Lightning and thunder – surprisingly, more the thunder – produce feelings of fear in a large number of people. In others, however, they do not. Many people are also afraid to be alone in an apartment or to go into a dark basement. Others are afraid of driving over a bridge, flying in an airplane, climbing a high tower, or crossing a plaza. Fear of the dentist, exams, or speaking or reciting poetry in front of many people is also not uncommon.
Symptoms and signs in anxiety
If you ask people what they feel when they experience anxiety, they usually report that they have the impression that their heart is contracting. Sometimes they also have trouble breathing, they turn pale or they blush. This short list alone shows that the feeling of anxiety can occur in different people under the most diverse situations. Often the individual does not even know where their anxiety comes from. For example, many have never flown in an airplane and yet they are afraid of it. Others have repeatedly been in a dark cellar, but their fear of it does not subside, even though no one has ever harmed them there. Never has a child seen a ghost – and yet he may be afraid of it. Fear, however – and we have seen for what different reasons it can arise – often prevents people from doing the right thing in a certain situation. Therefore, we should ask ourselves what the fear is based on and how we can protect ourselves from it. If you ask people what they feel when they experience anxiety, they usually report that they have the impression that their heart is contracting. Sometimes they also have difficulty breathing, turn pale or blush, feel as if they are bathed in cold sweat, feel a dull pressure in the stomach area, or are paralyzed with fear. The feeling of anxiety is thus accompanied by changes in the activity of the internal organs.
Causes and origin
But why are so many people afraid of flying in an airplane, for example? This is a question that is easy to answer; after all, everyone has heard of an airplane crash. So it is enough to think about the possible consequences of a flight to cause a feeling of fear. Accordingly, we can state first of all that fear always precedes an upcoming situation or experience, but never occurs after an event has been survived. And yet, it must be said that its emergence is always due to previous experiences that were less fortunate. For example, if we have burned ourselves a few times on a hot stove, in the future the very sight of it is enough, and we are wary of touching it again. Such a clear concatenation of cause and effect – touching the stove, painful burn – which is understandable for every human being, makes the occurrence of feelings of fear at the sight of the stove superfluous. In children, however, we observe real fear of hot stoves and ovens and can even educate them via this feeling of fear not to touch the stove or oven. We can deduce what is going on here physiologically from a range of knowledge. All these processes go back to the ability of the central nervous system to process the various stimuli running simultaneously or coming in a certain order from the external and internal milieu – in other words, to unite the nerve processes triggered by the stimuli in the so-called stimulus receivers into an excitation network or into a “mosaic of simultaneously excited nerve cells”. Most of the time – but not always – the transmission of the excitation or inhibition to the corresponding nerve pathways leading to the organs triggers the appropriate behavior of the individual organs and organ systems and thus of the whole organism. The whole is called regulative activity of the brain, and we know that it comes about through the formation of conditional reactions. In the cerebral cortex, certain nerve cells are thus excited both by the impulses from the outside, i.e. in the case of the hot hearth by the pain stimulus, and by the impulses coming from the internal organs and the musculature. At the same time, nerve impulses from the optic nerves also reach the cerebral cortex at the sight of the hot spot, so that another source of excitation arises here.Between these different excited cell groups a conditional connection is formed. If nerve impulses now reach the cerebral cortex only via the optic nerves, for example at the sight of the focal point, they spread via the formed connection like a bridge to the other cortical areas. These areas are now also excited and send impulses to the internal organs. Thus, the mere sight of a hearth triggers, to some extent, the same reactions that were evoked earlier when the hot hearth was touched.
Fear through conditioning
The information stored in the central nervous system from the past for what follows touching a hot stove becomes the cause for us not touching it. Thus, we are no longer afraid of it. In addition to the stimulus sources mentioned so far, language can also conditionally trigger reflexive excitation and inhibition processes in our central nervous system. As already explained, in a child learning to speak, the word acts as a sound stimulus via the ear into the nervous processes, and here it connects with the experiences the child has already had with the objects mentioned. The conditionally reflexive linking of the word “mother”, for example, and the experiences connected with her leads to the fact that the word “mother” alone is able to evoke all those sensations which have developed from the experience with her. If, however, this or that child has become aware of and desires a different, and indeed better, content of the word “mother” through the descriptions of schoolmates or the teacher than the events surrounding his or her own mother were able to give him or her, then that opposition develops which we so often find and which is based on the contrast between reality and the imagined. If we take into account all that has been said so far, the development of a feeling of fear, for example the fear of a dark street, can be explained a little better. Almost everyone has had experiences in their life that were not very pleasant for them and that they would not like to experience again: they have cut their finger, felt pain and seen blood. Others have seen a car accident, sometimes even experienced it themselves, and so on. All experiences with their consequences leave traces in the cerebral cortex, leave sensations, which express the contrast with the ideas of a happy course of life, thus are based on a contrast between reality and imagination. Coming back to the fear and its cause, we can already understand that the individual does not have to have gone through an experience himself in order to feel fear in front of an analogous situation. One has read in the newspaper or in a novel how a person was attacked, knocked down and robbed in a dark street. Such excitations caused by words leave – as already mentioned – their traces in the cerebral cortex, are stored. If one now walks along a dark street, the darkness itself, the slamming of a front door, as a signal or occasion, can set the whole nervous network into arousal, which had been formed in the central nervous system by self-experienced events or by events that had been recreated during reading. This arousal is followed by phenomena such as fluctuations of the heart rate, acceleration of the pulse, dilation or constriction of the blood vessels, trembling, etc. Even the press report about a bridge collapse due to high water, in which a whole railroad train plunged into the depths, is sufficient to evoke nervous processes in a large number of people at the rumbling of the train over a bridge, which evoke the horrors of the past event, instill uncertainty and thus fear. The more vivid the report was, the deeper the fear, since driving over the bridge … Here we must interrupt to point out beforehand another phenomenon in the course of conditional-reflective nervous processes.
Anxiety due to habits in everyday life (stereotypes).
In the course of our lives, we acquire very specific habits. For example, we get up at a certain time, then we wash, dress, eat breakfast, and go to work. So we perform certain successive actions at regular intervals. This sequence of actions also corresponds to a certain sequence of excitation and inhibition processes in the cerebral cortex, a so-called dynamic stereotype. Disturbances in the sequence of such stereotypes are perceived as unpleasant.Sometimes we do not know why we have been sad since the early morning, are in a bad mood, because we usually do not remember that we got up in the morning differently than usual, were disturbed, could not adjust to the new situation fast enough and other things. It is characteristic for the stereotype conditioned reactions that the successful course of the whole stereotype represents the positive affirmation for all intermediate reactions and thus becomes the reason for striving for regular, successful repetition. If the sequence was sensitively disturbed, the resulting inhibition acts back into the neurons that were involved in the sequence of the whole stereotype. That means, in case of repetition of a reaction chain, which is normal in itself, but which was interrupted a few times, already at the beginning of the reflex chain the disturbance of the sequence, which is within the range of possibility and which was already experienced a few times (it was also stored informatively), has an effect on the whole nerve network of this process. Let’s take exam anxiety as an example: on the way to the exam, one suddenly imagines that one might fail. This thought of the possible negative outcome causes uncertainty in the exam process itself and becomes the cause of failure. Examination anxiety will also reoccur in upcoming examinations. Such insecurity can arise in the event of disruptions or changes in a wide variety of habitual actions and activities – that is, dynamic stereotypes. As already mentioned, a person is used to a regular course of certain daily events. If they run in a regular way, he feels safe. Nothing disturbs him, everything runs like clockwork – he is happy. Sometimes, however, events creep into these regularities that suddenly confront him with unknowns. But he cannot cope with the situation, the stereotypical course of his nervous reactions is severely disturbed. If this has happened in his normal working environment, the next day the entry into the office will awaken the memory of yesterday and make him uneasy for the new daily routine. He waits with nervousness for the end of the day.
Insecurity and doubt as a cause of anxiety
So uncertainty becomes the basis of his anxiety. But back to the bridge. The thundering of the wheels over the bridge was vividly described. Shortly thereafter followed the catastrophe, which was deeply felt by the reader. If he now sits on the train himself and hears the thunder, the arousal pathways run the same way and bring his organism into a tension of expectation that can be so unpleasant that he feels it as fear. Fear is therefore always a feeling that comes at the beginning of a chain of active actions or passive experiences whose positive, successful outcome is not certain. Mostly it has a relation to personal experience or to experiences that one has been given, be it by parents or educators, by the press or generally by what one has read. Fear reflects a wealth of mystical ideas inherited from generation to generation, which should have been overcome long ago, because science has long disproved the belief in spirits and demons. Herein also lies the key to overcoming feelings of fear, from which we can protect ourselves by acquiring knowledge. Only knowledge allows us to cope with remnants of superstition and frees us from at least the idea of the involvement of supernatural forces in any situation. It is necessary to know that success and failure are not due to chance or luck, but to one’s own achievements. Since accomplishments naturally vary, the experience of failure does not make one anxious, but redoubles one’s efforts to lay the foundation for success. But this is only the one fact.
Treating and combating anxiety
The other is that not all nervous processes can be easily directed by the will. A large number of just the psychological complexes are deeply rooted. If one has such fear complexes, one must learn to prove to oneself how nonsensical they are. Many people say that they feel no sense of fear when they are in the company of another. They feel absolutely safe. This feeling of safety is obviously based on a suppression, an inhibition of the feeling of fear. In animal experiments, it has been observed that a strong focus of excitation in the cerebral cortex is able to attract excitation from other cortical points, i.e. to inhibit other areas.The presence of an accompanying person in the dark cellar creates a strong focus of excitation in the cerebral cortex, which induces inhibition in the neighboring areas, in the center of the fear. Such strong impulses emanate from the presence of the other person that the fear cannot even occur. Many people who are afraid to go alone into a dark cellar, often unconsciously, by starting to sing or whistle out of fear, counteract the emerging feeling of fear with a strong arousal center and suppress it in this way. In doing so, they gradually become accustomed to doing what is necessary without fear in such previously anxiety-provoking situations. This habit also turns into a stereotype together with the new environmental conditions – for example, in the basement – and slowly ensures the complete disappearance of fear. Let’s be clear: fear is a phenomenon that is actually unworthy of a person of today’s time, because it is based on insecurity, insufficient knowledge, lack of processing what has been learned in school and at work, and lack of trust (for example, towards the engineers who calculated and built the bridge). But those who are so paralyzed by insecurity and mistrust can never achieve full success. Therefore, everyone should strive to fight their fear, and moreover, all those who want to create and generate fear.