I’ve been thinking some about fear and happiness recently, so these excerpts from an article by Roger Fransecky (“Happiness Is A Choice”) caught my attention:

“Dan Baker’s book, What Happy People Know, confirms the wisdom of the research into what (Dr. Martin) Seligman calls “authentic happiness” and “learned optimism.” Baker notes that a major barrier to happiness is fear. He writes, “We all have a neurological fear system embedded deep within our brains, a neural network that once helped us survive as a species, but now limits our lives. The biological circuitry of fear is the greatest enemy of happiness.”

We’ve written about how fear binds us, edits our hopes and diminishes our potential for happiness. Baker reminds us that fear is the repository for our past traumas, our fear of the future and our archaic instinctual terrors. Fear can be a gift, our way of staying out of the darkness and moving into the light of awareness and new beginnings. But if our fears own us, we have to break free…by awareness of those fears, and through the courage to challenge our fears to see if they are still real.”

For additional information on “neurological fear systems embedded deep within our brains,” reference the work of Dr. Warren Chapin.