The One Thing All Humans Fear
All humans fear something, some fear spiders, some snakes, some darkness and some speaking in public. There is one thing that ALL humans fear, it is the fear of something or someone moving closer to us. The study was done at the University of Chicago and they found humans fear things moving closer rather than away.
Eight different tests were done using things like sounds, letters getting bigger and bigger and people walking toward you. The goal was to see if, as they got closer, it would strike fear in the test subjects, and it did, in all of them.
Physical objects aren’t the only things we fear, it extends to events approaching in time like relatives visiting, a big test on the horizon or maybe a deadline at work… it’s called ‘approach avoidance’ and dates back to evolutionary evolvement when early humans weren’t equipped for danger such as wild animals or people they didn’t know approaching.
For some reason ‘approach avoidance’ is something we can’t control or when it to use and when not to.