Horror films, haunted houses, and scaring the pants off our friends this time of year are typically harmless activities. But the fear they induce can trigger the body’s fight-or-flight system—releasing chemicals into the body and causing a number of physiological responses.
“Our body’s fear response is actually a fantastic tool for survival in dangerous situations because it kicks in fast, pumps us full of energy, heightens our focus, strengthens our muscles, and gets us ready to handle whatever’s coming at us,” says Kenneth Carter, a clinical psychologist at Oxford College of Emory University and the author of Buzz!: Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies.
It’s a built-in survival mechanism, “that’s been with us since our ancient ancestors had to flee from predators,” adds Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.
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But even as it helped our predecessors escape saber tooth tigers and keeps us out of harm’s way today, activating the body’s fear response isn’t always a good thing. “If it’s triggered too often with constant stress or frequent jump scares,” cautions Carter, “it can wear our bodies down.”
Here’s what fear does to our bodies, how our minds differentiate between real and perceived threats—and why some thrill-seekers might want to exercise more caution.
What fear does to your brain and body
The body’s fear response, or fight-or-flight response, always begins in the amygdala—a part of the brain’s limbic system that’s critical for recognizing threats and processing emotions. After it perceives a threat, the amygdala sends a distress signal to a command center in the brain known as the hypothalamus, which tells the nervous and endocrine systems to release hormones and neurotransmitters such as cortisol, dopamine, noradrenaline, and adrenaline.
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“The neurotransmitters are released from neurons in the nervous system, while the hormones are released from the adrenal glands—a pair of endocrine glands that sit on top of the kidneys,” explains Marc Dingman, a biobehavioral health scientist at The Pennsylvania State University.
Research shows that these hormones and neurotransmitters work together to quicken your breathing and to make your heart pump oxygen-rich blood faster to your muscles and vital organs. This prepares the muscles and brain to rapidly coordinate a threat response.
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In such a state, “our muscles tighten, so we’re ready for action; our pupils dilate, so we can see better; our minds sharpen, so we can focus solely on the threat; and our hearing improves, to make us more sensitive to sounds,” explains Kiecolt-Glaser.
The release of adrenaline also reduces pain by inhibiting signaling pathways, so we can run further or fight harder than we’d normally be able to tolerate.
Although stress hormones play the biggest role in these changes, fear also prompts the body to release dopamine to further heighten alertness. “This can contribute to the often-surprising feelings of pleasure that some people experience in fear-induced situations,” says Emily Hemendinger, a stress management researcher and the clinical director of the Intensive Outpatient Program at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
How are real or perceived threats different?
Our immediate biological response to fear is the same whether we’re facing true danger—or something that only appears that way, says Holly Blake, a professor of behavioral medicine at the University of Nottingham Medical School in England.
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But your brain usually soon recognizes the difference between a real and perceived threat.
“There are two phases to the fear or startle response,” says Denise Millstine, an internal medicine physician and the director of the Mayo Clinic Integrative Medicine Clinic in Arizona. She explains that the first is “automatic and involuntary,” and only lasts for a moment. “This is the ‘jump’ in the haunted house or what happens when someone leaps out in front of you,” she says.
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In other words, that actor wearing a scary mask and chasing you through a haunted house with a fake chainsaw will initially stress your system in much the same way an actual killer with a real chainsaw would.
But almost immediately after this initial stress response occurs, the prefrontal cortex—an area of the brain that helps us think rationally and inhibits impulses—kicks off the second phase of the fear response: Detecting whether the threat is real or just a guy in a mask.
This connection is helped by the hippocampus—the brain structure responsible for the formation and safeguarding of memories. “The hippocampus assists by retrieving memories of past haunted house experiences to support the argument that the current situation isn’t really life-threatening,” says Dingman.
How fear can harm the body—even if the danger isn’t real
But sometimes the brain doesn’t have such memories to draw from or doesn’t know what’s real or what’s not. Think a friend dressing up to scare you or the experience of watching a particularly frightening movie.
Because our brains evolved in the real world billions of years before movies starting being made, it sometimes identifies what we see on screen as real, or at least as educational. This is how Jaws—a movie showcasing a mechanical killer shark—made millions of people afraid of the real thing.
In these situations, the body’s full fight-or-flight response may not kick in. Instead, smaller quantities of stress hormones are often released—resulting in telltale effects such as a racing heart, sweaty palms, or feeling especially jumpy.
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Though harmless and fun for many people, “frequent scares can still be stressful—even among people who think they enjoy it,” says Mihail Zilbermint, a physician and the director of the endocrine hospitalist program at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Indeed, Kiecolt-Glaser explains that when stress hormones are released too often or for long periods of time, “it can wear your body down.” In some people, she says, “it can lead to health issues like high blood pressure, heart problems, digestive issues, and immune system dysregulation because your body is constantly in ‘high alert’ mode.”
And because adrenaline has been found to damage heart tissue in some people, individuals with heart conditions need to be especially careful. “I recommend avoiding intentional jump scares if you have a heart arrythmia,” advises Millstine.
Ditto for people dealing with chronic back pain, “as the abrupt muscle contractions that happen with a scare might set off muscle spasms and flare up your symptoms,” she adds.
Overexposure to jump scares can also desensitize you to fear—which, again, is an important evolutionary survival response. “People who enjoy horror films or visit haunted houses regularly might not react as strongly to real danger because their brain gets used to these situations through a process called habituation,” says Carter.
Another consideration is that people with conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anxiety disorder “may have an overactive amygdala that causes their fear response to be more dramatic or to affect them more than other individuals,” says Hemendinger. Such people, she says, “may benefit from skipping this year’s haunted houses.”
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