We often use the words anxiety and fear lightly in our vocabulary, we even use them interchangeably to describe the same situation or experience, but do we really know how to differentiate these two terms?
Fear is one of the basic emotions par excellence, necessary and adaptive in most cases, at some point in our lives we all feel this emotion to a greater or lesser extent, but when do we experience it?
- Fear is triggered by the presence of a threat.
- Either by perceiving or interpreting some harm or danger.
- For our physical and/or psychological well-being; it often appears in the face of real.
- Present and imminent danger.
- Although many researchers also consider that this emotion can occur in the face of imaginary danger.
In all cases, the common denominator of all these situations is usually its ability to implement emergency behavior in the individual who lives it, thus providing the necessary activation to avoid or escape the situation that causes it. Most of the time, our fears will be fleeting, not being a major problem in our lives, but emotional reactions of fear can also appear that can drastically change our way of life.
Through the role of the prefrontal cortex, we become aware of the feeling of fear, being able to interpret the situation correctly, exaggerated or underestimated, depending on the assessment we make of the moment we meet. Thus, in fear, two important considerations, loss and immediacy are established, which will determine our behavior.
The answers or strategies we implement will depend on our beliefs and expectations about how we deal with what scares us, and can be active (confront) or passive (avoid or escape). They will certainly be more effective as we become convinced of our abilities. and resources to regulate this emotion. The harmful side of poor fear regulation will be the creation of feelings of mistrust, anxiety and discomfort.
Anxiety is related to the expectation that something will happen, that is, when we expect something to happen and anticipate the negative effects before they happen or happen, it oscillates in the same way as fear between an adaptive or impotent response.
In this way, one of the functions of anxiety would be to activate ourselves in the face of the expectation of a possible danger, in many cases selectively reaching or expanding information considered threatening, leaving aside the rest of the stimulating conditions considered neutral.
A clear distinction can therefore be made between fear and anxiety, and this is the certainty of the presence of the stimulus, being clear in the case of fear and confused and imprecise, for anxiety, because in the latter there is a great concern for the anticipation of the negative effects of a future situation, which in many cases can determine a person’s mental health.
As we’ve seen before, fear is linked to assessing imminent danger and anxiety waiting for something to happen in the future.
Both responses will no longer be normal and adaptive when they exceed our tolerance threshold, control is not perceived and a revocation of the aversive stimulus occurs continuously, interfering with the functioning of the individual.
In such situations, one of the recommendations would be to initiate a process of deactivation, because our brain tends to perpetuate a positive or negative emotional response to a situation that it considers especially important.
To do this we must learn to disconnect, to unlearn the link between anxiety or fear and situations to generate more adaptive responses, we can use relaxation and breathing techniques, for example, in addition to informing ourselves about how we work and understand, and the experience of a professional is of great help, this will help us to understand the associations we make of negative assessment in the form of concern , as well as understanding the difference between worrying and facing a problem, and how the assessments we make are associated with fear, and that expectation, the arrival of imminent danger.
However, it is important to remember that each case will have its own therapeutic approach, in which each person will use one or the other resource depending on the situation, personality and context.