Let’s Talk About Our Fear Response
Let’s talk about our fear response for a moment since ever there was a “right” time.
How can we properly understand the brain’s responses that command our muscles to action if even in the subtlest, subconscious protective behaviors? That rests on understanding of our Amygdala: the catbird of emotional response to stimulus.
Stay with me here = emotions happen faster, stronger, deeper & WAY more subconscious than feelings.
We are processing sensory stimuli all the time. We are so efficient at it, our senses have evolved to inform our brain before our thinking mind even knows what’s up . This includes tying base emotions to these stimuli.
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And that’s just it. Little more is known of our neuroconsciousness than this: we orient to the unknown first, and build a reality of ‘things’ and ‘actions’ from that orientation.
But how do we do this!? Well primarily... Amygdalic Fear.
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Innately, we are primed to learn from a fear of the unknown. If fact we possess only two fears so buried in our reflexes, that we actually react before association.
1 - We orient to startling sound (startle reflex), and subconsciously build a constructed situation (orienting complex)
2 - We view severe cliff faces as “falling off points” and retreat somatically — if something is pushing us.
ALL OUR OTHER FEARS ARE LEARNED AND SHAPED, in some way or form, from societal influence. Take for example a child who sees a “monster” — how else would they know what a monster is constructed to be but from their stories?
It’s the reason we put ‘Novel’ in front of Coronavirus: we haven’t seen it before - it is the unknown story.
But what is unknown must also be made known, and we do this in two ways: learned (or conditioned) fear, and learned safety.
Safety is the righteous pacifier for homeostasis. Just as we can condition to fear (a hyper-reactionary response of the amygdala consistent with PTSD), we can attune to safety which saves us biochemically: a neuromodulator of sorts for our heart-mind-endocrine connection.
This is the absolute necessary reasoning of staying within our value system and remaining conscious to the COVID-19 container.
In this time of uncertainty, we can align ourselves with values and comforts, as well as our humanity and compassion for our children and elders. Remembering that our fear is a feedback loop of mental fluctuation based on our emotional reactivity to novelty — fear really does affect the immune systems.
For our own health, we learn to balance the difference of reacting to fear and harboring learned safety. We can observe our thoughts — our vrittis — in accurate perception and cognition to inform our emotions and therefore our immune responses.