#conqueringfear

Welcome back to “The Tapestry of Human Emotions.” In this fourth installment, we venture into the shadowy realm of fear, an emotion as primal as it is pervasive. Fear, in its many forms, influences our decisions, shapes our behaviors, and often dictates the courses of our lives. Today, we delve deep into understanding fear, its evolutionary role, and how we can confront and harness it to our…

        I am not sure where I was going with this week's topic, or with this whole passion project, for that matter.

        There are probably much more educated manners of looking at fear, as some advanced cognitive ability to predict and plan for the future or some primal survival mechanism from ages past. Neither concerns me. I care not for the origins or reasons for this phenomenon, nor the common trends of how it manifests in other people.

        I am selfish.

       I care about this phenomenon only to see how it affects my life. How I may overcome it or use it to my advantage. However, there is no harm in considering the origins, and indeed if I am to fight it, I must find its root.

        Fear is caused by the perception of danger. That is why some people, especially children or the otherwise inexperienced, fail to feel fear in certain dangerous situations because they do not perceive the situation as dangerous. It also explains why some people fear amusement park rides. Logically, they are safe and secure, but they are designed to emphasize height or speed and promote a feeling of fear.

        Thus, fear is very easily influenced by past experiences. Therein lies the source of trauma.

        This is where it gets interesting. Maybe. I am not sure.

        I would like to take a more in-depth look at psychology at some point, but I have not had the time and even if I did, I doubt I would be able to gain that much comprehension from it, so it would be better to not wield it carelessly.

        Fear not the man who admits his inexpertise, but the man who speaks proudly on matters that he does not know of, and then successfully dupes everybody else around him. It is not so much the duping that is the problem, as it is the believers going out and spreading that belief. It is alive. It propagates! Thus, pseudoscience is born. Boom.

        Bearing that and my complete lack of credentials in mind, back to "this is where it gets interesting."

        See, there is a debate in psychology on "nature v. nurture." I do not know the full details of it, but I think I am on team nurture. Of course, both probably influence a person's behavior, but I believe one's environment plays a stronger role, especially one's environment during developmental years.

        I think it is interesting because at that point, there are so many details to consider. Children are amazing because they are always taking so much in. One offhand comment may be the root of various behavioral patterns many years down the line.

        In this case, the topic is fear, so the majority of the influential memories are probably negative ones. However, when it comes down to it, it does not have to be the experience that is negative, but the perception. Fascinating. All about perception...

        At some point, I might have wanted to comment on my optimism at having made it past twenty-five days. An English teacher of mine once told our class that it took twenty-five repetitions to make something a habit, as she gave us a packet of seventy-five grammar problems, just to be safe.

        Then, shall I say that posting twice daily has become a habit? Not quite. Not yet.

        Apparently, people believed that it took 21 days to form a habit. Perhaps. I doubt it. Unless the desired habit was the skill of waiting until the last hour and rambling out a post in twenty minutes or so.

        Other studies—I did not check their credibility, I was lazy and just looked at some random online articles—claim that habits may take between 18 to 254 days to form. Interesting. Plausible.

        To be safe, I am going to say that this will not become a habit of mine until a year elapses. However, I am not even sure that blogging is the habit I want to focus on. After all, I have dropped most of the other habits I had planned to form when I began this blog.

        Hm...

        Thursday. Thursday marks the beginning of the second month, relative to a 28-day month scale. Thursday, I will try to adopt the unformed habits that I allowed to languish and fade. That means picking up my exercise routine, spending more time on Spanish and Japanese, and some other things.

        On the fear aspect of this post. I equally venerate, disdain, and fear habits. I venerate the end goal they stand for and the hope they represent. I disdain my inability to keep to them, and I fear the implications of them and of failure.

        Mostly though, I am just trying to finish up this blog post so I can get to doing some other things.

        It is strange, is it not? I used to believe the reason people struggled with journaling was not because they led uninteresting or unfulfilling lives, but because they were too caught up trying to enjoy their lives to spend the time to slow down and write about it.

        I do not suppose that is wrong, per se.

        However, where does popular media and entertainment fit into this? If we are so engrossed with our own lives that we will not even take time off from it to document it, why do we spend so much time reading books and articles, watching movies and shows, listening to radio and songs?

        I cannot make sense of it. Truthfully, I cannot make sense of much of the world, or of my thoughts.