In a regular night of your 7 years old, hugging one fluffy bear, you lying in your bed along, suddenly, you felt like seeing a blink from a green eye in your room’s corner. Then you turned on the light, but found nothing. Is this description familiar to you? Maybe everybody has this same experience when we were kids. But have you been asking yourself the reason? Why people afraid of dark even when they are lying in their own home? Is there really something hiding in our closet during the night?
The fear people have to the dark environment is natural. Showing by one research, the fear of the dark is seldom showed up before 2 years old, that is to say, when children grow up older, their afraid to dark became heavier. Followed children’ brain develop, the memory’s storage become stronger, and some of bad memories like the memory of on thrilling movie, or the memory of one disgusting screen showed in a TV program can be easily collected and then turned by kid’s imaginary to the fear of dark. Because in the dark environment, people cannot see anything but the shadow of leafs in our curtain, and obviously, that makes people feel uncomfortable, like something’s losing control but we don’t know what happen in the dark- what if that disgusting huge worm is lying under my bed? Then, the imaginary’s work firms our fear that “ there is a guy lying in my bed” or “ there’s definitely a hand waving”. The best way to release that kind of fear is “don’t care about it, just let that hand go” if you can fight your naughty imaginary, you can fight with your fear to dark.
Actually, besides that reason- our memory and imaginary, for me, there’s maybe another explanation: the thing we feared of is not the dark itself, the thing really scared us is the feeling of “not sure about it”. Like the fear we hold to death, because we don’t know, and do not have the way to know what will happen after the death, but if we don’t know what it’s like, we don’t know how to take a control of it, and people feel anxious about that kind of unsure.
Truly that we cannot know what happen in the dark, but don’t feel so bad to it and try not let your imaginary control your mind. The next time you feel afraid, just close your eyes, and leave that hand in the dark along.
Citation
http://gizmodo.com/why-were-afraid-of-the-dark-and-why-its-good-that-we-a-1448915260http://deldellm.hubpages.com/hub/Scaredofthedark
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_the_dark
This topic caught my eye because when I was a kid (even in middle school), I was terrified of the dark. But, I was afraid of the dark only in my house and my room. I was scared of not being able to see what was in front of me, and like you said, the “unknown.” I wasn’t in control of anything and that’s probably what scares people the most. There is probably a psychological correlation between our brains and the dark. I agree with you and the research that the best thing to do is to close your eyes and forget about it. The article below by Huffington Post talks about how adults are actually more afraid of the dark than children, but are too afraid to mention that. They also say that most people get general anxiety about sleeping in the dark and it is not an irrational fear. Hope that makes everyone afraid of the dark feel better!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/fear-of-the-dark_n_1840014.html
That’s so cool that cocoa nibs are good and good for you! I’m a huge chocolate fan too, so I much just have to give these a try. Here are some other fun chocolate alternatives that i found on Spark People.