Fear
This has been scary for me to write. All week I have been wrestling with my fears as I write about fear. I have a great many fears and those fears have been preventing me from writing about fear. I have the fear of no one reading this. I have the fear of it being shit. I have the fear of it being shit and everyone reading it. But mostly I have the fear of an impostor worried that I will be found out for the fraud that I am. Who am I to write about fear? I am just as scared as everyone else.
Life is scary! Living life every day is scary. It sometimes feels like going through a day is just a game of navigating a series of calculated risks. It’s like driving through rush hour traffic in a densely populated city. Having to stop and go with the ever-changing rhythm of the cars around you is a delicate dance. Mess up the dance and you’re in a fender bender or worse. So, too, with fear. Fear is like a red light green light of signals instructing you how to live your life. It signals green zones, green actions, green places, people and things and red zones, red actions, red places, people, and things. Follow the rhythm of your fear to stay safe. Fear wants you to believe that if you do not follow its signals then the result will be severe harm to you or to someone you care about.
But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Fear is not negative, though it feels negative. Fear is actually an information system, a biological information feedback system. A survival mechanism. Fear exists so a person can react to potential threats and decide the safest course of action quickly. When a human being has a fear reaction their brain becomes hyperalert, the pupils dilate, the bronchi dilate, breathing accelerates, heart rate rises, blood pressure rises, blow flow increases, and the stream of glucose to the skeletal muscles increases. At the same time all non-vital organs, organs that do not help in the survival mechanism shut down. All this happens within seconds of being frightened. The body is incredibly efficient and enables a person to make an instant decision for their safety based on their fear response.
Putting it another way, fear is a messenger. When fear rises up, it is trying to tell you something. It is trying to tell you go this far and no further. It is saying on the other side of this wall I’m building is something that can do you harm.
Which feels all kinds of intense and unpleasant but is actually great! Imagine if we listened to this system to make decisions! What if we used our fear feedback messenger system to make decisions. Not only could fear tell me the risks associated with writing this article, but I could use fear to decide whether to write it or not.
Now whether the thing on the other side of the wall is actually a threat varies. The fear can be legitimate like for example don’t dance on the edge of a cliff. But the fear can also be absurd like don’t dance ever because people will see you. Being seen dancing isn’t life threatening; dancing on the edge of a cliff is. In a similar vein, writing this feels life threatening. What if I write this and it is shit and everyone sees it and my reputation is ruined and I can never show my face in public or on the internet ever again as long as I live. Obviously, that is not the case. Part of the trick here is making fear your ally. Helping your fear calibrate appropriately to react with the relevant intensity for the associated risk.
How on Earth does one do that?
Well, it begins with understanding where our fears come from. One of my favorite facts of life is that children, infants, have two fears when they are born. That’s it. Only two. You would think that we are born with much more than two fears. Especially with how much we fear as adults and later in childhood. But the truth is that we are born with only two fears – the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. The rest of the fears we have are learned. They are learned from negative experiences, and they are learned by watching the behavior of those around us, particularly our caregivers. When our caregivers fear something, avoid something, that is a very strong signal to avoid that which they fear.
This means that if a fear is learned, it can be unlearned! Our caregivers are not villains. They have their own histories that taught them the fears they have that they conveyed onto their children. Moreover, their goal as caregivers is to keep the child in their care safe. We are all taught our caregivers’ fears. We are also taught fear by experience – a painful, shameful, or unpleasant experience of any kind teaches us fear. Unpleasant experiences create aversions which blossom into fear.
So how can we unravel these learned fears. I don’t have all the answers, but I believe it starts with recognizing what we fear. So much of fear is unconscious. You walk around a hole on a familiar path enough times and it becomes unconsciously the way. From there, even if the hole is filled, it is difficult not to walk around it anyway. Being aware of your body and noticing fear reactions is the first step to unraveling fear. Notice when your body activates the fear feedback mechanism. Notice what triggers that mechanism. Then take the time to evaluate if the fear is yours or something you were taught. Evaluate if the fear is protecting you from something that is actually life threatening or just perceived to be life threatening. Little by little you can shift the boundaries of your fears and create a new reality.
Working with fear and making it an ally gives way to an entirely new way of life, an entirely new type of life. Imaging living a life that feels both completely safe and is authentic to you. A life where you don’t allow the fear other people have taught you to keep you from doing what you know is true for you. A life where risks are taken with the help of fear rather than in spite of fear. A life of healthy fear.
“I am free from fear, the fear that keeps me stuck.”