Fear

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"The second fear is the 'battlefield fear.' This is the concrete, clear and present fear in face of a life-threatening situation. To get shot, to get maimed by a grenade or to step on a mine. Every soldier has a different method to manage this fear. I used to lie to muyself that the situation was much better than it looked, that the enemy wasn't that close, the shots were not aimed at me and the sound behind the bush was an animal and not an enemy soldier. My auto-suggestion method worked out fine for me. I also invented 'mantras' to calm myself down. One of them went like: "Today is a good day to die. But not for me. Not today!" Of course, endlessly repeating that you are not dying today, won't increase your chances to survive, but you can fool yourself into believing that it does. It worked and I calmed down. Other soldiers were using other methods, a lot of them were praying, others sang songs and some soldiers overcame their fear through shouting out loud or cursing. I lied to myself or repeated my mantras. Whatever works for you is fine. The third type of fear, however, is the worst. It's not only related to combat, but all of us will experience it one day. It's the fear of imminent death. That you won't be there anymore. In combat, this happens when you are in a really hopeless situation. This fear is the worst feeling I have ever experienced, almost like if somebody pushes you from a cliff and you have inly seconds to live. You feel completely alone. In the end, there is nothing you can do to overcome this fear. While other fears can be managed, you cannot train or prepare for your last moment on earth."

- Fear

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"Acute fear in response to encountering threat is associated with a distinctive pattern of neural activity distributed through the cerebellum (Ploghaus et al., 1999), limbic system (Knight et al., 2004; LaBar et al., 1998), and cortex (prefrontal: Phelps, Delgado, Nearing and LeDoux, 2004; sensory: Morris et al., 2001; cingulate: Milad et al., 2007; insula: Critchley et al., 2002; motor: Lissek et al., 2014). This dis-tributed network (Saarimäki et al., 2016) enables the rapid detection and appraisal of threat, its saliency to oneself, the employment of executive functioning and memory for decision making and action plan-ning, and the implementation of action plans (Zhu and Thagard, 2002). In addition to generating immediate survival responses, fear systems also modulate vigilance in anticipation of threat caused by environmental cues, perceptual uncertainty, and ambiguity that elicits a sustained fear prior to actual encountering of threat (Fanselow, 1994; Lang et al., 2000; Lehne and Koelsch, 2015). This gives rise to subjective feelings of anxiety, tension, suspense, dread, or foreboding that reflects a generalized antici-patory preparedness for the possibility of potential danger. Several recent studies have shown that spa-tiotemporally distant threats elicit activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cor-tex, hippocampus and amygdala, which are associated with a cognitive mechanism of fear that reflects the need for complex information processing and memory retrieval to generate an adaptive and flexible response. A threat that is proximal in space or time, on the other hand, elicits a reactive fear response of immediate action and fight or flight, and which elicits activity in the periaqueductal gray, amygdala, hypothalamus, and middle cingulate cortex (Mobbs et al., 2007; Qi et al., 2018)."

- Fear

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