The Perception of Fear

Sophie Serfaty                                                                                            Wednesday, October 7th, 2015

                                                         The perception of fear

Fear is the sweat dropping down your face as you walk home alone at night. Fear is the anxiety of waiting for the teacher to give you back the test she just graded. Fear is all the sharks swimming freely in the ocean while you go surfing. Fear, experienced by every human being, is an utterly unavoidable emotion. Fear is also a negative emotional state of mind. In the next few paragraphs, I will be explaining fears’ positive and negative factors. I will also be explaining President Roosevelt’s famous remark, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and how it relates to the idea of fear.

First of all, fear is a difficult problem to overcome. It grips the mind of many of us. There are many negative factors regarding fear. The first one of them being that fear kills any opportunity in people’s lives as well as prevents people from achieving success. The second one being that fear affects your ability to make concrete decisions. No good can come from this type of decision-making. When making decisions out of fear, our brain is not fully aware of the situation and hasn’t taken all the information into consideration. This kind of decision-making could lead us to making the wrong choices for ourselves. There are also positive factors regarding fear. The first one being that fear is an essential part of keeping us safe. Fear is usually triggered by a perceived threat. It is a survival mechanism that signals our bodies to respond to danger with a “flight or fight” response. The second one being that fear can help build confidence. When you do something that scares you, you become stronger. Each step outside your comfort zone helps grow your confidence. In order to overcome your fears, you must never give up. We can achieve anything we set our minds to. As Benjamin Franklin once said, energy and persistence conquer all things.

Second of all, the extent and range of fears varies from person to person, but the emotion is the same. One person’s reaction to seeing a spider will be similar to another person’s reaction to being in an airplane. Fear is a part of our everyday lives. Everybody expresses his or her fears differently. Some people run away from their fears while other will confront them. The most important thing we must remember is that your fear is not a weakness. You can always overcome your fears if you set your mind to it. If we become too afraid, we are allowing others to control us and then we lose the power to control our own lives. We must take control of our fears and learn to control them until one day, we learn to overcome them.