![]() When I travelled to countries with beautiful islands, I rarely went near them. When friends suggested water-based activities, I made excuses as to why it was not possible to join. I became increasingly frustrated as I watched the fear broaden and grow, and begin to interfere with aspects of my life that I wanted to enjoy. Why? Because that fear bled into so many other compartments of my life. Knowing that it was acceptable to be afraid of unruly seas did not help me. How to prepare for the inevitable disaster that would befall me. I started to worry about anchors coming undone at night when the boat was still. As the years went on, however, it swelled into something more ungainly than simple dread. My fear of drowning did not manifest as a disorder or a worry that interfered with my day-to-day life. Thus, “they may find themselves locked into the same, recurring pattern of response tied in with the original danger or trauma.” That patterned response of traumatic arousal is not great for our bodies. Indeed, a study about fear and the “defense cascade”, warns that while animals can generally restore to “normal” quickly once danger has passed, humans often are not. But when fear gets out of control – either in a phobic sense, or a central nervous system that runs on a hair trigger – it can wreak havoc on our health. Being afraid is our evolutionary saviour. Of course, we ought to be scared of scary things. Interestingly they also profiled a woman with no fear at all, which might sound like relief to some but actually exposes you to life-threatening dangers - you do not realize you need to avoid them. ![]() Recently, NPR’s Invisibilia podcast discussed fear in the modern world, and how we often shape our lives in ways that throw our instincts into hyperdrive. Then, learning that fear responses to the now-conditioned-to-be-scary stimulus can be reduced by avoiding this stimulus. First, pairing of a neutral stimulus (in my case water, which is not de facto scary) and an aversive event (almost drowning) leads to a conditioned fear response to that neutral stimulus. Garcia notes that an experiential fear becomes a phobia in two stages. Additionally, people who suffer from specific phobias work hard to avoid their phobia stimuli even though they know there is no threat or danger, but they feel powerless to stop their irrational fear.” “pecific phobias are extreme and persistent fears of certain objects, situations, or activities, or persons. In a 2017 paper on the neurobiology of fear, René Garcia, notes that For those with deeper phobias, the reaction can remain, causing ongoing anxiety issues. That is, awareness of a threat activates the fight or flight impulse we require to respond, often in ways that could save our lives.įor most people, as soon as they realize that there is no actual threat, their bodies relax and their pulse slows down. In a Pacific Standard magazine piece from 2012, Tom Jacobs talks about the neurobiology of fear, noting that like fire, it is our friend when it isn’t raging out of control. From fear to phobia: is it human to be afraid?įear is a strange and crazy thing, especially when your system learns to trace its contours with such graceless familiarity. This sounds amusing in retrospect, but during our Bering crossing I was breathless and weary, tired of the tightness in my chest and the infinite loops of ‘what ifs’ in my mind. But for most of our time in the Bering Sea, I was lying on the floor in my room, waiting for the boat to sink and the sharks to eat us. As that post suggests, it was filled with friends and business masterminds and great food. ![]() The repositioning trip was a fifteen day extravaganza with 9 other friends on a huge ship. I forced myself to take boat trips occasionally - my rocky last-minute Galapagos trip in 2008, and more recently the long repositioning cruise from Vancouver to Tokyo, among others. By extension, of water-based catastrophes. My family breathed a sigh of relief I might not be an Olympic athlete, but at least I could swim.įear programmed at such a young age tends to linger, and in my case it made me deeply afraid of drowning. I learned how to do breast stroke and butterfly, and though I consistently crashed into the lane dividers during backstroke, I could stay afloat on my own. My mother did the sensible thing given the circumstances: she put me into swimming lessons immediately. I don’t remember what he looked like, but I do recall that his name was Bram. Given my age at the time, I have only hazy memories of panic and being overwhelmed by water, and then of the eyes of the lifeguard on duty. I promptly fell into the deep end and almost drowned. When I was three and a half, my mother asked a friend to watch over me when she went to the washroom at our local swimming pool.
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