The Physical And Mental Effects Of Fear

Right Now Fear Is The Greatest Threat facing human beings today.

west Melbourne (I-Newswire) October 24, 2012 - What is the greatest threat to humanity right now? Spend three or four minutes thinking about it. Natural disaster? Nuclear catastrophe? Global warming? Got any other ideas? Chances are you’re wrong.

Thanks to the efforts of concerned scientists, we now know that fear is the greatest threat facing human beings today. It has more power than any external force or influence to profoundly affect your physical and emotional well-being over your lifetime. A human being living in the grip of fear spends his life living a fate worse than any victim of nuclear fallout.

Does that sound hyperbolic? It isn’t. A recent study orchestrated by the World Health Organization examined the physical and mental ramifications of three of the biggest nuclear disasters in recent history: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And what they found was that the greatest threat to the health of victims of these tragedies wasn’t cancer. It was the insidious effects of their fear of developing cancer.

That’s right. Fear posed a bigger physical threat to victims of nuclear fallout than the radiation itself.

According to John Boice Jr., cancer epidemiologist, nuclear radiation only slightly increases your risk of getting cancer (about 1/10th the risk of smoking cigarettes). But people fear the effects of radiation much more than they fear the effects of smoking. And as it turns out, those exposed to radiation were so afraid that they might have cancer that many did not seek treatment.

Although 99 percent of the cancers at Chernobyl (for instance) were treatable, fear made some wait until it was too late. Nuclear radiation didn’t kill them, their fear did. A 2003 study of HIV/AIDS sufferers by the University of California Psychology Department yielded similar results. Their fear of a death sentence made them avoid seeking the treatment that would turn their diagnosis from a death sentence to a manageable condition.

And if causing otherwise preventable fatalities was not enough, fear also directly causes sickness and sometimes death. You don’t need an academic study on a global scale to tell you that fear affects you physically. Think about the last time you watched a scary movie or spent weeks fearing an outcome. Your heart raced, you couldn’t sleep, you sweated profusely. You may have lost consciousness. What you experienced was your body’s autonomic response to fear.

Anxiety attacks are perhaps the most acute physical manifestations of fear. An anxiety attack causes your heart to beat so rapidly that many rush to the emergency room. Until recently, those fears were thought to be unsubstantiated.. But Time recently reported on a study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology that proved that frequent acute bouts of fear and anxiety does in fact increase your risk of heart attack.

But according to Stephen Co, lecturer and founder of Pranic Healing, by the time most people feel the physical effects of fear that intensely, they have been suffering for quite some time. For most people, the constant undertow of fear they feel on a daily basis has similarly subdued physical effects. According to a 2007 study published by the International Institute for Society and Health, living with fear over a long period of time results in reduced physical functioning. Your organ systems stop functioning at their peak. Healthy individuals have a lower quality of life, get sicker more often and stay sicker longer. People with compromised systems suffer exacerbated effects of their illness. But as most are unaware of the cause, their weakened condition begins to feel like the status quo....For more of this Article, GO TO newsonhealthcare.com/the-physical-and-mental-effects-of-fear/