Fear is a natural, influential, and primal emotion. Fear is composed of two primary reactions to threats: a biochemical or emotional reaction. Fear alerts humans of impending danger, threat or harm and whether the danger is physical or psychological. Biochemical reaction stems from natural emotion, which triggers the survival mechanism. Biochemical reactions are automatic responses crucial to human survival. On the other hand, emotional responses are highly personalized, depending on an individual based on their past experiences. Furthermore, they can be harnessed to feelings of excitement and happiness, for instance, watching horror films, adrenaline junkies, or other extreme sports that invoke fear (Fritscher, 2020).
The gift of fear is an amazing and popular book covering fear and survival signals. The book decodes how fear can be harnessed and used as a tool instead of avoiding encounters or being afraid. The book helps humans rediscover intuition as initially intended, its development, its evolution over the years, and how humans can learn to use it to keep humans alive if learned. It also teaches how humans can hone the sixth sense of danger. Further, the book also makes people aware of the warning signs to avoid and help friends, family, or coworkers avoid such circumstances. Acts of violence or harm are unexpected. However, before any harmful action happens to anyone, signs that manifest and the human gut send a queasy feeling through our bodies. To fully understand the gift of fear, there is a need to learn how to identify these signals with even more accuracy and maximize the gained intuition.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The gift of fear has several key ideas that can protect someone from any threat or perceived danger. They may include (a) the use of intuition as the best safeguard against danger. (b) Not being deceived by strangers who seduce someone with their charm or friendly behavior. (c) Reading body language and using empathy to predict behavior. (d) Recognizing false threats to avoid becoming a victim. (e) Understand signals to identify dangerous situations. Identifying some of the mentioned ideas can help anyone use the gift of fear to interpret situations that can help an individual wiggle out of a bad situation.
For instance, Bill and his partner Carl are police officers on their normal patrol route when they stop a vehicle. Carl takes his police work quite seriously. He observes unusual human behavior, sensing danger. Carl noticed that the two men at the back of the car failed to make eye contact looking forward the entire time. The driver is quite the charmer with his friendly persona, trying to get Carl's attention. Such body language raises Carl's suspicions sensing danger ahead. Through observation, Carl noticed and understood the situation and asked the men to step out of the vehicle for a quick search. Bill smoking his pipe beside the vehicle, failed to observe this simply by not engaging his initial intuition. Carl engaged Bill to help him get the situation under control to avoid any commotion.
Common stressors unique to Survival Psychology
The commons stressors in survival psychology are internal rather than external.
Emotional problems.
The first stressor is that emotional problems can be triggered by fear and uncertainty when faced with a life-threatening situation that can cause an individual to freeze in that particular situation. Other people can have such stresses and still assume leadership roles to guide them through the situation ( Krkovic et al., 2018 ). Fight or flight response is not the only response that is invoked in the face of danger.
Traumatic experiences.
Traumatic events also shape how people respond when faced with dangerous situations, especially in survival psychology. Surviving such situations depends on the attitudes and perceptions that can trigger a certain response to the situation depending on a similar previous encounter. Furthermore, people handle situations better if they happened to have encountered them previously. Knowing and understanding the danger ahead changes the attitude and perception of handling the situation without being fearful as the first encounter ( Ludick & Figley, 2017 ). However, novice individuals normally react without using the resources in hand but rather panic, worsening the situation, or die from the misjudgment.
Over-thinking.
Overthinking is another stressor that makes people ignore the very basic survival mechanisms jumping to more complex solutions that fail to work due to their overreach. The straightforward necessary responses are vital in handling most problems to reduce fear to observe, analyze, and react better to threatening situations ( Armstrong & Rimes, 2016 ). Overthinking ends up gaslighting situations out of proportion that can lead to death if not properly analyzed. Simple, practical solutions are key to addressing the common fear stressors in any situation to survive an ordeal.
Survival Psychology
Survival psychology is a field of study that teaches people how to handle fear, its trigger, and know not to ignore human intuition. Survival psychology can be summed as "it is not the will to live, but they won't to live" that matters in every survival situation ( Leach, 2011) . Survival psychology is an unexplored field of study that uses both a scientific and humanistic approach to understand how people react to different situations of disasters or just everyday life. John Leach, survival psychology, conducted survival experiments to further understand the human limitation of the cognitive function during times of extreme fear or anxiety with the hope to develop mechanisms that would increase the number of survivors to threatening situations. Survival psychology explores the limitations of the working memory that leads to freezing, lack of attention control, inaccessibility of the long-term memory to develop innovative ideas to improve chances of survival in any circumstance. Surviving psychology has taught me to engage my working memory to craft solutions in the face of danger. Also, engaging my intuition is very important and should not be ignored.
Numerous studies are being conducted to train and equip the long-term memory and complex cognitive tasks into simple basic cognitive operations that engage the working memory and make the best of any situation. Lastly, survival psychology efforts are meant to equip people with simple, quick, and appropriate skills to address disasters and threats and eliminate many victims' unnecessary deaths.
References
Armstrong, L., & Rimes, K. A. (2016). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for neuroticism (stress vulnerability): A pilot randomized study. Behavior therapy , 47 (3), 287-298.
Fritscher. L. (2020). The Psychology Behind Fear . Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/the-psychology-of-fear-2671696#:~:text=Fear%20is%20a%20natural%2C%20powerful,danger%20is%20physical%20or%20psychological .
Krkovic, K., Clamor, A., & Lincoln, T. M. (2018). Emotion regulation as a predictor of the endocrine, autonomic, affective, and symptomatic stress response and recovery. Psychoneuroendocrinology , 94 , 112-120.
Leach, J. (2011). Survival psychology: The won't to live. The Psychologist .
Ludick, M., & Figley, C. R. (2017). Toward a mechanism for secondary trauma induction and reduction: Reimagining a theory of secondary traumatic stress. Traumatology , 23 (1), 112.
