Topic Tuesday / Fear; What would you do if you weren't afraid? **Closed**

Hi everyone,

There have been a lot of discussion about ‘fear’ in the Forums lately; what impacts, good or bad, it’s had on our lives and questions about how to manage it. So what better way to bring together our collective tips and advice for each other than to revolve tonight's topic around the emotion?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2strQAiM0iA

Tonight we are focusing on ‘Fear’. There is a wide spectrum of different types of fear – so we may not get to everything tonight, but what I’m hoping we can get to tonight is giving a brief overview of ‘fear’, talk about our own individual experiences with fear, talk about some strategies to manage ‘fear’ and try and apply it to our own individual situations.

So to start off lets look at what fear is from a physiological and psychological perspective.

Fear is a primal instinct that served us as cave dwellers and today. It keeps us alive, because if we survive a bad experience, we never forget how to avoid it in the future.

Our most vivid memories are born in Fear. Adrenaline embeds them into our brains.

Today, fear still hovers around us, silently monitoring our environments. As sensory information enters the brain, it splits into two paths. One feeds into consciousness, where we can observe and remember it. The other flows through the subconscious, where a region in the brain called the amygdala filters it for signs of danger. When a match is found, the amygdala can trigger an automatic response so quickly that we might respond before we're consciously aware that there's a problem.

So back in day fear kept us safe, gave us almost 'super human' skills to fight or flee, to manage threats like lions, tigers and bears (oh my!).

But now, those threats mostly don't exist... so we have to find a way to recognise what fear is and create strategies to manage our physical and psychological responses.