Please see below selected recent fear-related change.
See also:
February 2024
- The School of Life believes that we may be addicted to crises because there are - deep down - many benefits to being out of our minds with fear. So long as we’re in a crisis, we cannot feel sad; we don’t need to be bereft, we have no requirement to think, we don’t have to remember. So long as we’re in a crisis, we don’t have to be alone; terror is the best of friends, it’s available at any time, it will sit with us for hours, holding us company while we imagine how our execution will unfold and everything we’ve worked for will be lost.
January 2024
- According to More to That, fear is the first emotion that strikes us, and life is about continuously navigating the residue of that impact. Much of what we do in our day-to-day lives is to mitigate fear, mostly as a means to reduce uncertainty. We set up to-do lists so we can approach tomorrow with intention. We build habits so we can anchor our attention in an ocean of chaos. This is our attempt to ground ourselves in something reliable; something we can predict that gives us a sense of calm.
February 2023
- The ability to recognise fearful facial expressions may be critical to survival, as it enables us to detect potential threats. Researchers demonstrated that the brain can rapidly detect and process fearful faces that are otherwise invisible to the eye. There appears to be a neural pathway for detection of fear, which operates automatically, outside of conscious awareness.
November 2022
- When fear subsides, we can be left with feelings of pleasure. Is this just the relief of having survived, or something more, asked The Guardian, The amygdala controls the fear response. In a fearful situation, the amygdala stimulates the hypothalamus, which activates two systems in the body - the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal cortical system - causing a flash flood of hormones and triggering the fight-or-flight response. Adrenaline boosts the body’s alertness. It speeds up the heart rate and diverts blood from the core to the muscles needed for movement. Cortisol raises blood pressure. Blood vessels around the vital organs dilate, flooding them with oxygen and nutrients. Breathing quickens, delivering fresh oxygen to the brain, while levels of glucose in the blood spike, giving the body a quick energy boost – ready for action.
October 2022
- Researchers in Sweden identified a mechanism that seems to explain why fear memories tend to become over-concentrated in certain circuits in the brain. By "knocking down" the activity of a certain gene in rats, the researchers found that the rodents experienced an abnormally long-lasting conditioned fear response, such that their fear memories took longer to extinguish than control animals.
- The findings may help explain why anxiety disorders are often associated with excessive alcohol use.
June 2022
- Further reading:
April 2022
- Fear can have transgenerational effects. Sparrows that listened to a horror playlist of predator sounds were less likely to reproduce, and their offspring less likely to survive.
March 2022
- In I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, journalist Mónica Guzmán explored how people can escape their echo chambers to have meaningful conversations with others whom they might not immediately agree with. Guzmán proposes that asking, "What am I missing?" is the first step toward truly understanding different perspectives and having better conversations.
February 2022
- LEGO donated model MRI scanners to hospital radiology departments to reassure children going for treatment. The LEGO scanners open up to reveal internal machinery, helping medical staff explain the process to children and turn a scary experience into a playful one.
July 2021
- The RSA noted that fear is part of all of our lives but - left unchecked - it can drive many negative emotions and hold us back from finding fulfilment. Fear of failure, inadequacy and rejection can make us jealous, self-critical or turn us into perfectionists. Cultures of fear in the workplace, in family relationships and in friendships can undermine intimacy, honesty and creativity. In a life ruled by fear we strive for success but are rarely happy. And the more we try to win, the more we risk losing ourselves.
November 2020
- The School of Life believes that most of us could manage perfectly well with very much less than we have, or rather than we think we should have. Not just around possessions but across every aspect of our lives. It’s not that we should want to: it’s simply that we could. We could cope quite well with being rather poor, not being very popular, not having a very long life and with living alone. We could even, to put the extreme instance forward, cope with being dead; it happens all the time. But we forget our resilience in the face of the risks we face. The cumulative effect of our innocence is to make us timid. Our lives become dominated by a fear of losing, or never getting, things which we could (in fact) do perfectly well without. TSOL adds that by continually renewing our acquaintance with our own resilience – that is, with our ability to manage even if things go badly (getting sacked, a partner walking out, a scandal that destroys our social life, an illness) – we can be braver because we grasp that the dangers we face are almost never as great as our imaginations tend to suggest.
September 2020
- The School of Life explained that some the reason why we are far more fearful, inhibited and sad than we should be is that we are - unbeknownst to ourselves - wandering through our lives with a huge burden of unresolved and unobserved trauma. A trauma is not merely a terrible event, though it is very much that too. It is a terrible event that has not been adequately processed, understood and unpicked and that has been able to cast a very long and unwarranted shadow over huge areas of experience. Many of our greatest fears have nothing at all to do with actual dangers in the here and now; they are the legacy of traumas that we have lacked the wherewithal to be able to trace back to their origins, localise and neutralise.
August 2020
- Quartz noted that whether it’s an inclement weather forecast, export ban, or pandemic, crises tend to push shoppers into hoarding mode. As therapist Bruce Conn told radio station WMAZ, grabbing that extra roll of paper towels or bottle of hand sanitizer is our way of “trying to control the uncontrollable.” It’s actually a normal behaviour that can be traced back to an animalistic drive to feel safer.
April 2020
- The Covid-19 pandemic is an unprecedented event in modern history. And yet, according to Paul Argenti, Professor of Corporate Communication at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, the experience of managing through it is not necessarily unique. Similar to other crises, such as 9/11 and the global financial downturn, workers feel scared and worried. “Uncertainty triggers fear,” he says. “People are freaking out and wondering, ‘What does this mean for my company, my job, and my future?’”
December 2019
- According to IAI TV, from terror attacks to paedophilia, our era is in thrall to fear. Throughout history, the fears of a society have defined the people who live in it. In this course, Professor Frank Furedi has tried to confront the causes of our anxieties and uncovers what they say about the way we live now and to examine whether we combat the culture of fear.
April 2019
- The School of Life believes that we are often terrified of so many things: disgrace, illness, unemployment, our mortality, the suffering and death of loved ones. When these fears arise, we are often encouraged, out of kindness, to think of the best-case scenarios. This is a well-meaning move, but it also unintentionally leaves our fears to fester and they can fill us with unnamed dread and sometimes loom far larger than they should. Therefore, the opposite move involves looking our anxieties directly in the eye, refusing to be cowed by them and examining them exhaustively so as to drain them of their debilitating power. Doing this can bring us to an important realisation: we could cope, even if the worst did come to the worst.
February 2019
- For The School of Life, many of us are daily tortured by a feeling of imminent catastrophe. Something terrible seems about to happen to us: we’re going to be abandoned, shamed and humiliated, publicly mocked, lose physical control over ourselves or be seen as a loser. The fear of such imminent catastrophes leads to a state of hypervigilance: where we are permanently on the alert, permanently worried, permanently scared, and permanently really very unhappy. People may try to reassure us, but reassurance goes nowhere; the terror remains.
December 2018
- Further reading:
October 2018
September 2018
- “Hope really is a choice and a practical habit,” says Martha Nussbaum in her new book The Monarchy of Fear – an x-ray of Trump America’s emotions. Building on political theory, psychoanalysis, psychological studies and classics, the philosopher argues that fear, disgust and envy undermine democracy, while Martin-Luther-King-Jr-style-love and ‘practical hope’ offer answers to our current political crises.
- The author of a recent book, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender claims that “If we take a close look at human life, we see that it is essentially one long elaborate struggle to escape our inner fears and expectations that have been projected upon the world. Interspersed are period of celebration when we have momentarily escaped inner fears, but the fears are still there waiting for us. We have become afraid of our inner feelings because we have no conscious mechanism by which to handle the feelings if we let them come up within ourselves.”
August 2018
- Is fear the best way of teaching us how to choose the seatmates, the soulmates, the mates we want alongside us throughout our lives?
- Is the great modern fear anonymity? If the property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmodernism is it visibility? So asked the writer of a highly thought-provoking article about our obsession with connectivity. Is this what our contemporary selves really want? To be recognised, to be connected, to be visible, if not to the millions via, say, the X Factor, then at least to the hundreds, via Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn? And in the process, perhaps we are losing the ability to know ourselves in quietness, in isolation, to dip into what Thoreau called fishing "in the Walden Pond of our own natures".