Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.

Fear is an emotion that seems to be almost universal considering the fact that it's experienced across a whole range of different cultures and animals. It’s the name we give to our interpretation of biological changes. So when we experience fear it's a result of our blood being diverted away from our digestive organs in order to flow towards parts of the body that will enable us to fight or to flee. That's the sensation of having blood supply through your stomach. There are two main categories of fear. Some fears are in a which means that we're born with these and we all tend to share these same fears and some of the common innate fears are a fear of death and a fear of snakes and there's an obvious reason on why we'd want to avoid these things. The second category of fears we call acquired fears, and these are things that we've learned we've developed a phobia towards, even though there's no biological reason why we should be afraid of them, the acquired fear that's seen the biggest increase in recent years is called coulrophobia, and that's the fear of clowns. The highest-grossing horror film of all time is “IT” which was released in 2017 and that's at least partly to blame probably for this massive increase in a fear of clowns. When does the line between harmless and harmful start to appear? especially with regard to symbols of joy and playfulness. Pennywise the clown in “IT” eats children like nuggets, which really links into our fear of dying. A first-century B.C. Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius was worried that our fear of death could lead to irrational beliefs and actions that could harm society. One of the reasons why fears can spread so rapidly through populations it's because of something called emotional contagion, and that's basically this drive that humans seem to have as social animals to emulate people's behaviours and ape their responses, and that's something we saw quite widely in the UK in 2016, in what's been called the “clown apocalypse”. People who were dressing up as clowns and it eventually led to people who didn't previously have a clown phobia ended up developing one just through watching other people's reactions. As kids, we associated that colours always expressed a sense of joy and happiness, but it’s when we grow old is when we find the clown to be a very exaggerated version of happiness. Those features of the clown that accentuate joy, such as the big wide grin, the red nose, the multicolored unkempt hair. This realisation of fake exaggeration is what scares us as adults, this association of our personal emotions towards clowns is what sets the children and the adults apart. We get this much hysteria which is another persuasive factor to get manipulated in fearing something or being afraid of someone. A confused mind is actually the coziest house to start. Every trait that you possess makes who you are, I know people who are scared of stepping on the line that separates tiles on the floor. Imagine if every step you took decided whether you fell into an abyss which cannot be explained even by you, a dark void where each tile only stands apart. Fears of a person are a part of who they are to an extent, a fear should be confronted only if the person feels that it’s being a hindrance to their completion of everyday tasks. As of now, we have dealt with a population of the human race that has the capability to associate emotions to things, comprehend emotions,etc.I’m talking about Children and adults who are on the autism spectrum, they just don't seem to catch and copy the fear response in the way that an average person does. The main reason for such a response could be that autism spectrum patients cannot recognize emotions, fears, even complicated concepts of the importance of social and relationship norms. There are two techniques that we can use in Psychology to try and alleviate these fears. The first technique is perhaps the most extreme and it's known as Flooding, this is basically where you're forced to come from the worst-case scenario. So for example if you had a fear of clowns you might be put into a room with a large number of clowns and the idea behind it is that eventually although you might be extremely anxious at first you learn that no harm is going to come of you and your anxiety naturally has to subside. The second technique is known as systematic desensitization and this is where you work with a psychologist to build up your ability to tolerate whatever you're scared of, for example, if you were afraid of clowns you might start by being asked to read about clowns, then to look at a picture of a clown, then maybe to be in a room where you can see a clown outside where He/She can't get to you, and then you gradually build this up until eventually, you get to the stage where you can approach a clown without getting this fear response. It's about learning to break these associations you have between clowns and something bad happening to you.

Now there arises another question, what would it be like to live a life without fear? The answer is very simple, you wouldn’t. You would be dead if fear was non-existent. Everyone would like to live that life where there are no strings attached to hold you back, no boundaries to stop you from moving forward, it might be possible, but then it is also possible to be dead while you’re alive and alive while you’re dead, philosophically. As explained above, Fear is the flight or fight response in humans, it helps you quantify whether taking the risk is worth it (sometimes it is, sometimes taking the leap of faith is all it takes to make or break something. Trust me it’s better to die taking the leap than live regretting you didn’t.). Now that you know what Fear is and why you need it, there is something about Fear, you still have to get to know about it. It’s origin story, as stated earlier that there are innate fears that a human is born with, but where do these innate fears come from who is their “MAMA”. Some researchers have argued that there might be one fundamental fear underlying all of these things. One you can trace all of your worries to THE FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN. So when Albus Dumbledore said, “It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more” he might’ve actually been right (I can hear those HP fans going wild). This makes a lot of sense if you believe that the earth is round and that we are the result of evolution, humans during the early years feared anything that was colorful, loud, and bright and anything that caused pain. This shows the same response any animal shows to anything in its surroundings. This is how we come to worship gods. Gods were created by humans to satisfy their ego when they couldn’t understand natural phenomena such as rain, thunder, and fire. So tell me, what did you Fear?