Exchange of Realities

This post was requested by DrBurst of Habitation Intention. If you want to see a topic covered, feel free to ask!

You may have noticed that most of my posts on fear this week had one thing in common: overwhelming the audience or otherwise putting them off balance. Too many inputs and not enough processing power, an immediate situation and no immediate solutions, things that were supposed to not be problems refusing to keep not being problems—you’d think that sounds more like stress than fear, wouldn’t you?

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Technically, you’d be right—those are indeed stress triggers. You’d also be technically wrong: according to Goosebumps! The Science of Fear, stress is fear, albeit a lesser form.

That may sound strange, but consider the following. Both stress and fear tend to be triggered by situations that are at least somewhat out of the control of the person experiencing them, but often do still leave room for that person to try to change things. (Haven’t you seen people who no longer fear something because they know it’s going to happen to them anyway, or quit stressing over a project by declaring it impossible?) Both result in similar chemical responses: in fact, the fight or flight response, primarily associated with fear, is an integral part of the first stress reaction. And both fear and stress are things that wear down people who experience them on a day to day basis.

There are two main differences between fear and stress, both having to do with the consequences the person experiencing the emotion is trying to avoid. Stress is generally a reaction to things we see as ’smaller’, overall—while they’re still technically threats, they don’t often have immediate consequences, or the consequences seem minor to those around us. Meeting deadlines, prioritizing five or six different responsibilities, trying to keep several people with nearly mutually exclusive agendas satisfied at the same time: it’s in our control, or at least appears to be, and it’s not the end of the world if we fail. So we can’t admit to being scared, but being stressed is perfectly acceptable. Fear, on the other hand, is more commonly used when talking about things that are sufficiently threatening that it’s not embarrassing to be afraid of them; ones that can’t be easily mitigated or fixed. Threats to life and limb are fear-worthy, as are threats to family, or to way of life, or sometimes even to particularly important objects or reputation. So the difference has two roots: one part the intensity of the stimulus trying to be avoided, and one part the semantics of how much of the stimulus’s effects we’re willing to admit.

Interestingly enough, these roles seem to switch in a narrative, with fear becoming the emotion people have more tolerance for. In the real world, stress is more common, and generally more accepted; it doesn’t bear social stigma, and is if anything something of a fact of life. Fear, on the other hand, is supposed to be suppressed. After the elementary school years, with ’scaredy-cat’ a deadly insult, people get used to seeing fear of anything not immediately life-threatening, and sometimes even things that are obviously dangerous, as a sign of weakness at best and something wrong with them at worst. But when you get out of the real world and into the narrative, it changes: now the writer or the game master is encouraged to bring out fear in the audience, and movie reviews laud the particularly scary films. But introduce stress to a narrative, by overwhelming the main character with conflicting priorities or giving the players too many things to accomplish in too little time, and you leave yourself open to complaints. Most GMs have heard (and I’ll even admit to having said) that dreaded refrain: “If I wanted stress, I’d stick to the real world and at least get some good out of it!” Essentially, stress is so familiar, even ubiquitous, that it destroys escapism; but fear, particularly intense fear, is different enough, and comparatively straightforward enough to conquer, that it’s still interesting and possible to learn from.

The advantage to this, of course, is what brought us into this topic. Stress is fear, to a lesser degree; therefore, things that could be sources of stress can, if their circumstances are changed, also serve as fear triggers. It’s all about intensity and context.