The vicious circles of negative feelings

It is not possible to avoid loss of health, of work and relations or of material goods and property in this life. Of course we react to all this but not only with logic or philosopical thoughts but perhaps more with feelings in those situations where we either fear the risk to loose something that is important to us, or already have lost it. Our minds may fill with anxiety and fear, with grief or with anger and bitterness. And if we also have placed our self-image in something we fear to loose, or already have lost, we may experience loss of self-worth and meaning of life. 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 in turn increase the load on our body systems with eventual risk for imbalance or failure if this 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 increase mental tension. These stressors will again act on the body’s level of tension and so on. In this way vicious circles of stress are created who in the end will threaten normal functions of both body and mind.

As life always, in some way, includes the experience of loss, whether it already has happened or not, fear of this can not be avoided by conscious beings. But the feeling of fear has a positive purpose in all 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 included. Its physical manifestations happen so fast that an animal is not aware of it before the body actually is ready to fight or flee. But humans seem to have a more advanced type of awareness and differ from other animals by a more complicated mental reaction to fear after the initial physiologic reaction. As opposed to other animals we can consciously reflect on our feelings and 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 causes 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 main causes of threat. Physical fight, or flight, does usually not help us humans to evade threat and fear caused by relations to other humans or our place among them. In advanced societies most people have not felt conscious fear of nature for a long time. That may now change. But we still know that it is possible for us to affect, or be harmfully affected, by other persons, organisations and social systems. So we often 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 our own 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 threat perhaps has to be eliminated in some way if we want to escape from this 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 other harmful actions. But in reality it is always difficult to change other peoples behavior by attacking them, as well as altering the behavior of organisations, they may be the real cause of our fear or not. So if we can’t win over them our feelings of anxiety and anger will remain. Most people are in some way also morally and socially programmed so 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. As we usually can’t ”kill” the cause of these threats we may experience that we are caught in a mental trap creating lasting mental images of fear. In the end this can also create feeleings of bitterness. All this represents 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. In these times one also should mention mankinds problems in relation to the ecology of this planet we are living on. This genetically inherited 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 can determine our life and that we have no power to protect ourselves. Such feelings will 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 having an idea of a threat that can’t be avoided we will still have a reason to be afraid, wanting to run away. So, even by pretending not to see our feelings of fear can we avoid to strenghten the vicious circles of stress.

This explains why it is vital for us to come to terms with our fear and negative emotions. There is a way to tackle these stressors of life. It’s never easy, but it is definitely possible to weaken them by trying to look consciously at our feelings of fear, of grief and suffering and accept them. We can do this by humbly respecting life and be aware of the fact that it necessarily also brings unavoidable dangers and losses. Such an insight helps us to mobilise courage and strength and actively try to go on with our life. Since very old times humans have known that the best way to tackle our fears is to be brave enough to look at them. This also will give us the possibility to distinguish between realistic threats and our own mental images. We humans can do this with 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 or anger will decrease. In fairy tales this is shown symbolically by assuming that troll and ghosts can’t stand light.