FEAR FACTOR
None of us can claim that we were not afraid by some or other fear factor in the life.
Fear is said to be a negative emotion. Negative because it blocks or limits our cognitive functions, the ability to think rationally. You might have noted that the fear changes our behavior dramatically. We may be brave in hundred challenging situations but may get terrified by some other cause of fear.
I remember one incident when one of my friends, who was standing in the balcony of first floor in college hostel, saw a snake crawling on the ground floor and got so terrified that he closed the room doors and was virtually shaking even inside the room. Not to mention, otherwise he was a brave fellow in most of the situations.
We can understand fear to be originated from our mind like other emotions. Is it not quite similar to audio and visual alarms raised by machines or relays under abnormal operating conditions?
Thus, the brain gives us a perception of danger and can be seen as biochemical alarm. In fear there is stimulus and then there may be some consequence related to that, which may include risk to life, health, status, power, security or loss of any other valuable thing.
What can be the possible response to a danger. I think, either you confront it or you escape from it, i.e., avoid it and these two responses are nothing but fight or fright response. Have you heard of some other response, the extreme of fright response is a freeze or paralysis. Like, you saw a tiger and instead of running you were frozen in your place or someone got paralyzed with the news of some bad event like accident or death of near and dear one.
If fear is all that then what is phobia. , irrational response to a fear is known as Phobia, like you saw a rat and froze in your place, is Phobia. Fear is useful also for the existence of human beings up to a certain extent if the mind takes appropriate action in time to save the person from the danger.
Knowing ourselves include knowing our Phobia also and by knowing these phobia we can at least avoid them. So many attempts have been made to understand route cause of Phobia but the concluding remarks are yet to come.
Phobia or fear causes little good to you in most of the situations. Birds getting frightened by the sounds of bullets come down to ground as if they had got fired with some lethal weapon. Dogs running away frightened are caught more easily by dog catchers. In fact, in most of the cases, fear factor or phobia is used by predators as an advantage. You got terrified by one mistake and it is reasoned that you will correct yourself out of fear but I fact you make further mistakes out of that fright syndrome.
Hence, understanding and control of our fears should be one of the main target areas in order to improve our performance and build the confidence under various situations. Also that we should refrain from creating phobia work culture at work places as they do no good to the organizations, as proven by various studies.
I would like to ask you a simple question: “Have you taken some time to note down your main fear factors or would you at least like to think about doing so?”
What do you say?
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