Fear What is the limit between normal and the pathological?

Fear is my most faithful partner, he has never cheated me to leave with another. Woody Allen. American director, director and writer.

In this article we offer you a tour of the neurobiology of fear. And the limits between the natural behaviors of fear and pathological ones are described, as well as some therapeutic alternatives in its treatment.

• Alberto, spends days and nights thinking that he wants to do one and a thousand things in his life, but he almost always stops a thought that paralyzes him; The fear of dying (necrophobia).
• Toño, is apparently a sociable person, but in most cases he tries to avoid contact with people. He has friends who consider him as weird, but in the most internal of his being, he has been diagnosed since adolescence with a condition called: social phobia.
• Bty, she is a very attractive woman in every way, but no one explains how she supports her partner who treats her very badly. She thinks it is better to pay that price to not be alone, she is afraid of being left alone (autophobia).
• Margarita, she will present her degree exam, she considers that she is the most important of her life. Despite feeling fear, try to relax with music, meditation exercises and creative visualization. His body is tense, but in his internal dialogue he knows that he can achieve his desired goal (Just experience some anxiety).

What do all these characters have in common? They live the emotion of fear in different degrees. Sometimes we can control it, but unfortunately in others the fear itself governs their lives and unfortunately it can become disabling.

Content

• What is fear
  • Defining fear
• The semantic and polysemic linguistic structure of emotions
• Our fears or fears
• The boundary between health and disease
• Reactions to fear
• Fear in our brain
  • Theoretical approaches
• Treatments
  • Psychological
  • Doctors
  • Bibliography

What is fear

Fear is one of the few emotions that we share with animals on our evolutionary scale. All emotions have an adaptation function. Some disadvantages of feeling fear are: reprimands our playful part, can paralyze us, brake our creativity, our potential abilities and also make us unhappy. Emotions are there to be felt, but we don't necessarily know how to control them. If we did not feel emotions we would be like automatons, zombies or robots.

Fear and fear, serve as protection and alarm signal (VASS, 2019, p. 5).

Fear, is one of our most primitive and possibly the strongest emotions because our survival is involved, lives in the depths of our DNA. In an emergency situation it keeps us safe, but also if we are prey to fear can significantly alter our lives. It helps us to make decisions and also in extreme situations, it makes us clumsy or aggressive.

Emotions are so important in our lives that they build personality traits. When we think of the people we know we surely say "he is a very" person ... cheerful, affectionate, friendly, anxious, sad, rabid, fearful, etc. That is to say, We assign as personality trait the emotion that manifests more frequently. A tendency to respond with anger, without relation to the present situation, is a personality feature. This means that we are building our personality with the emotions that we externalize. And many times we are not aware of it (Bisquerra, 2017, p. 43).

Defining fear

Fear is part of our basic emotions. The others are: disgust, surprise, joy, anger and sadness. And, all of them have a special adaptive function.

Fear is a reaction of the primitive body response fight or run away (Boyes, 2007, p. twenty-one).

Fear is an emotion that It is experienced before a real and imminent danger that is lived as overwhelming and that puts health and life at risk (Bisquerra & Laymuns, 2018, p. 108).

Is an intense emotion activated For the detection of an imminent threat, it involves an immediate alarm reaction that mobilizes the organism by generating a set of physiological changes (APA, 2010, p. 316).

As fear can be observed, it can be experienced in the face of an imminent, or simply imagined danger, is a primitive response to safeguarding us with some damage, has an intensity that can be mild or acute, is also characterized by being a unique or chronic experience, active psychosocial mechanisms, as well as physiological that alter the lives of those who suffer from it. If emotions cannot be managed and we leave them free, they become a source of conflict (mental disorders or toxic relationships with ourselves or with other people), if we keep them they somatize and also bring us psychosomatic problems.

The semantic and polysemic linguistic structure of emotions

From Daniel Goleman's classic book (1995) on emotional intelligence, it was already proposed that emotions formed families, very possibly described by the degree of semantic and physiological intensity in which they presented themselves, fear was classified as fear and There they derived degrees of severity in the experimentation of emotion:

1. Nervousness, concern, restlessness, apprehension, restlessness and caution.
2. Anxiety, dismay, uncertainty and fear.
3. Tapel, terror, phobia and panic at a psychopathological and disabled level (The classification is mine).

Bisquerra & Palau (2017), made an interesting classification more recently to describe emotions. Detected of the six basic emotions, more than 300. Especially in relation to fear, they found more than 18 meanings in their Spanish version, which are described below (Again the classification in relation to its intensity, from least to greatest, is mine):

1. Aguided, alert, bug, indecision, inhibition, medication, fear, denial, submission, scare, fear, hesitant.
2. Disorientation, alarm, intimidated, shit, coercion, cowardice, fright, overwhelming.
3. Phobia, attacked, in terror, horror, panic, dread, terror.

Linguistic, semantic and polysemic learning is that the different variants in how we express our fear, differ in their linguistic concept, but denote the intensity with which one lives. This in the end will translate into the severity of how our brain will capture the emotion of fear and act accordingly. It brings also cultural connotations, in Mexico the fear is the Zacatón or the Marica, for example.

Our fears or fears

Fear is part of some of our anxiety disorders and is an essential component in our phobias. The disorders caused by fear are the reason for being of the most common psychic diseases.

The phobias are irrational and continuous fears of an object (tripophobia, fear of black holes), an animal (music, fear of rats), an activity or a situation (agoraphobia, fear of open spaces) in particular (Halguin & Krauss, 2004. p. 597). For its part, the Anxiety states (as the obsessive compulsive disorder) cause uncontrollable or panic reactions that take over thought In many areas. The affected person has sometimes been in a position to describe what distress him, but he cannot explain the causes (Vass, 2019, p. 7).

How human beings fear various situations consciously or unconsciously and in many cases govern our lives: The fear of getting sick (hypochondria), to the death (necrophobia), To the loss of a loved one (tanatophobia), At the heights (acrophobia), to fear, fire (arsonphobia), to sleep (somnifobia), loneliness or to be alone (autophobia), to social interaction with people (social phobia), to fall in love (philophobia), to failure (atiquifobia), fear of ugly people or ugliness (cacophobia), fear of open spaces and crowds (agoraphobia), fear of black holes (tripophobia), to the future (chronophobia), to change, to criticism, not to meet our goals, at the heights to animals (for example; animals in general-Zoophobia, insects-Entomophobia, rats or mice-musophobia or snakes), to pain (somephobia), fear of life, in short the list is almost inexhaustible.

The boundary between health and disease

However, how far is the border between "normal" fear and "pathological fear". It is important to highlight that each of these has multiple etiologies, but there are areas of the brain specialized in detecting fear and in most cases they can be treated, to live a fuller life.

It is natural that we all have a certain dose of fear of facing ourselves or some specific situation (coexistence with others or in any environmental situation, for example), you can even have a positively speaking positive component. We feel good when we face an event that causes us fear, which we thought were not being able to do it. Another positive aspect is that facing fear prevents us from more painful subsequent situations, this is the case when people go to the doctor, if it detects any disease, it can be treated and healed in time.

Emotions are there to be felt and adapt To various social circumstances, then then it is "normal to feel fear" in the face of some circumstances whether they are imagined or face -to -face. However, if in spite of this we can control our fears, we can move forward with our life. In counterpart, The emotion of fear becomes a problem when fear controls or dominates us (We become toxic people), when fear is totally unfounded, when by association it is installed in our brain or when it remains constant in our lives and gets limited or disable phobias).

Reactions to fear

• Physiological:
  • Muscle rigidity, general tremor of the body, the skin becomes pale, it presents pionrection, it is likely to sweat cold. Rapid heartbeat, redirection of the blood fujo of the periphery towards the viscera and general mobilization of the organism to perform an action: fight, flee or remain petrified of fear.
  • “Fear is also demonstrated in the face through the increase in the flicker. The pupils dilate. The mouth is tense and stretches back. The lips tremble and it may be that the teeth casteñeen. Sometimes the action of clarifying the throat is performed and the rhythm of breathing can increase while adrenaline occurs in the body ”(Boyes, 2007, p. twenty-one). Rapid heartbeat, blood flow redirection.
• Psychological: Attention is fixed in nearby threats and our memoirs evaluate whether we have already gone through a similar situation before. We can enter into a situation of discomfort, anxiety until they are panicked.
• Behavioral: Fight, run away or look still.
• Social: If we can avoid fear, we are very likely to stay at home so as not to face any stimulus that potentially endangers our identity and we get safe. However, the more we avoid fear, this is more strengthened.

Fear in our brain

Previously it was thought that the cerebral tonsil was mainly activated. It is like a brain inside the brain, the size of an almond and one in each cerebral hemisphere.

However, in the neurobiology of fear, Rüdiger Vass (2019) describes the following route where many more brain structures intervene, in summary:

• Before a stimulus that produces fear, whether internal or external, the tonsil receives information from the thalamus.
  • In the amygdala the normal and pathological fear is recorded. Produces fear or aggression. If damage produces submission or affective flattening. Detects good and bad stimuli. It is the most important region in the memory of fear. It is activated in the face of stimuli that cause fear and anxiety disorders.
  • The thalamus is an oval structure that transmits information from our organs of the senses (view, touch, taste, smell, hearing) to the cerebral cortex (it is the largest part evolutionarily). Communication between the cortex and the thalamus is reciprocal and bidirectional. It has motor sensitive functions, these can be mechanical, thermal and painful stimuli. It is involved at the motor level in voluntary and involuntary movements and includes the march. Involve attention in the sleep-vigilia cycle. In language is its motors and syntactic alterations. It is divided into 4 zones: 1) above, which participates in memory and emotions, 2) medial, is divided into three areas that involve the memory, 3) ventral, is responsible for motor control and 4) later, it is divided In turn in three parts.
    • 1) Medial geniculate, it is a component of the auditory system.
    • 2) lateral geniculate, receive information from the retina and send it to the visual cortex.
    • 3) Pulvinar geniculate, projects more developed in humans in humans.
  • The amygdala sends signals to the cerebral cortex and both are feedback.
  • The central nucleus of the tonsil, receives information from the bark, the hippocampus and the thalamus.
  • The hypothalamus increases blood pressure and regulates the release of stress hormones; The brain trunk and the mesencephal.
    • The hypothalamus governs the hormonal system and is a bridge with neurons. Before a threat situation, among other cortisol hormones, stress hormone and prepares the organism to the fight.
    • The hippocampus, is the orchestra director of our different memoirs.
  • The lateral and lower nuclei receive signals from the thalamus and direct the different forms of behavior, such as the change of sense in the flight.

The above tells us that there is no exclusive region where fear occurs and becomes aware. Rather, it comes from different areas at the brain level and feedback between them.

Theoretical approaches

• From the point of view of psychoanalysis fears correspond to unconscious conflicts.
• For behaviorists fears originate from external factors (stimuli) that are associated with such behavior (response).
• For cognitive psychologists, they are due to a cognitive distortion that has been learned and it is necessary to unlearn it.

Treatments

There are different therapies, each of them obeys various strategies to work with fear, there is no one that is the most effective, they are simply treatment methods.

Psychological

• Emotional control with relaxation and meditation techniques. The objectives of meditation overlap with many of those of clinical psychology, psychiatry, preventive medicine and education. As more and more data indicate, meditation can be an effective treatment for depression, fear and chronic pain and also helps to cultivate a feeling of well -being (Ricard, Lutz & Davidson, 2014).
• Thoughts create reality in good and bad. Negative expectations generate harmful effects and bad results (NocEbo effect), while positive expectations generate pleasant effects (placebo effect). Irving Kirsch (2012), says: "The way we feel depends largely on how we anticipate that we will feel".
• Hypnosis, the use of low frequency pulsating electromagnetic field that balances the electrical loads of the body at the cellular level, the technique of successive approaches and systematic desensitization and the overexposure to the stimulus that causes fear that causes fear balances the stimulus. Music therapy with binural music.

Doctors

• A combined therapy of antidepressants and anxiolytics is used.

Phrases to overcome fear

Bibliography

• APA (2010) Concise Dictionary of Psychology, Mexico, Editorial The Modern Manual.
• Bisquerra r. (2017) Universe of Emotions, Spain, Editorial Palauita Communication.
• Bisquerra r. & Laymuns G. (2018) Dictionary of emotions and emotional phenomena, Spain, editorial Palauita communication.
• Boyes c. (2007) The Language of the Body, Buenos Aires, Editorial Albatros.
• Goleman d. (1995) Emotional Intelligence (why it is more important than the intellectual quotient), Mexico, Editorial Javier Vergara.
• Halguin r. & Krauss s. (2004) Psychology of abnormality, Editorial McGrawhill, Mexico.
• Kirsch i. (2012) Networks for Science 135, Nocébo The Evil Brother of the Placebo, Irving Kirsch Interview with Eduardo Punset, consulted on June 1, 2016, in Red: https: // www.Youtube.com/watch?V = 4V7-SJS6BAA
• Ricard m., Lutz a. & Davidson r. (2014) Nueuroscience, in the brain of the meditator (the new neuroimaging techniques shed light on the brain changes that produce contemplative practices), research and science, January 2015, Barcelona
• Vassa r. (2019) Fear (neuropsychology of fear and phobias), neurobiology of fear, notebooks and brain, third four -month period, number 24, Spain, research and science editions.