Like many children, when I was young I was afraid of the dark. Late night walks across the neighborhood kicked my heart rate up 40 or 50 bpm. Every shadow felt sinister and unidentified noises lit a fire in my imagination fueled by my love for scary movies. I think most kids don’t like the dark and most little boys would never admit it to their peers. As I got older, I began thinking that I was getting too old for that sort of thing, but just thinking it didn’t turn off my physiological reaction. I remember thinking the problem through and choosing a course of action to deal with it. We lived by a large wooded area. I decided that if I made myself go walking in the woods at night enough, eventually, I would get used to it and my fear of the dark would go away. At first, I stuck with short trails that were near the safety of streetlights. Over time, I began to venture deeper into the woods. Finally, I started to detour past spots where the older kids went to party. At first, the experience was terrifying. Adrenaline ran through my little kid blood stream, my heart pounded, sweat soaked my hair, and every little sound made me want to run. Sometimes, I would hear a branch or dry leaves crack in the dark somewhere and I’d run for all I was worth. More often than not, I would reach the end of the trail and everything was fine. Eventually, I found myself comfortable on my evening walks in the woods. Today, when I cannot sleep and find myself particularly worried and stressed, I go for walks on the gravel farm roads outside of Big Sandy. I find it strangely calming now.
In graduate school, I read about this approach for dealing with anxiety and fear. As a kid, I was employing a strategy for dealing with the “fight or flight” reaction that is used by therapists for training soldiers, etc. In mental health, it is called “stress inoculation.” It involves exposing the individual to stressful situations or stimuli to train them to remain calm. Essentially, by putting them in stressful situations over and over again, they increase the amount of stimulation required to set off the fight or flight mechanism. Once when I was a kid, my father showed me a picture he took during basic training in the Army. He was preparing to go to Vietnam when the war ended. The picture was of a live fire exercise. It was pitch black out and all you could see was the tracer rounds going over their heads. They literally had their trainees sit in trenches and fired machine guns at them to get them used to being shot at. The goal was to inoculate them to the fear, like receiving a psychological vaccine.
Over the past 10 years, I have watched as people have begun employing the opposite strategy for dealing with anxiety and fear. There are some instances in which this is a justifiable approach for a short time. However, by avoiding all stressors constantly, we can easily accomplish the opposite effect. We can train ourselves to trigger fight or flight more readily. To clarify, the fight or flight mechanism exists to save us from being ambushed by wolves while we are out hunting and gathering. If the response goes off when we are in the position to talk to a coworker or teacher is like when the smoke alarm goes off while you cook dinner. It doesn’t help you. Learning to identify it for what it is, making a plan for dealing with the fight-or-fight trigger and then facing it is important to taking control of your life and achieving stability. If you feel like you cannot do this alone, plenty of mental health professionals and counselors can guide the process.