Fear: 6 Facts

1. Fear is an emotion caused by the presence of or the perception of danger.

Fear is an emotion. That means a human can experience it without their consent. It also means that people place different value judgments on experiencing that emotion. 

Like other emotions, people experience fear at different levels and their bodies’ natural expressions of fear may vary. Also like other emotions, people will have different vocabulary to describe what they are feeling.

2. Fear, broadly speaking, includes a range of emotions like nervousness and terror.

Because fear includes such a wide range of emotions, people may not always identify what they are feeling as fear in the broad sense. 

They also may identify their emotion as something different than an outside observer would call it. For example, someone may say, “I feel stressed” and an observer would say, “You seem nervous.” 

This could be because of the differences in words accessible to a person, because humans don’t always understand themselves well, or another reason.

3. We don’t know why people feel fear for reasons that don’t make sense to others.

Psychology Today says that at least 60% of adults have an unreasonable fear. That’s a lot of people having their lives limited by something that doesn’t limit others! That’s a lot of people getting laughed at by the people around them for something they didn’t choose!

4. People can be afraid of being afraid.

If you know someone with this condition (phobophobia), be kind to them. Because fear is an emotion, people don’t choose to feel it.

5. Some people think fear is fun.

This has something to do with the sympathetic nervous system. Basically, you feel good when your body relaxes after being afraid. Some people like the contrast in feelings so much that they seek out fear in order to get the good feelings afterwards.

6. Chronic fear causes a lot of physical and mental problems.

Chronic, or long-lasting, fear can result in difficulty learning, changes to how the body functions, inability to feel love, despair, and other life-altering problems. 

Basically, being afraid for days on end is not good for humans. Considering that fear is a broad term for a range of emotions and knowing how many people are living in danger or uncertainty, this is sobering.