Few people seem to understand that most of the fear that goes on in your body is mental. Small children, upon seeing one image that frightens them at youth (or having one event happen to them that has a negative effect) are going to shy away from things that occupy those elements in their minds. The sweating, the cramping, the goosebumps are all stimuli created by the body when the event resurfaces. The question here though, is how detrimental is a fear to one's existence? Fear is represented as a hurdle one has to cross — yet fear can also be the inhibitor. When you're afraid, your body uses its energy creating tension, nervousness, all the stimuli that fear represents. It wreaks havoc on concentration and one's ability to perform. To quote one of my favorite books:

Fear is the mindkiller.
—Dune by Frank Herbert

And still, how can the body live without it? The experiment I semi-conducted on fear revealed that some fears take away from the human character. Without fear, we become inhuman, not inhumane. We don't have restrictions. We recklessly thrust ourselves from one situation into another. Some fears, regardless of how minute, provide insight into someone's life. And sometimes, what you take away ends up more harmful than what you give back — a life without caution, a life without vulnerability — in essence, no life at all. Simply a shell that takes hits. It could be, say, a fear of stamps, a fear of sunflowers, a fear of dinosaurs. The little things keep us alive, keep us careful, and let us live our lives a little at a time, the way it was meant to be lived.

In the end, it just goes to say that even the little things count.