What Causes Fear?

Identifying what causes fear probably goes back to a past experience in childhood or early adulthood, and most fear, you'll be glad to hear, is the creation of our imagination.

Maybe you were bitten by a dog and freeze everytime you see that particular breed (a friend of mine has an absolute fear of these dogs now because of this past experience).

Maybe you were tongue-tied when making a speech, and now fear public speaking.

Maybe you're afraid of the dark. Now this one is very common, but what causes fear of this kind?

Put simply, your imagination builds within you a fear factor, or fear mechanism, that your mind then recalls everytime you are in the dark, or speaking or whatever your fear is. The imagination grows bigger and bigger and causes fear relating to your situation.

Other causes of fear may have arisen from early childhood - being disciplined in school, you now fear authority. Or your parents threatened you when naughty "if you do that again I'll ......", maybe giving you a fear of being shouted at or looking stupid.

Fear can be overcome by taking the necessary action to isolate it and then work out why you had that fear in the first place. It means sitting down and actually writing out what your fear is and doing something about it.

You have internal and external fears.

External Fears

External fears are sometimes not easy to overcome - take for example a bull chasing you in a field. That is a very real fear, but a fear which becomes a survival instinct, where you just act as necessary without little thought. That is raw fear!

But another example of external fear is fear of spiders, fear of driving and so on. And in each case the causes for fear will undoubtably be some past experience, or knowledge of the experience.

Internal Fears

Internal fear is emotional, fear of someone not liking you, or fear of not feeling good enough. It's something that you link to a negative emotion, but which you can overcome. What causes internal fear? Emotions.

It's the old saying - Garbage in, Garbage out. Filling your mind with negativity only produces negative thinking, which in turn can often result in Filling your mind with negativity only produces negative thinking, which in turn can often result in low self esteem.

So, you can learn to overcome fear by finding what causes fear and taking the necessary action to face it when it appears.