The vicious circles of negative feelings

We can’t avoid the loss of health, of work and relations or of material goods and property in this life. So we will react not only with thoughts but perhaps more with feelings when we think that we are at risk to loose something that is important to us, or when we actually already have lost it. Our minds may fill with anxiety and fear, with grief or with anger and bitterness. And if we have placed our self-image and its intentions in something of that which we fear to loose, or already have lost, we may also experience loss of self-worth and meaning. All these strong emotions, based on threat and fear, will start genetically or socially aquired programs in us. Mental tension rises and stimulates the rise of physiologic tension. This will increase the load on our body systems with eventual risk for imbalance or failure if the load is prolonged or too strong. Body symtoms, caused by increased tension, will then be noticed by the mind. There they act as stressors which will increase mental tension and this will again act on the body’s level of tension and so on. In this way vicious circles of stress are created which in the end will threaten the normal functions of both body and mind.

As life always includes the experience of loss, whether the loss already has happened or not, fear can not be avoided by conscious beings. But the feeling of fear has a positive purpose in animal life. It is the motor of an ancient, very important, life-saving mechanism for physical protection. This fight-or-flight reaction starts in the middle brain of all mammals, man in-cluded. Its physical manifestations happen so fast that the animal is not aware of them before the body actually is ready to fight or flee. But man differs from other animals by a more complicated mental reaction to fear after the initial physiologic reaction. As opposed to other animals we have the mental ability to harbor feelings of threat and fear even if our physical life is not at stake.

One of the two or three ancient genetic reactions to fear thus prepares us for fight. That is if the fear is strong enough. If we choose to fight we will also feel anger. But as we humans usually expect everything to have a cause, our minds try to identify the cause of our fear. This creates a problem because this life-saving reaction to fear comes from times when predators and other manifestations of nature were the causes of threat. It does usually not help us to evade threat and fear caused by our relations with other humans and in human societies. Nor  do we consciously nourish anger against nature. We know that we as individuals seldom can go against it. On the other hand do we know that it is possible for us to affect, or be harmfully affected, by other persons, organisations and social systems, so we choose them to be the cause of our fear, wether this is true or not. In the psychological language this is known as ”projection” of mental images. But if we project our anxiety and anger to something outside ourselves we will also tell our mind that there exists something to be feared and that this something perhaps has to be eliminated in order to escape from the danger. In threatening social situations many of us will then start to fight in some way. Usually not with fists and weapons. Instead we attack verbally or with harmful actions. But in reality it is always difficult to change other peoples behavior by attacking them, as well as it is to alter organisations, even if they are the real cause of our fear. So if we can’t win over them the feelings of anxiety and anger will remain. And as we all in some way are morally and socially programmed we often also feel guilt when attacking others. All this will add to our mental tension. Thus we create stressors with our projections and amplify in this way negative feelings which in turn re-inforce the vicious circles of stress. And as we very often can’t ”kill” the cause of the threat we experience, we may be caught in a mental trap creating lasting mental images of fear which in the end represent an increased risk for stress-induced illness and disease.

The other reaction to fear is flight, which in man usually does not imply running with our legs but more often a flight from the necessity to tackle problems in relation to ourselves, to other people and to society. Being aware of this tendency to flee creates then very often a negative ego image by convincing us that we are not able to tackle the threat. This will create more feelings of insecurity and fear and further boost the vicious circles of stress. We may become overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness, convinced that all and everything around us are threats which determine our life and that we have no power to protect ourselves. Such feelings create very high levels of mental and physiologic stress.

Of course we can try to hide our fear under many excuses and activities. But if we go on with having an idea of threat we will still have reason to be afraid. We know that we did not succed to fight this threat but ran away. Not even by pretending not to see our feelings of fear can we avoid to strenghten the vicious circles of stress. These long nourished negative mental images will in the end often create bitterness. And bitterness can be one of the longest and strongest stress re-inforcing emotions.

Tough negative changes in our life, caused by loosing someone close, by loosing ones job, by beeing told the diagnosis of an harmful disease, can create not only feelings of anxiety and fear, but also of anger. Some people are in such a case prone to open demonstration of their anger. Others perhaps hide it within themselves. But both these variations are stressors.

This explains why it is vital for us to come to terms with our anger and fear. There is a way to tackle these stressors of life. It’s never easy, but it is definitely possible to weaken these negative emotions by trying to accept our grief and suffering. We can do this by humbly respecting life and be conscious of the fact that living necessarily also brings unavoidable dangers and losses. Such an insight helps us to mobilise courage and strength and actively go on with our life. Since very old times humans have known that the best way to tackle fear is to be brave enough to look at that which we fear. This gives us the possibility to distinguish between realistic threats and our own mental images. We humans can do this because of our ability for conscious thought and reasoning. In this way we can transfer a problem from the level of feeling to the level of understanding. We can convert physical reflexes and automatic behavior to conscious actions guided by will and determination. The problem which we fear can then be dealt with in practical ways. As a result our feelings of fear and anger will decrease. In fairy tales this is shown symbolically by assuming that troll and ghosts can’t stand light.