It seems that fear helps you learn and anxiety makes things worse. Like, the author is saying that fear is an adaptive learning mechanism. It helps you learn to survive. And anxiety is maladaptive. How is it maladaptive? Idk, it seems like anxiety doesn’t get better cuz when you’re lacking info the brain spins out of control. When does anxiety happen here? How does anxiety make things worse here? I wish things were explained philosophically. That’d make it easier to understand.
I’m going to read sentence by sentence:
Fear is an adaptive learning mechanism that helps us survive.
It seems that the goal of fear is to survive. Like, that’s what it helps with. The author I think said that fear helps you learn to avoid danger. That helps you survive.
Can there be downsides to fear? Like, what if you don’t know if something actually is danger or not? Like, you see too many things as danger? Idk how that could happen.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is maladaptive; our thinking and planning brain spins out of control when it doesn’t have enough information.
Saying “on the other hand” contrasts two things. Anxiety is different than fear. Fear is adaptive and anxiety is maladaptive. What does maladaptive mean? This is what Merriam Webster says:
:marked by poor or inadequate adaptation
That would make sense. That’s like failing at the goal. If you adapt an idea then it’s good enough for a goal. If an idea doesn’t adapt then it fails. Why does it sound like anxiety makes things worse tho? Like, the author says that your brain spins out of control. What does “spins out of control” mean?
Paragraph from the book, “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind” by Judson Brewer:
You can get a sense of this simply by looking at how quickly a fear response happens. If you step into a busy street and a car bears down on you, you reflexively jump back onto the sidewalk. In this situation you don’t have time to think. Processing all of that information (car, speed, trajectory, etc.) in your PFC takes much too long, and making a decision
about what to do (“should I step back or will the car swerve around me?”) takes even longer. We can break it down into three very different time scales that differentiate reflexes from learning from anxiety:
Immediate (milliseconds)
Acute (seconds to minutes)
Chronic (months to years)
The first sentence:
You can get a sense of this simply by looking at how quickly a fear response happens.
I have to check what “this” means but it seems like a larger idea. It’s a pattern. If you look at how fast something happens you’ll get a sense. Where is a fear response from? I think that’s from how we learn thru fear.
“this” could be about how fear is adaptive and anxiety is maladaptive. Or how anxiety is maladaptive. Or how our brain spins out of control without much information.
What does “simply” mean? Like, obvious? Or by doing something simple? Or not requiring much? Like, a simple request.