Is love an emotion like fear is an emotion? In other words, how should we classify love?

People's emotions affect their habits, feelings, and decisions. Love and fear are feelings that guide people's lives by determining the rhythm which each one exposes to take risks and accept personal emotions. Love can motivate people to hike mountains, while fear can close someone in a room for an extended length of time. Those facts evidence the value of better understanding the emotional reactions that can be explained by science and neuroscience methods for using them to better manage love in fear in personal and professional contexts.

Aiming to explain how our emotions, including the feelings of love and fear, have a biological origin, in 2002 LeDoux used reactions that happen in our brain to justify human emotions and their impacts on body reactions and people's actions. Those explanations are based on neuroscience theories, and several examples comparing animals and humans were used by the author to demonstrate his ideas and propositions. (1) One decade later, Damasio and Carvalho demonstrated the association between several human organs in the production of love and fear feelings, which are defined by the authors as mental experiences of body states.(2) `

The suggestions pointed out by both authors about the connection between feelings and biological actions from our nervous system can be useful to drive studies and discussions about how society could better comprehend and, consequently, deal with the variability in how each people feels love and fear in the rush current world. However, considering the difference in the effect that love and fear cause on people's actions, is posted the question: are they similar feelings? Is it possible to manage love and fear in the same way once someone is looking for a balanced life? And is really possible to feel love without having felt fear?

Those questions motivate us to evaluate people's reactions to fear and love scenarios and invite each reader to answer to yourself how fear and love can be categorized in your personal life. This comparative article introduces conceptual definitions for the feelings of love and fear from two authors and explores real-life examples of how people assume attitudes in fear and love situations. By promoting the immersion of readers in those real contexts, it is expected that at the end of this 10-minute reading, each one can assume a final opinion about the classification of love and fear in your personal life.

Human reaction to fear and love

Fear can make someone hide from life challenges and routine activities but also to make someone closer to his dreams. Let’s explore how by getting it into a short narrative novel.

Maria is a 30 year’s woman who lives in an unsafe city, where active shooters kill to steal a wallet in the middle of a central city park. The simple activity of sitting down on a sunny Sunday at the city park is followed by fear for Maria, who is looking for free time to read a book outside, and she decides to go to a coffee shop or stay at home. The fear triggers Maria to assume a rational behavior that puts herself in a context that is not necessarily what she really wants to do, but she does it by fear.?The emotion of fear here is affecting Maria’s capability to feel the whished emotion of enjoying free time outside on a sunny day; the emotion of fear is associated with a restrictive action and a lovely feeling to Maria. In this situation, the fear inhibits Maria’s opportunity to feel the lovely activity.

At the same time, Maria is experiencing a special moment in life of getting in love. When someone is starting to feel in love with another, there is fear of taking the wrong action and breaking this organic process of loving someone. Maria’s fear of losing the lovely person here makes her care, pay attention to each genuine attitude, and consequently get closer to the opportunity to live her wished love.

On one side, fear causes an action blocking Maria’s opportunity to live a lovely moment, while on the other, it makes her get closer to having the opportunity to live the love. However, is the fear felt in the first case the same fear that we are suggesting in the second case, and is that possible to live love without fear?

Except for love felt by a kid for his parents, what makes people love something (someone) or be afraid about something involves wishes, achievements, and the history behind these personal feelings. The context and individual history promote love and fear, not being possible to define the reactions generically caused by love or fear because is on the individual experience and mind the experiences in his life that are associated with loving and fearing feelings. Following the thesis presented by LeDoux, Damasio and Carvalho, our experiences recorded in our mind are responsible to the way in which we express our feelings and emotions. Love and fear have a connection point that can be expressed in different ways according to individual experiences, wishes, and goals.

Damasio and Carvalho defined feelings as mental experiences of body states and signify physiological needs (2). In the first case, Maria needs self-protection, while in the second one, she wants to protect her feeling of love. In both of them, fear is promoting a protection of human action, however, in one of them, it causes a bad experience, while in another, it contributes to building a stronger relationship.

Coming back to the central question of this piece, using Maria’s experiences, we could categorize fear on different levels and love as a most valuable and wished feeling, which also involves fear.

The achievement of physical and mental ‘love’ is a reflection of several reactions in our brain and hormones, which are influenced by our experiences associated with the object loved (something, someone, or an activity). Once you love, the feeling of fear also is always appearing: you start to be afraid about losing or hurting what you love, and the fear also contributes to making the loved object more special because it brings risk and uncertainty to the actions to increase and fortify love. Using the simple example of a mother that drives her car to drop her daughter at a night teenager party. Her daughter is one of the most loved people, and her happiness is probably among the top 3 most priorities for this mom. Nonetheless, to make her daughter happy involves dozen oh histories where the mother gets afraid, the daughter was exposed to fear, and both of them did it knowing that to be exposed to fear was necessary to achieve the happiness of the loved daughter.

Learning to deal with fear is what makes someone stronger and more mature to be the protagonist of your personal life and, consequently, able to love. Delivering love is impossible if you have not learned how to love yourself. And achieving thism, is a virtuous learning cycle about dealing with fear, angsty, risks, and assuming life decisions. By deciding by ourselves on the next steps of our life journey, we create our history; and record in our brain the experiences that will, each day, make us react better to our emotions and feelings. Once we accept that fear is also a step to making us love and live healthier and happier, it is easier to get each day closer to the opportunity in the elderly years to look back to our life and categorize the fear managed over life as a challenge that has offered the life opportunity to live and feel 'the real love'.

It is in our hands to decide how we categorize and manage fear and love in our lives and set up our history of fear and love in our brain. Once we are able to categorize fear as a driver for growth and live better experiences in the future, we learn to accept that fear, as love, makes part of human life and happiness.

References:??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

1. ???????LeDoux J. Synaptic self: How our brains become who we are. New York; 2003.

2. ???????Damasio A, Carvalho GB. The nature of feelings: evolutionary and neurobiological origins. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2013;14(2):143–52.

This article was written during the Effective Writing for Health Care Postgraduate/Harvard Medical School Ceritication - Class 2023.