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We get caught in fears and don't have to.

Neuroscience reveals how fear affects the brain and body.

Understanding these automatic responses can help us make better choices in the future.

Neuroscience helps us understand how fear works and how we can work with it. A fear-arousing experience that hearkens back to a trauma from long ago will feel to us as though it is happening right now. All emotions, especially fear, include a physiological component. In fear, our amygdala, an organ deep in our primitive brain, instantly signals our autonomic nervous system to go on full alert. We then feel an amplified ability to fight or flee.

Sometimes, a freeze response to fear is safer than fighting or fleeing. This is generated by our parasympathetic system. In all of these reactions, blood flows to our outer organs, away from our brain. We thereby lose full access to our reasoning mind. But if our nervous system has learned a program for dealing with fear, we survive and restore ourselves to our full mental capacity in a short time.

The amygdala in our brain’s limbic system holds on to memories of danger and threat. It does not, however, distinguish past from present. To arouse our fight, flight, or freeze reaction immediately, we have to feel a threat as happening here and now, which mindfulness helps us with.

In addition, the amygdala does not distinguish levels of impact; every event is a catastrophe. This likewise produces a boost of adrenaline. All our years of development in adulthood, all our gains of common sense, make no difference now. Thus, today’s fears make us feel just as powerless as we were in childhood. We lose sight of our adult powers. They are available in our prefrontal cortex, but that part of our brain is offline when the amygdala is online.

The amygdala shuts down our thinking mind. We might say it reduces our I.Q. by 50 points! When things calm down, we think, “I should have said or done this….” But we literally could not have thought so clearly or acted so sanely because the limbic system had taken over.

No wonder we felt powerless. We don’t blame ourselves now. We understand that being human means our life story and all the detritus of the past continue to affect us.

We also know there are state-of-the-art ways to intervene using a program for dealing with fear. Research into neuroscience has shown that we do not have to be at the mercy of our limbic system. Our brains have plasticity. This means that we can reprogram our habitual neurological patterns. We can open new neural pathways in our brain so that when fear strikes, we can pause between stimulus and reaction.

This pause is freedom because, through it, choice is made possible rather than a slavish reflex. Any new ways of thinking or doing things can lead to new neural pathways. Now our brain has joined in our work of self-healing.

During the mindful pause, our prefrontal cortex can remind us that we are in the present: we are not victims of the past; we are not powerless children; we have alternatives and resources. Unfortunately, our automatic tendency to fall prey to the bully of fear does not vanish easily. Even with neural re-wiring, we may still feel afraid of what is not, in fact, dangerous. This is where we can have compassion for ourselves and make our way through as best we can. We can then face our fears without defense or resistance. Gradually, we can become stronger.

This is sure to happen if we keep returning to the spiritual practice of non-violent love. This is how we become both defense-less and resource-full, the winning combination for freedom from the grip of fear. The more you love, the less you fear. You will then find yourself changing in many ways: less fear, more love, less ego territoriality, more generosity, less self-seeking, more compassion, and most of all, more joy at noticing that doors are opening without having to push.

Take our Generalized Anxiety Disorder Test

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Adapted from When Love Meets Fear (Paulist Press) by David Richo.

© Psychology Today