Scientists have long established that not only our consciousness, but our entire body reacts violently to dangerous situations.
Fear can lead to a change in the frequency and strength of the heart, cause sweating, provoke gastrointestinal disorders (nausea, vomiting, flatulence, diarrhea), affect the activity of the respiratory system, causing a feeling of shortage of air, lead to urinary retention, or, conversely, provoke involuntary separation of urine, and also cause bowel movements ("bear disease").
All these phenomena occur due to malfunctions in the autonomic (autonomic) nervous system of our body. A great contribution to the study of the autonomic nervous system was made by an outstanding Russian scientist - academician A. D. Nozdrachev. This system consists of two main divisions - sympathetic and parasympathetic, and the third - additional - metasympathetic, which ensures the automatic performance of vital functions at the level of individual organs without the participation of the central nervous system. The sympathetic department is designed to mobilize all the body's resources if necessary, and the parasympathetic department performs an energy-saving function, ensuring the economy of our spending.
To better understand the logic of the autonomic nervous system, one should travel back in time - at least 40-50 thousand years ago, when the human body was formed. Suppose a primitive man saw a saber-toothed tiger in a bush and got scared, which activated his sympathetic system and adrenal glands, which secreted adrenaline.
As a result, a redistribution of blood occurred, which passed from the skin and internal organs to the heart and skeletal muscles, preparing them for flight or defense, the bronchi dilated to deliver more oxygen, the pupils increased in diameter to let in more light, the stomach and intestines slowed down their work in order not to interfere with the repulsion of the attack, the skin glands secreted sweat so that the body could slip out of the predator's paws, the hair stood on end to frighten the aggressor, the liver began to break down glycogen, releasing an additional amount of glucose into the blood - the main supplier of energy, etc.
If the enemy is strong, then the best strategy would be flight, and suppose that our ancestor, with the help of the active work of the sympathetic department, managed to escape from the tiger and climb a tree. (By the way, in life, there are often cases when, fleeing from an angry dog, ordinary untrained people immediately overcome two-meter fences and climb telegraph poles, which later cannot be done in a calm state.) At the same time, the sympathetic department is not interested in what price was given. salvation or victory, the main thing is the achievement of a useful result (in this case, saving a life).
But after the trouble has passed, it is the turn of the parasympathetic department, whose task is to restore the body's generously spent reserves. The parasympathetic section reduces oxygen consumption, restores the normal functioning of the digestive system and helps to remove metabolic products, as well as sleep and rest after military and other labors.
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It is important to note that although human life has changed dramatically over the past millennia and saber-toothed tigers and cave bears have migrated from nearby bushes to paleontological museums, our vegetative system responds to fear in the same way as our distant ancestors - that is, to put it mildly, inadequate to the situation.
Well, what, tell me, is the benefit to a student entering the exam that his body's energy has increased many times over from fear and he can do a handstand right on the professor's desk or, running away from the examiner, run a hundred meters in eleven seconds? If you do not slow down the reaction of fear in time, then the autonomic system will work automatically (that's why it was called autonomous) and it will only interfere with overcoming social fears, disorganizing thinking, and interfere with the choice of a truly optimal strategy of behavior.
Although humanity has centuries of experience in observing the reactions of people experiencing fear and anxiety, nevertheless the first scientific publications on the study of the effect of fear on the body date back only to the beginning of the 20th century. In 1911, it was shown that when recalling an emotionally colored event, the subjects' breathing became frequent and deep. In other experiments, the researchers used a chair that tipped over backward when the subject sat on it, causing fear in people. At the same time, a slowdown in breathing and an increase in heart rate were noted.
Thus, it was shown that a strong and prolonged feeling of fear is accompanied by increased breathing rate, and sudden fright - by its "reduction". In 1928, Nancy Bailey experienced the following stimuli on her fellow students: they listened to a story about cattle drowning in the sea; held a burning match in their hand until it began to burn their fingers; then, four feet away, they fired a revolver loaded with a blank cartridge that made a particularly loud sound, and some were handed the revolver to fire themselves. On the basis of the subjective report of the subjects and the analysis of physiological reactions, N. Bailey also came to the conclusion that there are two types of fear: fear from surprise and fear due to understanding the situation.
At the Voronezh Center for Experimental Medicine and Life Safety, together with Ph. D. EI Ivleva, we conducted research in which we helped people get rid of various fears - of dogs, spiders, darkness, etc. To weaken or completely eliminate fear, a person first needed to mentally recreate a situation in great detail that caused negative emotions, and only then, with the help of a special psychotherapeutic technique, he was given strength and energy to overcome fear. It turned out that when a person remembered a frightening event, his body reacted as if the source of danger was nearby, the heart quickened its rhythm, blood pressure increased, muscle tension increased, and breathing quickened.
With the development of science, scientists got their hands on new devices for studying the secrets of the body. At the beginning of the century, the French doctor S. Feret and the Russian physiologist Tarkhanov, using various methods, independently discovered that with fear, human skin changes its electrical properties. This is how the galvanic skin reaction (GSR) was discovered, which is one of the main components of a lie detector, in fact, which allows you to determine not the degree of truthfulness of a suspect in committing any crime, but just the level of his fear. More about the principle of operation of the lie detector will be described in another article, but for now it can be noted that the body is much more truthful than consciousness, no matter how brave a person is, his body will definitely show by its reactions that he is afraid.
In general, it should be noted that the relationship between the emotion of fear and the state of internal organs is diverse and ambiguous. On the one hand, fear and anxious thoughts adversely affect the work of our organs, and on the other hand, disturbances in the work of internal organs, in turn, can cause attacks of fear. In some conditions, for example, with hypochondriacal neurosis, these mutual influences acquire the character of a "vicious connection", when anxious, obsessive thoughts about possible diseases disrupt the normal vital activity of internal organs, which through the system of our internal sensitive sensors - interreceptors further disorganizes the patient's psyche.
The worse his mood, the more gloomy thoughts overwhelm him, the more he fears the possible adverse consequences of his illness, the more the body's well-coordinated activity is disturbed. As the Romanian physician A. Paunescu-Po-dianu wrote in his book Difficult Patients, “anxiety turned towards physical health, maintained continuously and exaggerated by the smallest ailments felt by the patient day after day, adds a vague, indefinite, but persistent fear of the severity of suffering, of possible complications, consequences of the disease and, mainly, of its incurability."
An important point in understanding the two-way connection between the state of internal organs and emotions is the ideas of the American psychologist William James, who believed that emotions are initially born not in the depths of our brain, but on the periphery of the body. According to his hypothesis, the effects of the external environment automatically cause certain changes in the internal state of the organism, and only then the brain assigns these changes a "label" of the corresponding emotion.
So, for example, the sight of a stranger in a dark alley can cause heart sinking and sweating. The brain begins to perceive these signals from internal organs and at some moment suddenly realizes: if my body reacts like this, then I am probably afraid. Thus, according to James, we feel joy because we laugh, sad because we cry, and afraid because we tremble. At first glance, such a statement seems unfounded, but James's hypothesis sometimes finds convincing confirmation in life!
At the Amsterdam airport in 1995, I saw a huge neon balloon, along which multicolored lights were running, folding into letters: "Hee hee hee … Ha ha ha." When people who were afraid to fly airplanes looked at this balloon, their fear diminished.
Don't believe me? Then try to paint a smile on your face and then think of something scary. After that, assess your condition … I guarantee that your fear will be less than usual, because our body cannot smile and be afraid at the same time: two opposite emotions mutually neutralize each other.
Yuri Shcherbatykh
"Psychology of Fear"