What are your biggest fears in life?

What are your biggest fears in life? How do you usually respond when you are faced with them?

What scares you? Terrorism? Climate change? Snakes? Germs?

Whether it makes you buy a handgun or hand sanitizer, an electric car or an electric fence, fear drives much of human behavior. And it’s not just fear of physical harm that makes us want to hide under the covers. The twin fears of intimacy and rejection, for example, shape many of our social interactions.

Scientists say fear and its companion — the fight, flight or freeze response — can save us when faced with imminent physical harm.

This served us well when we were cave dwellers, under constant threat from marauding wild animals or invading warrior tribes. But it can often get in our way in modern life.

“Change has occurred so rapidly for our species that now we are equipped with brains that are super sensitive to threat but also super capable of planning, thinking, forecasting and looking ahead,” said Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. “So we essentially drive ourselves nuts worrying about things because we have too much time and don’t have many real threats on our survival, so fear gets expressed in these really strange, maladaptive ways.”

Dr. Hariri studies the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that has been called the seat of fear (there’s one in each hemisphere of the brain). But it’s really the seat of anticipation. The amygdala primes you to react — your pulse quickens, your muscles tense and your pupils dilate — even before other parts of your brain can figure out if you need to be scared or not. We are particularly sensitive to anything new, other people’s fearful facial expressions, or anything that resembles something that harmed us in the past.

It’s why you jump when you sense rustling in the bushes before realizing it’s just your neighbor’s cat. That reflex can save your life in certain circumstances such as leaping out of the way of an oncoming car. Trouble starts when you can’t tamp down your amygdala’s response, which makes you obsess and perhaps do counterproductive things when faced with concerning but not life-threatening events like the Equifax hack or a vulnerable social situation like asking someone out on a date.

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