All we have to fear is fear itself.

Our brains are hard-wired to fear the things that could harm us. It’s an essential legacy of our early days when spiders, snakes and other harmful creatures, too numerous to list, could kill us. The part of the brain that protects us in this manner is the amygdala, an area of our brain that could be seen as our “fear centre”. It is an essential part of the body’s panic response system and numerous studies have shown that it lights up when people get scared in response to frightening situations. (Although recent research suggests that it may not be as simple as the amygdala being the direct source of our fear. I’m referring to a paper published in Nature Neuroscience in February, 2013.)

But whatever the precise human biological process in dealing with frightening situations, it doesn’t alter the fact that, to a very great extent, our lives in the twenty-first century are hamstrung by this ancient reflex action we all carry. What I have in mind is how we all tend to react to bad news as compared to good news. How our attention is much more likely to be grabbed by something frightening or sensational than by something positive, with the media headlines being the prime candidates of this.

A web search for classic newspaper headlines brought to light some wonderful old-timers. What about the English newspaper The Sun that ran a now infamous headline ‘Freddie Star Ate my Hamster‘ on its front page on March 13, 1986. The story was untrue, by the way!

Or the Australian Daily Telegraph in 1974 that announced: DARWIN TERROR STORM: 40 DIE!
Or The Washington Post of Monday, July 28th, 1952 that proclaimed: ’Saucer Outran Jet, Pilot Reveals’.

The advertising industry knows full well that making people feel needy, even if only very temporarily, is essential to generating a sale.

Not just the advertising industry. I well recall when I was a humble office equipment salesman for IBM in the UK in the early 1970s and helping spread the acceptance of the IBM Selectric typewriter, or golfball typewriter as it was often called, that when in front of a potential customer, one tried all sorts of questions that focussed on the limitations of the conventional electric typewriter. Asking questions such as how frequently did the typebars clash, or was there ever a need to have a different typeface?

Now these are quaint, almost charming examples of stirring up fear. Utterly trivial when compared to the heavy stuff. Around the time of writing the first draft of this book, in October 2014, the International Business Times ran a headline: US-Russia Nuclear War Could Wipe Out Humanity – Nuclear Physician Warns. The story opening:

A nuclear war that will deplete the ozone layer, emit radioactive pollution, form massive fire storms, and a nuclear winter could ignite between the United States and Russia over the Ukraine crisis. Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician, an advocate of citizen action to address nuclear and environmental crises, the founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and a 1985 Nobel Prize nominee warns that the Cold War has returned and could escalate into a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. “It’s an incredibly dangerous situation. … If there’s a nuclear war tonight, that’s the Northern Hemisphere (of the entire world) gone,” she said at the National Press Club Newsmaker press conference.

“If there’s a nuclear war tonight, that’s the Northern Hemisphere (of the entire world) gone,”

Now that’s negativity of the first order, and if you detect a slightly light-hearted tone to my words, then that is not intentional. It is just that it’s almost impossible, in my humble opinion, to have any serious, rational response to such a news item. We have no control over the ‘games’ being played by the superpowers, we can do nothing to prevent such an event, and were it to happen there is no practical response one could take.

Still the negativity has the potential to be increased by more extreme dire warnings. And the dire warning of all dire warnings is the one about mankind’s impact on this planet: climate change; loss of natural resources; over population; et al. Again, to a very great extent, we have no control over the ‘big picture’. The difference between a nuclear Armageddon and climate change is that most people can see the signs all around them. That’s a powerful source of personal fear.

There was an article in Psychology Today written by Dr. Alex Lickerman (Alex Lickerman, M.D., is a general internist and former Director of Primary Care at the University of Chicago and has been a practicing Buddhist since 1989.) in October, 2011 under the title of How to Reduce Negativity. Dr. Lickerman made the point that, “Though we all have negative selves, there seem to be only two basic reasons they appear: one is as a result of a lack of self-confidence, or belief that we can solve a particular problem; the other is simply out of habit.”

If that is read quickly, it’s easy to take it as “one is as a result of a belief that we can solve a particular problem“, as I did. Then on re-reading it, the meaning became clear. One of the reasons our negativity can appear “is as a result of a lack of belief that we can solve a particular problem …” I underlined a part of the sentence because it needs to sit squarely on the shoulders of our consciousness.

Once one has understood the ease with which the wider world, and especially how it is reported, affects us then we are armed, so to speak, to actively counter any negativity that arises in us.
Now I quoted Dr. Lickerman from a little way into his article in Psychology Today. But his opening words are extremely valuable for all of us to consider.

In one sense, the battle to be happy is a battle against negativity. Bad things happen all the time but how we internalize them, how we react to them, is what ultimately determines their final effect on us — and over that we have simultaneously more and less control than we realize. More, because we assign the meaning of events, not the events themselves, even though it feels as if that meaning is somehow assigned for us. Yet less, because we can rarely simply decide when confronted with a negative life event that is is, in fact, actually positive. To do that, we have to find a way to actually believe it, and that requires a process of continual self-reflection and attitude training; a program designed to strengthen our life force, so to speak.

Later on in Part Four there are a number of chapters that explore the power of positive thoughts and ways of countering the negativity that is so often in our faces.

1,124 words Copyright © 2014 Paul Handover