346

Fear is an emotional impulse originating in your limbic system and amygdala in response to threatening external stimuli or stressful situations. Get rid of fear? No. Suppress the power that fear has over your reasoning mind? Yes.

Intense fear is likely not a survival mechanism. Studies show that fearful animals, including humans, tend to experience more harm and death through panic than those experiencing less fear. This is because in situations involving intense fear, the frontal lobe, your reasoning and intuition center, experiences a reduction in activity as activity in the limbic system (the emoting brain) increases, resulting in you technically getting more stupid and slow as you get more afraid.

Some evolutionary biologists like Joseph E. LeDoux theorizes that fear was a way for weaker animals to get themselves removed from the gene pool by predators, allowing for stronger animals capable of resisting the fear impulse and engaging the "fight or flight" response through the frontal lobe to survive and breed. So it is most probably not fear that is good for survival, but an individual's natural resistance to fear.

You are well within your rights to embrace fear instead of avoiding. But I prefer to avoid fatalist perspectives such as the "need for fear." Especially when it comes to things proven to decrease my intelligence. I usually want less of that, not more.