Understanding Your 7 Emotions

CBT for Everyday Emotions and Common Mental Health Problems

Lawrence Howells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000512717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

Understanding Your 7 Emotions explains how emotions help us to respond to the world around us and are fundamental to our existence.

The book provides a detailed understanding of the main human emotions – fear, sadness, anger, disgust, guilt, shame and happiness – showing how to live with them and how to resolve problems with them. Each of the seven chapters also includes an 'emotional trap' to highlight what happens when we get stuck responding in unhelpful ways and explains how to get out of the trap. Grounded in emotion science and cognitive behavioural therapy, the book provides a powerful alternative to mental health diagnosis. Examples and exercises are provided throughout to help apply the ideas in everyday life and achieve health and happiness.

This easy-to-read guide will help anybody who isinterested in emotions or is struggling with common mental health problems to better understand how emotions work and improve their own and others' mental health and emotional wellbeing. It will also be an invaluable resource to those working in the caring professions.

Chapter 1

Fear

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138112-2

Fear is an unpleasant emotion that’s intense and has a dramatic impact on our bodies, increasing our heart rate, breathing and muscle tension. We don’t feel intense fear very often, but we might regularly feel on edge, nervous or anxious. Usually, it’s a helpful experience. Before an important meeting, fear encourages us to prepare, think about what questions we might be asked and make sure we arrive on time. In the meeting, it helps us concentrate and improves our performance. Fear can also be helpful in encouraging us to avoid situations that might do us harm. There is a strong link between fear and excitement, and the tension between these two emotions can lead to intensely pleasant experiences like exhilaration and joy.

At other times, fear can become a huge problem. Feeling scared of everyday things, feeling scared most of the time, or feeling easily overwhelmed and struggling to cope can all be extremely unpleasant experiences and can lead to significant problems. It is at these times that the experience of fear can be labelled something else – anxiety – and anxiety disorders might be diagnosed.

This chapter starts with an understanding of fear, its causes, how we learn to fear things and what happens when we are scared in our minds and bodies. It explores the importance of fear in keeping us safe and the tensions with excitement and exhilaration. Next, it looks at how we can tolerate and use helpful responses to fear, with some practical techniques that can help us when we are scared.

The chapter moves on to the fear trap, which illustrates what happens when we feel excessively scared or scared of things we shouldn’t be. This covers problems that might be labelled with anxiety disorder diagnoses, including panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, specific phobias (e.g., of animals and other creatures, natural environments, flying, dentists and body-based phobias, such as blood), generalised anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. The chapter gives illustrations of how the fear trap works for these different fears and how to get out of the fear trap.

Understanding and accepting fear

Like all emotions, fear helps us to respond to what’s going on around us. Understanding the causes of fear, the impact it has on the five elements of emotion and its function can help us accept it. This also helps us to think about how we can tolerate and respond to it and to consider some of the difficulties we might have with it. The first exercise in this chapter (Exercise 1.1) will help you to think about what it is that makes you scared.

Exercise 1.1 What makes you scared?

Write a list of your top five fears; things that would make you feel scared if you were to be near them, or to do them; or things that you have worked hard to avoid in your life.

Now think about your early life. What were the adults around you scared of?

Look at your list of your top five fears. Are you right to be afraid of these things – are they as dangerous as you feel they are?

What causes fear?

For our ancestors, the most common causes of fear were predators and attack. Today, we still face a variety of threats to our survival, and many of us fear things like terrorist attacks, wars and death. But our modern lives and easy access to information have produced a whole variety of other potential fears – lack of money, social success, intimacy and the future. There are also common fears of spiders, heights, snakes and clowns.¹ Sometimes we can also find ourselves feeling scared about everyday things, like making decisions, answering the phone or going out of the house. Fear can become associated with almost anything.

Natural fears

Most causes of fear fall into four broad categories²:

1. Interpersonal events or situations
   We can fear criticism, rejection, social conflict, judgement, interaction, displays of sexual or aggressive behaviours.
2. Death, injuries, illness, blood and surgical procedures
   We can fear becoming physically and mentally ill, which would include disease, contamination, madness, losing control, fainting and sexual inadequacy.
3. Animals
   We can fear creepy crawlies, snakes, dogs and many different animals and creatures.
4. Agoraphobic
   We can fear going into shops, crowds or public places; travelling on buses, trains or planes; entering enclosed spaces like elevators or tunnels; or crossing bridges. We can get to the point where we are scared of leaving the house altogether.

Have a look at your fears in Exercise 1.1, and see if you can put them into one of the four groups. Are there any that don’t fit? Generally, around 90% of fears fit into these four categories, which suggests that humans are biologically more likely to fear some things over others. In our evolutionary past, fearing particular things probably helped us to survive.

Learned fears

We are not all scared of all of these things, though, so our learning and experiences are also important in shaping our fears.

One of the most powerful situations that teaches us to fear things is the experience of pain. Think of the last time you really hurt yourself. Now think about how you felt in similar situations afterwards. A common example is learning to ride a bike. Falling off a bike hurts, and so once we have fallen off a bike, we’ve made an association between riding the bike and pain. This results in more fear when we get back on the bike.

Fearing previously painful situations is an example of learning from our own experience, but not all learning is this direct. Monkeys reared in the wild show a fear response to snakes, but monkeys reared in captivity don’t. When monkeys reared in captivity see monkeys reared in the wild being scared of snakes, they learn to fear snakes themselves. They continue to show fear in response to snakes even months later.³ Toddlers who see their mothers responding fearfully to toy snakes learn to fear snakes in much the same way.⁴ So not only do we learn to fear things through our own experience, but we can also learn to fear things that those around us seem to fear.

In Exercise 1.1, are there fears that you might have learnt from those around you when you were young? Are there fears that are shared by your family?

Accuracy of fears

All of us have things that we’re scared of. We are likely to have learnt to fear these things through our own experience and through watching others. We seem to be more likely to fear certain things than others, which links with evolution and survival.

Importantly, our fears may not be accurate or precise. Consider Exercise 1.1, in particular the question of whether you are right to fear things as much as you do. It is likely that there is at least one fear on your list that you fear more than you should. Most of us fear things that are not as dangerous as we think they are, and many of us will have experienced interference in our lives as a result of strong, unreasonable fears.⁵ In fact, if we consider the importance of fear in terms of survival, it is likely that we will ‘play it safe’. Missing a real threat may have major consequences for us, whereas responding to a harmless situation as if it were threatening just wastes energy.

• We are likely to overestimate threats

Most of the time, we know what is making us feel scared. Sometimes, though, we can find ourselves feeling scared or on edge and not really knowing why or feeling on edge for lots of the time. When this happens, the object of our fear tends to be more abstract, like being out of control or being uncertain. We will return to this in the section on worry.

Exercise 1.2 Feeling scared

Think about a recent time when you felt scared. This is usually easier with an intense feeling rather than a mild one.

• How would you describe the experience?
• What did you notice/were you most aware of?
• What made you feel scared?
• How did you respond/what did you do?
• What happened afterwards?

What happens when we’re scared?

Have a look at Exercise 1.2, which will help you to start thinking about what happens when we feel scared. The Introduction of this book outlines the five different elements of emotions. Fear, like all emotions, arises out of changes in these five different elements, as shown next.

Feelings

We experience fear at different levels of intensity. When we experience a little bit of fear, we are apprehensive, concerned or nervous. With more intense feelings, we are fearful, scared or alarmed, and our most intense experiences of fear are when we are panicked, terrified or petrified. Most of us don’t feel scared very often, but when we do it feels energetic and like a ‘cold’ feeling.⁶

Sometimes people will use words to describe feeling scared like ‘anxious’, ‘stressed’ and ‘worried’. Each of these three terms usually describes something slightly different than fear, and they are covered separately at the end of this section.

Bodily responses

Fear has a dramatic impact on the body, activating the sympathetic system and suppressing the parasympathetic system.

When the sympathetic (accelerator, or fight-or-flight) system is activated, our heart rate increases, our breathing deepens and our muscles tense. These are the bodily responses we are often most aware of when we are scared. However, there are other important changes too. Our senses are sharpened: our pupils dilate to let in more light, our hearing becomes more acute and our sense of touch is heightened. This is why, if we get scared in a busy place, it feels as though it gets even louder and busier. The sympathetic system also has a powerful impact on our attention, narrowing it and focusing it on the threat. This is why it can be difficult to concentrate on other things when we are scared.

Fear drives an increase in heart rate, breathing, muscle tension and attentional focus on threat

The parasympathetic (brake, or rest-and-digest) system is suppressed in fear. This means that the digestive system slows down, causing a dry mouth and ‘butterflies’ in the stomach. In extreme cases, we might get rid of food either through being sick or needing the toilet (this is where the phrase ‘bricking it’ comes from – visiting the brick outhouse before indoor facilities!). The parasympathetic system also controls immunity and libido, so prolonged suppression of the parasympathetic system (see later section on stress) can lead to reduced immune function (and so, getting lots of viruses) and reduced sexual interest.

All of these reactions are fast and often intense; people sometimes talk about an ‘adrenalin rush’ or ‘adrenalin thump’. It usually reduces fairly quickly, but it can be extremely unpleasant if it lasts for a long time.

Facial expression

Fear is an emotion that others can read quickly on our faces. Our facial muscles tense, our eyes widen to allow in more light and our mouths often open. Sometimes this is because we are screaming and shouting; at other times, it helps us to breathe (and improves our hearing). For lower intensities of fear, our facial expression is often one of thought and consideration.

These facial expressions are linked with the changes in the body outlined in the previous section, but they can also communicate to those around us that we are scared.

Thoughts/interpretation

When we are scared, our thoughts are quick and impulsive rather than slow and methodical. It can feel as though our thoughts are racing or spiralling. Thoughts can be motivating, like “I need to get out of here!” or “Help!”, or they might race to find the best response to the threat.

Our attention and thoughts are directed towards the perceived threat, and it is difficult to concentrate on anything else. It is also difficult to use a slow, rational decision-making process. Sometimes this leads to circular processes of thought that are not particularly rational and are also very troubling. This is covered later in the section on worry.

With intense fear, we can find it almost impossible to think clearly at all.

Behaviours

When we are frightened, we often have an urge to do something – usually something quick and physical, like running away. If we resist this urge, we can end up feeling restless and agitated. Another common response is to freeze like a ‘rabbit in the headlights’: to stop and remain completely still.

Fear and the brain

The Introduction of this book showed how the brain is made up of three parts: reptilian, mammalian and rational. Fear functions t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Fear
• 2 Sadness
• 3 Anger
• 4 Disgust
• 5 Guilt
• 6 Shame
• 7 Happiness
• Afterword
• Index