoia relating to money, being followed or watched, as well as diseases and disorders of fear including, anorexia, bulimia, obsessive compulsive disorder and so on.
It seems that as time has progressed, our fears have shifted from real life threatening situations to contrived “what-if’s” of the mind. There is no basis for most of our fears, except for the fact that we have, as a society, become more logical. Thoughts are very powerful.
So why do we become increasingly fearful as we age? Many reasons can be given to this. Group-think, brain development, conforming to norms, etc. It’s probably a little bit of all of the above. But it really comes down to the fact that we have the ability to think more than act on instinct. We have developed our brains over time.
And as we develop as human beings, different situations will become more or less threatening. That’s just evolution for you.
And sometimes, it’s just better if we don’t think.
Namaste.