Fear is an inherently unpleasant experience that can range from mild to paralyzing. constant worry, and daily insecurity, can quietly but seriously harm your physical and mental health over time.

Fear is also partly imagined, so it can arise in the absence of something scary or intimidating. A lack of fear may be a sign of serious brain damage.

Fear is part instinct, part learned, or taught to us. Some fears are instinctive, while other fears are taught: Cultural norms will often dictate whether something should be feared or not.

Being fearless doesn’t mean eliminating fear. It means knowing how to leverage fear.

Actions motivated by fear fall into four types—freeze, fight, flight, or fright.

What happens in the body when facing fear?

According to Medical News Today

People often refer to the physiological changes that occur when a person experiences fear as the fight-or-flight response. Overall, as the name suggests, the changes prepare the animal to either fight or run.

You will also find that your Breathing rate increases, your heart rate follows suit, peripheral blood vessels in the skin, for instance, will constrict, the central blood vessels around vital organs dilate to flood them with oxygen and nutrients, and muscles are pumped with blood, ready to react.

Triggering the response

The fight-or-flight response begins in the amygdala, which is an almond-shaped bundle of neurons that forms part of the limbic system. It plays an important role in the processing of emotions, including fear.

The amygdala signals the hypothalamus, which then activates the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland is where the nervous system meets the endocrine, or hormone, system.

The pituitary gland then secretes the hormone (ACTH) into the blood.

At this time, the sympathetic nervous system — a division of the nervous system responsible for the fight-or-flight response — gives the adrenal gland a nudge, encouraging it to squirt a dose of adrenaline and others into the bloodstream.

The body also releases cortisol in response to ACTH, which brings about a rise in blood pressure, blood sugar, and white blood cells. Circulating cortisol turns fatty acids into energy, ready for the muscles to use, should the need arise.

Hormones then prepare muscles for violent action.

These hormones can also:

boost activity in the heart and lungs

reduce activity in the stomach and intestines, which explains the feeling of “butterflies” in the stomach.

They can also inhibit the production of tears and saliva, explaining the dry mouth that comes with a response.

They will also dilate the pupils, produce tunnel vision along reduce hearing capacity.

Both the hippocampus — a brain region that is heavily involved in memory — and the prefrontal cortex, which aids high-level decision-making, also help control the fear response.

They help us understand whether our fear response is real and justified or whether we might have overreacted somewhat.

If the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex decide that the fear response is exaggerated, they can dial it back and dampen the amygdala’s activity. This partly explains why people enjoy watching scary movies; their sensible “thinking brain” can overpower the primal parts of the brain’s automated fear response.

So, we get to experience the rush of fear before our more reasonable brain centers dampen it down.

The fear response has kept us alive. It is primal, and we should respect it. At the same time, it can be unpleasant and interfere with people’s day-to-day functioning. However, paradoxically, fear is also the source of a highly enjoyable adrenaline rush.

The bottom line is that fear has a function that has served us well over the course of history, however, we live in much safer times and we have learned to be comfortable in a less confrontational world. Now as we see the rise in conflict closer to us than we have seen in many years we are seeing more and more problems arising from fear associated with mental health issues. Now more than ever we must understand how our brains make us act under stressful or fearful situations.

Remember, Fear is the destroyer of logic!