Dear Stoics,

Do you like to be scared? In daily life, hardly anyone would say yes. We prefer to feel comfortable and calm, and even a bit of stress at work can leave us nervous. And yet every autumn, when the shops fill with ghouls and plastic skeletons, so many of us settle down to watch gory movies. So, why is such a big part of our entertainment built on extremes, when what we need is a steady, peaceful life? That is a good question, and we are going to dig into it right now.

Researchers call this recreational fear: feeling frightened and delighted at the same moment. It started long before the first horror film. Peek-a-boo has been called the first jump scare a child ever meets, and the toddler bursting with laughter during a game of chase is doing exactly what the grown-ups pay to do in cinemas.

The main idea is that scary fun is a kind of play, and it’s how we rehearse the hard parts of life when the stakes are low. By watching a character creep down a dark corridor, your body rehearses the alarm. But because you know you are safe on your sofa, it never turns into real distress. Psychologists have a name for this that might sound a bit funny: benign masochism, enjoying something the body reads as a threat while the mind knows better. It also covers our love for chili peppers and bitter coffee, and for many of us, the favourite dose is just below the level we can no longer bear.

Studies in real haunted houses, with visitors wearing heart rate monitors, found the same pattern. Enjoyment followed an upside-down U: too little fear was boring, too much was unpleasant. The best moments were in a sweet spot in between. Visitors actively steered their fear toward that spot, grabbing a friend’s arm or laughing at the right moment, and got better at it with practice.

Why does it feel so good afterwards? When researchers asked visitors to one extreme attraction how they felt before and after, about half came out in a better mood, especially those who had walked in bored. Much of the body’s effort goes into anticipation, and the enjoyment arrives when the thing you dreaded turns out to be survivable. There may be a longer effect too: during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic, horror fans reported coping better than people who avoided the genre, as if years of rehearsing worst cases had left them prepared and steadier when a real one arrived.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should power through the frights we don’t enjoy just because they make a good real-life rehearsal. In that same study, about one in six people felt worse afterwards, and the researchers say clearly that nobody should do what makes them uncomfortable. The pleasure relies on two things real danger doesn’t offer: you choose it, and you can leave when you feel like it. When you take away the choice, the fun disappears right away. This also means the horror fan and the person who avoids scary movies are doing the same thing: keeping fear in the zone where it works for them.

A racing heart means something has your full attention; it doesn’t necessarily mean something has gone wrong. The body sounds the same alarm for a jump scare and a job interview, but the story we attach to it makes the difference. People who enjoy a scary movie have learned to tell themselves: “This might be super intense, but I am safe”. That might be a good exercise for all of us: trying the same approach during our real-life anxieties.

So no, you don’t need to avoid extreme entertainment to protect your mental health, and we don’t think you need to seek it out either if it makes you uncomfortable or anxious. If a good scare leaves you satisfied, enjoy it; you are playing, and fun is good for you. But if it leaves you awake at night, that is useful information too. Either way, it is nice to know that the thing that makes us hide behind a cushion is one of the oldest ways humans have of practising courage.

Yours truly,
The Stoic App Team

This week, we’ll finally listen to the calm voice that rarely shouts, but usually knows best.

Everyone has one. It is the voice that says “It’s only a movie” halfway through a scary horror, the one that suggests sleeping on a decision, and the one we talk over because it is so easy to ignore. Over the next seven days, we’ll spend a few minutes finding out what it has been trying to tell us, and what happens on the occasions we actually listen. Open your journal and join whenever you feel like it.