Читать книгу The Highly Sensitive Person - Elaine N. Aron - Страница 23

It is important not to confuse arousal with fear. Fear creates arousal, but so do many other emotions, including joy, curiosity, or anger. But we can also be overaroused by semiconscious thoughts or low levels of excitement that create no obvious emotion. Often we are not aware of what is arousing us, such as the newness of a situation or noise or the many things our eyes are seeing.

Actually, there are several ways to be aroused and still other ways to feel aroused, and they differ from time to time and from person to person. Arousal may appear as blushing, trembling, heart pounding, hands shaking, foggy thinking, stomach churning, muscles tensing, and hands or other parts of the body perspiring. Often people in such situations are not aware of some or all of these reactions as they occur. On the other hand, some people say they feel aroused, but that arousal shows up very little in any of these ways. Still, the term does describe something that all these experiences and physical states share. Like the word “stress,” arousal is a word that really communicates something we all know about, even if that something varies a lot. And of course stress is closely related to arousal: Our response to stress is to become aroused.

Once we do notice arousal, we want to name it and know its source in order to recognize danger. And often we think that our arousal is due to fear. We do not realize that our heart may be pounding from the sheer effort of processing extra stimulation. Or other people assume we are afraid, given our obvious arousal, so we assume it, too. Then, deciding we must be afraid, we become even more aroused. And we avoid the situation in the future when staying in it and getting used to it might have calmed us down. We will discuss again the importance of not confusing fear and arousal in chapter 5 when we talk about “shyness.”