see also:

• psychiatry and mental health
• psychology
• prevent burnout, learn to reduce your stress and stressors
• fatigue
• stress
• Coping with shift work
• sleep hygiene
• insomnia
• anxiety
• regret and regret avoidance and decision making

• fear is a critical evolutionary emotion that sharpens the mind and aims to reduce harm however, it can lead to either:
  • anxiety
  • anger - which tends to lead to actions which may not be well thought through and makes for vulnerability as we tend to be convinced by simple messages and not to pay adequate attention or priority to details of critical complex messages or scenarios and leads to hatred and abuse, especially of those with opposing beliefs or social groups. Furthermore anger tends to spread within a group quite rapidly and can become a self-reinforcing escalation. The brain is far faster to react and engage when it is angered, as opposed to watching something nice and peaceful.
  • dysfunctional fear - such as the Cold War
  • chronic stress
  • post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) as fear is one of the key emotions which embeds long term memories
  • apathy - when the fear is overwhelming or over-used (eg. pandemic - we are all going to die or we can't avoid it) or remote (eg. climate change for those not currently adversely affected)
• manufactured fear fuels anger and anger in turn blinds us to the recognition that our fear is misplaced
• fear is THE key emotion that is used to manipulate others:
  • political elections widely use fear
  • organisational leaders often lead by fear and micromanagement in an effort to get high performance but in the end this fear leadership strategy usually fails as it causes dysfunctional behaviours, loss of dynamism and innovation, and high talent turnover which is in itself expensive
  • media uses fear to increase sales of their products or “click-bait” to increase views
  • advertisement to sell products and peer group behaviours
    • fear of missing out (“fomo” phenomenon) which may result in high risk behaviours without adequate attention to risk mitigation
    • fear of not having a product and thus emotive purchases even though the advertisement intentionally misleads the consumer into thinking purchase will resolve their unmet needs when it doesn't - a cruise ship holiday like everyone else seems to be doing to resolve relationship issues or unhappiness when in fact they need to address the relationship itself or your own cognitive thinking processes which may be the cause of one's unhappiness.