What is Fear and What Causes It?

Fear is something that large amounts of people have encountered at least once at some point in their lives. It has been said to have caused a variety of outcomes, many of them being largely negative. Therefore, it is a common human response to react to fear by counteracting it with positivity and/or success. The idea people have of what fear is depends on the person. In the article “How Fear Works”, for example, fear is defined as a “chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals” (Layton 1). The website “Psychology Today” defines fear another way, calling it “a vital response to physical and emotional danger” ("Fear Paranoia”). There are several other definitions people have on the term fear as well but however people define fear, there is usually an act of trying to defeat the fear(s) that people encounter.

The main problem many people have about the emotion called fear is the profound impact it has on their lives. Often, when people feel the emotion of fear, it causes poor judgment and/or decision-making on their parts. Many people do things they would not normally do when in an uncomfortable situation. That course of action a person may resort to may not even be logical. The result of this is that an irreversibly terrible outcome may occur in somebody’s life and/or that person’s close ones’ lives. It is the often negative outcome that results from fear that causes many people to attempt to eliminate this emotion that they consider to be negative and destructive to their lives.

There are several factors that attribute to the fear humans feel. One of them is the atmosphere people are in. In the environment of a workplace, for example, many of the people involved in ...

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