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What sparks the amygdala and nervous system into action and makes us afraid can be an idea or memory (conscious or unconscious), a sensory impression (a sound, sight, smell, or touch), or an internal physical sensation (such as palpitations or pain). In fact some of us are so sensitive to our own sensations that we can overreact to our bodies’ signals (anxiety sensitivity). Much study has been done on the subject of such introceptive condition, which helps explain how the fear system can be mobilized by imperceptible physical symptoms, which are then mistakenly interpreted as a threat to the organism…
Since memories are “filed” in multiple ways, according to associations and to the impressions registered in all the senses, the special attentiveness of fear can be stirred by smells or facial expressions or physical sensations or noises or by odd phenomena recalling past experiences of danger or by thought associations. An element from a remembered threat will rouse a readiness for fear. Our brain is constantly working, processing, comparing the present wit the past, evaluating beneath the threshold of awareness. “Should I be wary because I was once mugged in a vestibule like the one I am in now?” “Ten years ago such a cracking sound above my head signaled that a heavy tree branch was about to fall on me. I had better look up and be prepared to run.”
At the same time, the internal physical sensations associated with primary emotions open the memory banks for past experiences of those emotions. Physical sensations of rage stir memories of past anger. This is why the act of crying, even when formalized in mourning rituals, stirs sadness; why laughing, which stimulates a network of positive and relaxation responses, relives pain by sending positive physical signals to our organs and muscles that contradict the negative ones. For this reason, then, the physiology of fear, which was created to mobilize us to face dire threats, also opens the memory banks associated with loss and desperation. Just as the triggering of an alarm system in a building sets hearts and minds racing, so the activation of our inner alarm system creates thoughts of doom, even when the original bodily stimulus is a harmless mouse or the mistaken impression that we are gravely ill (which [researcher David] Barlow would call a false alarm). [Antonio] Damasio reports upon a carefully controlled experiment in which subjects were called upon to move muscles in their faces in a certain order that, without their knowledge, simulated expressions of “happiness, sadness, and fear.” Remarkably, by this purely mechanical means, the subjects experienced the moods associated with the expressions.
Conversely, memories and thoughts associated with the emotions stir their physical effects. If you imagine sorrowful events, you activate physiological sorrow. (Actors often have a gift for such autosuggestion.) This is why the imagination plays such an important part in abetting or allaying the physical symptoms of fear and indeed all the emotional states….
According to those who have observed hundreds or even thousands of cases like mine, phobics tend to be perfectionists, they tend to have an exaggerated need to please others, they tend to seek certainty, and most interestingly of all, they tend to avoid showing certain kinds of emotion. The book Your Phobia has it that many of us have in common the “need and ability to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.”
-- Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life
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