INSANE: Oddly terrifying strange images | Vintage Vibes

Harvard Business Review emphasizes that people tend to love horror because it is stimulating, educational, and allows them to experience new things from the safety of their own homes.

For example, if you watch a horror movie, you get a surge of negative and positive stimulation in the form of fear and anxiety, as well as excitement and joy. What’s more, horror can energize you.

Meanwhile, through horror content, you are engaging your curiosity about some of the darkest, most taboo aspects of the human experience.

Moreover, you are throwing yourself into various simulations of danger, which can improve your chances of survival in the future.

Human beings are hardwired to react to danger and stress in certain ways in order to keep themselves alive.

You have probably heard about our fight-or-flight reaction kicking in in the face of threats. What you might potentially not know is that this is not the full story.

Aside from a desire to fight or flee when you face acute stress, you might also freeze or fawn. Let’s get into it.

The three most basic stress responses, fight, flight, or freeze, were identified first, followed by fawn later. The basic idea behind these responses is that you try to decrease or avoid the present danger so that you return to a calm, relaxed state.

In a nutshell, the fight response is your body’s way of urging you to aggressively fight off any threats. Flight, on the other hand, is your body's signal that you can run away from danger.

Freezing is self-explanatory: your body seizes up, and you feel unable to move, neither to fight nor to run away.

Meanwhile, when you fawn, you essentially try to please someone to avoid the conflict in the first place, WebMD explains.

When you freeze or fawn, you are not taking decisive actions, unlike when you fight or flee.

The main signs of the freeze response include:

1. Feeling stuck in place
2. Sense of dread
3. Pounding or decreasing heart rate
4. Feeling stiff, heavy, cold, and numb

Meanwhile, the top signs that you are entering a fawn response to acute stress are:

1. Trying to be overly helpful
2. Over-agreement
3. Focusing on making someone else happy
4. Soothing the source of the threat

People who respond to danger by fawning are often covering up their distress and damage due to trauma, neglect, rejection, or violence in their past.

Individuals who tend to fawn are often overly dependent on other people’s opinions. What’s more, they are very bad at establishing healthy boundaries, and so they are very vulnerable to control, manipulation, and narcissists.

Broadly speaking, the most common stress responses include things like pale or flushed skin, an increase in your heart rate, dilated pupils, a temporarily dulled pain response, tenseness or trembling, and feeling on edge.

What’s more, after super stressful encounters, you might have distorted memories of the event.

Naturally, these responses work to keep us safe and secure. However, if you have very strong reactions to mundane situations or slightly spooky online content, you might end up burning out and harming your mental and physical health.

“Anxiety disorders can trigger your fight or flight response even during situations that don’t put you in danger. Unfortunately, there are detrimental effects of this chronic stress,” WebMD explains.

So, you need to learn to manage your stress and anxiety levels if things are getting out of hand. Therapy and medication aside, you can learn to overcome your stress responses through mental grounding.

For instance, you might:

1. Focus on your environment
2. Remind yourself that you are safe
3. Distract yourself by doing mental calculations
4. Recite positive affirmations, songs, or poems either aloud or in your mind
5. Imagine overcoming your fears
6. Think about relaxing in your happy place

Meanwhile, physical grounding techniques include focusing on breathing, holding an object tightly, physically connecting with the ground by putting weight on your heels, and tensing your body before releasing the tension.

If the ‘Oddly Terrifying’ online community sounds familiar, the odds (pun not intended) are that you may have stumbled upon some of their posts online. This is one of the most popular and active spooky content-related niches online, and it continues to bring in crowds upon crowds of fans to this day.

First created back in October 2013, over the past 12.5 years, the group has grown to massive proportions. Currently, 558k internet users visit the community for some odd-meets-terrifying content every week.

Too spooked to speak? No worries, we’ll wait for you to get your bearings back. Share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments at the very bottom of this eerie list, Pandas.

Which pics genuinely freaked you out the most and why? What is your relationship with horror content like?

What scary movies, shows, games, books, or podcasts do you enjoy, and what would you recommend to us?