Seeking Discomfort Mentally, Physically, Socially, and Intellectually
One of the most intriguing yet beautiful things about being humans is our ability to experience emotions. The field of psychology has paved the path for the opportunity to study these emotions by understanding the behaviors and neurological aspects that predicate them. An emotion that I’ve been interested in recently is that of fear. It sparked my interest through watching the videos of YouTube group – Yes Theory. Their platform is to Seek Discomfort and they believe that the greatest things in life come after the discomfort one experiences. Fear is one of the aspects they discuss often through their videos and it has been one of my personal goals to try to understand further why I hold these beliefs in my head and whether they truly are keeping me from experiencing some of life’s greatest pleasures.
In order to draw the correlation of age with the conditioning of fear, a deep dive into the concept of fear is required. Adolphs (2013) described “ humans stand out from other animals in having fear and anxiety triggered not by occurrent stimuli but merely by thinking about the stimuli. The bulk of psychopathology arises from worrying about what could happen and what night be, often to the point of distorting what actually is. This aspect of fear induction in humans probably also contributes to the impression we have that fear depends very much on conscious experience”. The study additionally offered two theories to incorporate the diversity of stimuli, situations, and behaviors related to fears. The first is the appraisal theory which is the adaptive functional role fear is thought to ensue. The alternative is the conceptual act theory which states that experience of fear are “cognitive synthesis that begins with an initial core affective state and then incorporates not only interoceptive and somatic knowledge of the state of one’s body and one’s actions but also of the context-dependent situation, knowledge stores in memory, and much explicit information stored in language and acquired in a particular culture” (Adolphs, 2010). This foundation of the importance of conscious experience in studying fear induction leads into the approaches towards the conceptualization of a phobia, which is pertinent to the one this review will the exploring in depth – acrophobia. There are two major approaches to the conceptualization of phobias. The fist revolves around cognitive models through which individuals learn to relate their feeling to an indication that there is danger present – “I’m anxious because I fear, and I fear because I’m anxious”. The alternative is that phobias are not learnt, but are “manifestations of general adverse responses to evolutionarily prepared threat stimuli”. After explaining these two approaches, Coelho and Wallis define acrophobia as specific phobia demonstrated when one possesses a fear of heights. Their findings are that fear of heights is an expression of largely sensory phenomena, which can produce strong feelings of discomfort and fear in individuals (Carlos and Wallis, 2010).
The experience of fears and phobias is universal to all humans which makes it is quite interesting that the study of these feelings has not reached a consensus. The ambiguity around the feeling of fear and whether it is a basic human emotion or a response to stimuli is why such fears exist largely to this date. This is likely attributed to the lack of empirical evidence behind a claim that tries to be advanced in one of these measures but the information that is present allows us to understand the conscious experience that plays an important role in the experience of fear. In order to extract oneself from a phobia or fear, the physiological and psychological aspects of it must be understood to separate it from occurring in the future. My hope in learning about the notion of fear is to recognize it’s limitations and not allow it to limit me from seeking discomfort physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Sources:
Adolphs, Ralph. “The Biology of Fear.” Current Biology, vol. 23, no. 2, 21 Jan. 2013, doi:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3595162/.
Coelho, Carlos M., and Guy Wallis. “Deconstructing Acrophobia: Physiological and Psychological Precursors to Developing a Fear of Heights.” Depression and Anxiety, vol. 27, no. 9, 2010, pp. 864–870., doi:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20821801/.
