EUFEAR: EMBRACING OUR FEARS’ POSITIVITY
By Andrew Colin Beck Senior BFA - Graphic Design
An Introduction
What is fear?
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he most destructive power, the most deadly poison, the most sure weapon, the greatest enemy is fear. Fear kills the most potentials faster, more effectively, and thoroughly than any disease. Many of us are ruled by it and bow in submission to it multiple times a day; creatively, socially, vocationally, religiously, and personally. As this black adder slithers in and out of our lives, biting and weakening its favorite spots, we grow ever weaker and weaker, exposing ourselves to its venom. There must be some escape from this terrible beast. You may be able to identify with this description if you have ever been paralyzed by fear. All of us, in some way, are its slave - and it is few and far between that I have come across a man or woman who did not feel its effects. I personally have been plagued by its effects my whole life. I have suffered from social anxiety in a potent way during my junior high and high school years. I have also felt a dense net of dread tangled around me, keeping me from breaking on to the next level of many things I have been on the cusp of. It is like a poison, and I can recognize its scent when it comes near me. Why be free of fear? Because it causes discomfort. It causes disease. Most frightening of all, it can steal your life and rob you of reaching your full potential. I see people around me - loved ones - backing down to its demands. Bowing to it. Is that enough of a reason? Studies show the mind/body connection is especially
active when it comes to the illness that fear can inflict. Fear and stress can literally shorten the days of your life. Needless to say, I felt the need to break free from fear’s grasp. I have always been somewhat of a rebel, and letting someone (or something) else tell me what I can or cannot do is not in my nature. I have worked many many hours at training myself to be free from fear. I went through clinical therapy for about a year where we worked on breaking through social anxiety - my fear of the disapproval of other people. This experience really helped me drop the shackles to a large extent, but I wasn’t fully free. I have spent hours and hours in prayer trying to figure out how to escape its grasp. I came a long way, but wasn’t all the way there. Always in my mind was the goal to squelch fear completely, and become a 100% fear-free person. As I begun this study, my goal was to research and finally find a way to become fully instructed on a way to help my fellow man rid himself of the plague of fear, and systematically report on that information in a way that could be spread to the masses and relieve the epidemic. And although I still believe completely that its negative effects can be overcome - the conclusion and solution I have arrived at is far from what I expected it to be. In my research and explorations, one peculiar thought crossed my mind. “What if I am driving at the wrong problem?”, I thought. “What if fear is not all bad? What if the goal isn’t to eliminate it?”
Then I thought in the absurd: “What if fear is good?” There was a dull ring and a long silence, and then I said to myself “I think I am onto something.” I realized that my target of eliminating fear was off - fear might just be an integral part of life that we have to come to terms with and then harness. And that is the major concept: Instead of trying to escape fear, I propose a new positive relationship called “EuFear” where we understand and embrace it for its potentially positive effects. In order to sufficiently lay the foundation of this argument, I must define, of course, what “Fear” I am talking about. I am referring to the following: Anxiety Feeling Overwhelmed Panic Discomfort Dread Excessive Worries And Stress On the other hand, I am not referring to the following, (although they are serious and important issues, and should be dealt with elsewhere): Phobias Nightmares & Night Terrors Clinical Insanity Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
So, although you may hold a strong fear of the color orange (and I can completely understand that), that is not the type of fear that I am focused on describing. I am focused on that feeling that holds you back from being the great person that you could be. I am referring to that universal type of fear that we all share, that whispers crushing doubts to our minds. To begin, I feel that we must trace fear back to its origin. We must understand it at it’s roots to figure out why it affects us in the ways that it does. Understanding this will open to our minds the first chapter in the story of EuFear.
01
THE ORIGINS OF FEAR
Where does fear, the oppressor and the destroyer, come from in the first place? There are certainly many origins, but most basically we can trace it to its birth: in our minds. We will see how fear begins as a biological process, and an anthropological system, that can be understood to help us change our habits. Biological Origins - Our three brains In simple terms, our brain can be separated into 3 parts. The Old-brain, the mid-brain, and the New-brain. These periods are referring to mile markers in the development of man’s mind. From understanding this triumvirate of developmental paradigms, we can start to tap into seeing why we currently experience fear in the way that we do.
The Old-brain, also referred to as our reptilian brain or archicortex, “began to evolve when the amphibians crawled onto land to give rise to the reptilian age. It is over 400 million years old and yet it remains structured into the anatomy of our human brain. It includes also the brains of the lower mammals, such as the horse and the cow.” 1 The Old-brain has one function alone – to survive. It is primitive. It is constantly scanning the horizon for threats and sending us messages about how to protect ourselves from them. Often the Old-brain’s messages consist of flight, fight, or freeze. Later we will see how this effects our current ways of reacting to the world. The Mid-brain, or mesocortex, represents the next level of cerebral development - emotions. Your Mid-brain will make you nervous when you’re reminded of a previous nerve-wracking experience. 3 This type of reasoning exists in high functioning yet subhuman mammals, such as primates and dolphins. Unlike the Old-brain, which reacts to an “in the moment”, reactionary fear, the Mid-brain creates along with it a precautionary fear, evident in projective worrying. The Mid-brain learns fear from experience. The New-brain, or neocortex, is the true trouble maker for the human race. It gives us the ability to worry about things that have happened in the past and are not currently happening, things that have not happened yet, and even things that may never happen. As Mark Twain put it, “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
In summary, the Old-brain helps with survival, the Midbrain is emotional memory, and the New-brain works with conscious processing. These three structures, which were built on each other in evolutionarily sequence, function together and all inform the way we process and react to the world around us. Each is still playing an active role in our contemporary psyche. We will now review a few practical scenarios to help us understand their functions in context. Scenario 1 You are walking an unfamiliar street and you are suddenly being chased by an angry frothing dog. The Old-brain kicks in and all you can think of is “RUN!” This is the survival mode tactic “flight” permeating your consciousness just as it would if you were a brontosaurus and you saw a T-Rex coming after you. You would also likely experience a physiological response, such as this: “The pupils of the eyes dilate. Hair stands on end. If the skin is broken, blood will readily coagulate to prevent severe loss. The chest expands to increase the volume of inhaled air. The bronchioles relax, allowing a greater volume of oxygen to enter the lungs. The heart dilates, increasing the blood output. Blood pressure rises. Muscles contract. Blood vessels near the surface of the skin contract, causing the skin to pale. Other blood vessels dilate, and the liver releases glucose, which provides fuel for the muscles. And the bladder empties stored urine in cases of extreme fear.” 2 That is the Old-brain in action, today.
Scenario 2 You are swinging on the monkey bars at the local park. Suddenly you are hit with a wave of anxiety as you remember the time you fell from the monkey bars when you were three years old. The fear is so crippling, that you leave the site immediately. There wasn’t any immediate danger per se, but the mid-brain drudged up the past that then affected your current assessment of the situation. Scenario 3 You have a job interview coming up tomorrow. You have never been to the place of employment, and you have had no face-to-face contact with the employer before. You start experiencing strong waves of anxiety as you anticipate how the interview will go. You worry about the types of questions will be asked. You worry about what to wear. You fear that you might not sound smart, or that you might not be right for the job. You fear many things that may or may not have any actual bearing on the unknown future situation. This is a classic example of the overactive new-brain causing you undue stress. The Neocortex vs. everyday life According to a great book about fear in the psychological field called “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers”, the thing that causes so many illnesses and stress disorders for humans, is actually the fact that we are so smart. If a zebra is grazing on prairie grass when he experiences a threat (for example when he is chased by a lion) his brain, mainly functioning on the archicortex level, will kick into
“flight or fight” fear response and he will run. As soon as he evades the predator, and the threat is no longer readily present, he will immediately go back to grazing. This happens because he does not have the cerebral ability to worry about that threat when it’s not immediately present. Humans (and a few other high-level thinking beings), on the other hand, are so smart that we have the ability to worry about, and analyze, and create fear and distress in our own minds, whether or not it actually exists or affects us. This is something we do quite often.
Anthropological Origin - Social Fear Another place that fear comes from is found in the evolutionary development of human society. I have found that a vast majority of our contemporary fears come from a fear of rejection. Rejection, coming from other people. This fear is so prevalent and strong that disorders like Social Anxiety cripple many people on a daily basis. So where did these fears come from? A look back into the way society formed may help us answer this question. Anthropologists and historians speculate that hunter-gatherer families 20,000 years ago belonged to larger groups called tribes. Tribes are clusters of families bound together by common taboos and beliefs for social advantage 5. Man’s survival balanced on his ability to interact with and fit into a group. If he did not, for whatever reason, it was a real possibility that he might be cast out.
This could cause him to starve, or have a lack of protection and be subject to fending for himself. Expulsion could very likely lead to his death. So now, in our current age, it makes sense for us to equate being unpopular or not liked by the group as equitable with a threat to our lives. Many such connections exist and still inform the way we act and the things we fear in life. Another example might be the human fear of failure. In this day and age, failing at something, like a contest or a job interview often represents little to no threat to our immediate survival. We experience feelings of anxiety and dread, and if we search deeper we might not even be sure why. Perhaps we feel those feelings because of a vestigial belief, stemming from our archaic ancestors. If you were an ancient hunter gatherer and you “failed� to get your work done in a day, this could represent the starvation of your family, or the death of someone you failed to protect. These types of archaic fears still inform the way our belief system works in regards to us and our relationship to the modern sociality that exists around us in everyday life.
02
OUR CONTEMPORARY RELATIONSHIP WITH FEAR
What does our current relationship to fear look like? How much does it affect us? Is it really a problem? We need to do a contemporary field analysis of the outreach of fear to see how we stand in relationship to it. Currently, if we analyze the situation, we can see that fear runs rampant. It often permeates everything we do. Not only does it cause us momentary discomfort, it also can stop us from reaching our personal potential, and can even cause other related bio-physical ailments and diseases. “Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson The human social realm is overwhelmed with fear and dread. Social anxiety is at an all-time high. This and other Information regarding the United States of America, from the AADA shows the following: 6
Anxiety disorders affect one in eight children. General Anxiety Disorder (GDA) affects 6.8 million adults, or 3.1% of the U.S. population. Panic Disorder - 6 million, 2.7% Social Anxiety Disorder - 15 million, 6.8% Many people with an anxiety disorder also have a co-occurring disorder or physical illness, which can make their symptoms worse and recovery more difficult.
A study at Princeton reveals the following: “Anxiety disorders, the most common mental illnesses in America, account for approximately one third of the nation’s direct and indirect mental health costs each year.” 7 Clearly we are at fear’s mercy. Fear is a crippling agent. When we are filled with too much of it, the instinct for humans is to freeze up and just do nothing. When we feel that things are too risky, we do nothing. Let’s look at a few fictitious examples: Jeremy is a talented engineering student. He has recently become aware of an internship opportunity with a prominent engineering firm in Japan. An internship with this particular firm would totally jump start his young career, give him invaluable experience in the field, and be a huge gold star on his resume. Jeremy likes this firm and is interested in the opportunity. Going online, Jeremy starts to search into the requirements for application. He thinks about all the other applicants he would be up against. He becomes overwhelmed with the amount of paperwork he would have to do. He starts to realize how much it would cost to get himself to Japan. He starts worrying about the fact that his Japanese isn’t what it used to be. In his mind, he envisions a new and unfamiliar place, a cold and scary working environment, and a 14 hour plane ride in a confined space (possibly having to talk to some stranger the whole way). In defeat Jeremy closes his laptop. Fear wins.
If we could fast-forward in Jeremy’s life, in an alternate universe where Jeremy had pushed through the fear and applied and was accepted to the internship, we would see that he got a job right out of college that payed twice as much as his classmates. We would see that he eventually returned to Japan, drawing upon the contacts he had made there and started a successful business. We would see that his life would have been totally different without the crippling interference of fear. And potentially this capitulation represents a pattern in Jeremy’s life that will surface again and again. This is a fabricated tale, but certainly many such stories exist all over our world. Perhaps you have experienced something similar. Perhaps Jessica ends up living an unfulfilled and celibate life because she was too afraid to talk to boys from junior high through college. Maybe Austin is unable to finish his high school degree because he is too afraid of the disapproval his classmates and stays home. Maybe Alex always wanted to be a photographer, but was too afraid of the competition and stress it would take to keep up a great portfolio, so she folded and became a secretary at a job she hated for 20 years. These are all stories of defeat. In these stories, a person comes up to a battle with fear and gives in to its oppressive weight. Lest it seems that I am hastily judging these situations and drawing these anecdotes from out of the air, I would like to share my story:
Personal Connection to Fear
My Story
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y story starts in junior high; I was deeply affected by social anxiety. I had a severely acute sense of what others thought of me, and of where I fit into the social pecking order. At times, walking into a classroom was nearly impossible for me, knowing the eyes that were watching me just waiting for me to make a mistake. The fear I felt was so real, that I was at times unable to speak to certain people, and most certainly barred from being the person I wanted to be. I felt that there was a deep layer of liquid that I was drowning in, and that my head was just below surface and that I would not be able to come up for air. I felt smothered. I can recall going on many first dates with girls, the first time we had really spent any time together, and completely freezing up. I was unable to act normal. I was unable to speak much, and my personality that had in the beginning attracted them virtually disappeared under a wave of anxiety. I remember feeling terrible because the entire date would always be ruined by my withdrawal – and it definitely destroyed possibility for future dates. What was going on in my head? A feedback loop of self-fulfilling doom. I feared I would act weird, and in fearing that, I did. I feared girls wouldn’t like me, so I tried to act like someone who wasn’t me, and they usually didn’t like that person (nor did I). I feared I wasn’t normal - and my fixation on that point made it come true. I felt fear was a dense fog choking me out of my natural self. Inside I knew I was fun, cool and easy to get along with, but when the fear came, it reduced me to a pile of nerves.
After a while, these feelings started to permeate all of my relationships. Those with strangers, friends, and even family. I felt that I was being trapped and that fear would eventually take me. At the end of my junior year of high school, I had my mom take me to see a counselor because I was sick of feeling paralyzed and I wanted to make any effort I could to escape the fear. I met with a very nice man for about a year who helped me understand what was happening in my brain. Mostly he taught me ways of “re-framing� my thinking and helping me dispel the powerful worries about my self-worth. A few years later I met with a different counselor for about six months. He started me on a medication called Citalopram that helps to regulate the cyclothymic routing in my brain and helps me not to have anxiety. With all of that help and years of praying and actively working on the problem, my fear issues are finally under control. My story only leads me to believe that thousands of such cases exist in the world. This personal connection is what drove me in the first place to study and try to find a remedy for fear. I feel that many of us are living below our potential because of the demands of fear on our minds. I have compassion on my brothers and sisters in the human race who experience this crippling effect. I desire to understand how to fully escape fear, and I desire to help mankind do so as well.
03
WHAT IF FEAR WAS GOOD? EuFear: AN INTRODUCTION
As I began my research for this project, my outright goal was to find a solution to the epidemic of fear and totally eradicate it. I realized that this was quite an undertaking, but I thought that if I could puncture a hole in it, possibly my ideas could lead to its eventual demise. Momentarily I pictured a world where everyone was free. I pictured a world where no one was fettered down with paralyzing doubts. I set out to research and make a difference. Something strange happened while I was brainstorming about the demise of fear. As I was thinking about and analyzing the research I had been doing, I decided to do a thought experiment. Sometimes, in order to understand things more clearly, I like to ask my self a question that is the antithesis of what I would normally ask. Since I believed in fear as the ultimate root of bad, and something only to be destroyed, I asked myself, “What if fear was good?� Opening the antithesis of my issue to my own mind changed everything. Twisting my paradigm around filled my mind with new questions and blew my topic up into a million swirling pieces. What if fear was good? What if fear had positive attributes? What if fear wasn’t all bad? What if we needed fear? I tried to think of fear as if it were a precious commodity, to see what would happen if it was lost. I thought of a term I had learned in my schooling called Eustress:
Eustress, a model for EuFear Eustress is a term coined by endocrinologist Hans Selye. The word Eustress consists of two parts. The prefix eu- derives from the Greek word meaning either “well” or “good.” When attached to the word stress, it literally means “good stress”. 6 I thought about how I could borrow this concept to change our minds about the function of fear in our experience. What if we believed in a concept called EuFear, where fear filled a necessary and functional space in our lives, where fear helped us to be happy, and was a positive part of how we saw things? The sheer counterintuitiveness of this theory struck me and caused me to believe that a good relationship with fear was a real possibility, different and more powerful than the idea of the absence of fear. Eustress was originally explored in a stress model by Richard Lazarus. “It is the positive cognitive response to stress that is healthy, or gives one a feeling of fulfillment or other positive feelings.” 6 As I researched Eustress, I found quite a bit of crossover to inform us about our new philosophy of EuFear. Essentially the idea is that fear has a rightful, helpful, positive place in our lives. The problem is that more often than not, fear spills over into other areas of our psyche where it doesn’t belong. I will discuss both of these concepts to help us see EuFear.
Where fear belongs Our brain has crafted to keep us alive and move us toward a successful and fulfilling life. At a basic level, half of the fear responses that exist in our brain are there to keep us safe. If we removed them, we would somewhat resemble someone who is drunk. We would have no caution - we would jump off of buildings trying to fly, and stick our heads in stoves, and dance through burning buildings. To be straight forward, our basic survival instincts are fully connected to our fears of morbidity and mortality, and if removed, would certainly alter our lives for the worse. Interestingly enough, there is a psychological problem called Williams Syndrome where the bearer has no social fear and is “Pathologically trusting”. “This means that it is essentially biologically impossible for [them] to distrust.” 7 This fascinating problem causes children having it to call on their own kidnappings, and wander off and claim strangers as their caretakers. Although extreme, this syndrome gives us a little window into the effects of the entire removal of one fear. And we can see the negative effects. An article on NPR about this psychological problem makes an interesting point, in describing a little girl named Isabelle who has Williams Syndrome: “... though [She] trusts the world completely, the world is not a place worthy of complete trust.” 7 The world we live in has
been built to function with and around the reticence we have to its dangers. If we removed the basic instincts we have to keep ourselves safe, none of us would survive long enough to accomplish anything. Using the above story as a jumping off point, we can begin to see how fear plays an essential role in our lives, and isn’t just a mosquito to be waved out of the way of our ambitions. We begin to see how it helps us get to them. Accepting this thought, we can begin to open our minds to the idea that our primitive, reptilian fears could be our friend, our tool that we use to live an effective and fulfilling life.
Fear as a Tool Beyond these primary fears we begin to move on to the idea that fears originating in the mesocortex could in fact be good. We need to fear emotionally uncomfortable memories from the past in order to learn. If we didn’t fear failing, or mistakes, what would drive us to try again and eventually succeed? What would inspire us to try something different than what we did last time? Fear has a function. It is like an organ, like the heart. It has a mechanical necessity and should be respected. Also like an organ in the body, if interrupted or tampered with, it can fail to perform its function and cause trouble for the connected processes.
Fear out of control Cell growth is a necessary part of biological process. Cell growth helps us grow larger during development, and creates essential new skin and other tissues throughout the entire process of our lives. Cell growth works through the natural process of cell division. Fear and cell division both serve natural processes for our wellbeing, and when either get out of control they can be destructive and fatal. “Unregulated cell growth” is called cancer. “In 2007, cancer caused about 13% of all human deaths.” 8 Rampancy is another characteristic that cancer shares with fear when it is out of control. According to our idea of EuFear, the crippling, destructive, paralyzing effects that we see stemming from fear come only from fear being allowed to overrun its boundaries. The idea behind EuFear is that fear is a natural part of life and has a designated function space in our psyche; fear only becomes damaging when it, like cancer, spreads too far and affects us in unnatural ways. An incomplete list of these unnatural fear takeovers are as follows, and is characterized by fear infringing on our ability to live a happy and fulfilling life: Social Anxiety Generalized Anxiety Disorder Panic Disorder Paralyzing thoughts about the future
In order to keep fear from overrunning its territory and functioning as a team player in our minds, we need to learn strategies of activating its positive attributes. One of the most important revelations afforded by my research was the idea of transforming, or reframing fear as motivation.
Reframing fear as Motivation Motivation is fear’s complement. When we run up against a fear, we will be filled with power if we can turn that fear into a motivation. Change the phrase, “I am afraid that if I go to this party, I will feel uncomfortable the entire time cause I don’t know anyone” into, “at this party, I am going to make three new friends, so that I feel more comfortable.”
The Continuum Like most healthy relationships in our lives, our relationship with fear needs to exist in balance. I love food. Food is necessary for my survival and makes me happy to eat. The wrong amount, or type of food can cause me to be sick momentarily, or cause me to have long term health issues. Lets take an example from the continuum of fear: social fear. Feeling a little nervous in a new social situation is completely normal, especially when meeting someone new. Let’s take this situation and study it in relationship to the fear continuum. On one end of the spectrum is Full Fear, and on the other is No Fear. Let’s examine the situation from both ends of the spectrum and then try to find the healthy balance between 0 and 10.
No Fear
0
EuFear Functional Fear
4
Full Fear
10
Finding the Balance Experiencing No Fear (0), when you meet a new person you might treat them with nonchalance and even disregard. It is possible that you could offend that person, and even estrange them in that you were not alert enough to be sensitive to their temperament and personality. This could cause you no discomfort, but potentially cause you to fail in creating a successful connection with that person. This is not ideal. (Remember fear as motivation). Experiencing Full Fear (10), on the other end of the continuum, one could feel so nervous meeting someone new that they are unable to speak. They might end up acting really weird and uncomfortable. They might be so paralyzed by their need for approval, and fear of making a mistake that they would sabotage the entire experience - with the same undesirable outcome as before: failure to create a successful connection with that person. One must find the healthy balance on the fear continuum. Clearly, neither extreme is the right amount of fear to have to cause the situation to go successfully. Let’s try to envision a middle ground where EuFear plays its natural role, but doesn’t overpower the experience: Every experience will be relative. Possibly some experiences will call for more EuFear than others. But lets imagine that for the experience of meeting someone new, the perfect level of fear is a 4. Enough fear that we
are concerned about how we treat that person and how sensitive we are to the nuances of their body language and vocal intonations so that we can read them correctly and understand how to communicate effectively with them. But not enough fear to cause us to act unnatural or be overly self conscious. Enough fear that motivates us to behave well and be concerned about the interaction, but not enough to stifle our personality or cause us to freeze up. Can you see how the important thing here is the balance? Can we begin to believe that fear is an integral part of how we experience the world and that it is truly a tool if we understand how to use it? So how can we get to this healthy blended middle ground?
04
MOVING FORWARD WITH A NEW PARADIGM
We shall now introduce a practical model for activating EuFear and targeting a balanced approach to any situation. If we feel it is valuable to cultivate the internal relationship of EuFear, when we feel afraid we should take these steps: Recognition Analysis Decision Release
Recognition and Analysis When we are presented with a situation where we feel afraid, we need to take a moment to recognize it and analyze it. It may be difficult to do so, as the present is buzzing all around us in a never-ending stream. But if we will try, we can build the ability to pause time and think about what is happening to us. When we have successfully identified that we are in a situation causing us fear, we should consciously pull apart the situation and do our best to rank it on the fear continuum. Ask, “Where am I experiencing this on the scale from 0 to 10. No Fear? Full Fear? In between?” Do your best to envision the continuum, even write it down on paper, if possible. Try to ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way? What is the root of my fear? Am I experiencing fear from my old, mid, or New-brain?” And even “Should I be experiencing fear at all? Am I benefiting from
feeling fear in this situation?� When you have answers to these questions (and they will most likely become easier to answer over time) you will have the ability to move on to the next step.
Decision Once you determined the source of your fear, and where it is currently sitting on the continuum, you will have the ability to decide what you want to do about it. If you feel that the fear is totally healthy and comfortable and feels like EuFear, than great - you can dismiss the fear and move on. If you feel that the fear is more unhealthy and causing you discomfort, try this: Envision the fear continuum again, and try to decide where you think a more healthy amount of fear would sit in your particular situation (as opposed to what you are currently feeling). You now have the power and ability to decide to reframe that fear into motivation, or EuFear, by deciding what to do with it. Fear is a tool. Fear is nothing more than an alert, telling you that something needs your attention. Once you mentally address whatever the problem is, it should be easy for you to use those feelings to find a solution. If your mind alerts you that you have a test coming up at school that you feel unprepared for, you can easily change that fear into motivation to begin studying. If you feel fear about an upcoming party, or social situation, it can become easy for you to reframe the situation in your
mind and decide that you are more interested in having a good time and meeting three new people than you are in standing in the corner for the duration of the night.
Release Once you have recognized your fear, analyzed it, made a decision about what to do with it, and you feel that your fear has moved into the healthy realm of EuFear, you can give yourself permission to let go and stop being afraid. Now that you have conquered fear, and put it in its functional place - it no longer needs to bother you. Try this model multiple times, and give it time to sink in.
Conclusion I would hope that this study only serves as the beginning of a larger effort to help all of us construct a proactive healthy relationship with the innate sense of EuFear we all share. Clearly this paper cannot serve as a full compendium on the subject, and cannot solve all problems related to the subject. I do believe that it can serve as the door to opening a conversation that can help us have happier and more fulfilling lives. I hope to do more research, studies and experiments to turn my philosophy of EuFear into a tool that can help people. I hope that others join the cause and help me to dive deeper into this shared human problem.
BIBLIO GRAPHY 1 One Old-brain http://www.cosmic-mindreach.com/Three-Brains.html 2 How the Body Works : Physical Responses to Emotion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS_qMHPI0XM 3 Old-brain, Mid-brain, New-brain http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/ nervousness/fear-of-public-speaking-causes/ 5 Wiki Books, Ancient Human History http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ancient_History/Human_ Evolution/Neolithic_Age 6 Anxiety and Depression Association of America http://www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/ facts-statistics 7 A life without Fear http://www.npr.org/people/90889243/alix-spiegel 8 Cancer: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer