What if fear is not a bad thing?

The other day I was helping a client work through a lot of fear and anxiety she was feeling. The way she was relating to fear was that it was a bad thing and that she shouldn’t feel so scared. And so often we do that, right? We resist the fear, telling ourselves that we shouldn’t be fearful. Yet, what we resist persists. So, the more we try and ignore our fear, the bigger it seems to get. Eventually it’s like this dark looming cloud.

Susan David says, “real courage is not fearlessness, it’s fear walking”. And she has a point. However, have you ever considered WHY you experience fear in the first place?

See most of us relate to emotions as either good or bad, because some emotions elevate you – i.e., make you feel “good” – and some emotions bring you down – i.e., make you feel “bad”. Yet, emotions are neither good nor bad. They simply are part of the human experience. Being human means you will face ups and downs. You will experience some wonderful things, and you will experience some tragic and difficult things. That is simply part of the contract you have with life. Wanting it to be otherwise, is aiming for dead people’s goals, because only dead people experience no emotions.

A more supportive or empowering way to look at emotions, is to treat them as data points. Susan David postulates, “emotions are data, not directives”. What she means by that is that emotions serve as signposts in our lives. They point us to the areas in our lives or the situations we need to pay attention to. Yet they don’t direct our behaviour. We always get to choose our response in every situation.

So, if we were to suspend our judgment of the emotion of fear for a moment, and we did not consider fear a bad thing, then perhaps the question to ponder is, what does fear DO for me? What is the purpose of fear?

The main function of fear and anxiety is to act as a signal of danger, threat, or motivational conflict, and to trigger appropriate adaptive responses. Fear alerts us to potential danger. It is the body’s natural alarm system. So, when we feel the emotion of fear, what it is trying to get us to do, is to become more alert and pay more attention. What do most of us do? We ignore the fear, or pretend it’s not there, or we actively avoid dealing with the situation or people evoking the fear in us. Ironically, that amplifies the fear even more.

That was my client’s experience too. The more she avoided looking at what was causing her anxiety, the more anxious and stressed she felt. The more she resisted being with her fear, the more she felt anxious and powerless.

Eventually the discomfort of constantly feeling fearful and anxious reached boiling point and it was more uncomfortable to stay scared than to simply decide and move forward. And that is exactly what she did. And you know what, the anxiety dissipated. Why? Because the message had been received.

You see fear works FOR you. Fear is there to alert you to potential danger. For my client, the fear was telling her exactly what she did NOT want to happen and that propelled her to take action towards ensuring the things she worried about would not occur. Or put another way, the fear was there to help her strategize so she could create what she wanted.

And that is ultimately the function of fear. It’s there to get us to pay attention to what might transpire that might affect us negatively. It’s there to motivate us to act proactively and to plan for the scenario we fear might unfold. It’s there to assist us in coming up with a strategy. And once we decide and act, the fear goes away, because we are at choice, and we are moving forward.

So, despite how you might think that fear holds you back, fear actually wants you to proceed – only with caution and alertness. Once you move forward, once you decide, the fear goes away, because it has done the job it was there for, which was to get you to pay more attention to what was going on around you and to proceed with caution.

The key point here is proceed. You still proceed. You simply proceed with caution, now knowing that there are potential threats to pay attention to. Our hunter gatherer ancestors became hyper alert when they sensed danger. They didn’t do nothing. They took action. They either hid away, or ran away, or prepared to fight, depending on the nature of the danger. They became attuned to their environment, they listened more closely, they watched more closely, the moved more slowly, or they knew to run quickly. But act they did.

In our modern day lives, we experience anxiety around things we fear might happen. We don’t always know if these things will happen, but our tendency is to avoid taking action because of the fear and then we continue to experience the anxiety, because we are staying in inaction. Once we get so uncomfortable that we are almost forced to take action, the fear goes away.

So, what if fear was not your enemy, but your friend? What if fear was there to help you decide? What if fear was the most valuable companion you could ask for? We don’t feel fear unless we truly care about something.

I read somewhere the other day that fear is a mask for desire. We experience fear because we desire something. We are yearning for a big change in our lives and the fear alerts us to proceed with caution, to pay attention to what we are doing, so that we can succeed in creating what we want. If we are careless, we might not bring focus and attention to the thing we want to create. But, when we are alert, we pay attention, we care. And what happens when you bring your whole focus and attention to something, you are more likely to succeed.

It is incredible what people can create when they are focused and intentional. So, my invitation is that next time you feel fearful or anxious, see it as an indicator that the thing you are worried about is important to you and that you care about it. Just because there is fear, doesn’t mean you should not act. It simply means you should proceed with caution. Ask what is the fear wanting you to pay attention to? What is the fear helping you see that you might otherwise ignore that could jeopardise what you are trying to create here? How is the fear being your friend right now?

And then if you want to take it one step further, you could do some fear setting. Tim Ferris describes how fear setting works to really map out what we anticipate might go wrong and to plan for it accordingly. What fear setting does, it helps you see how resilient and resourceful you actually are, by providing the opportunity to anticipate what could occur and plan how you will recover if what you are worried about does occur. This helps you see that you can handle whatever comes your way.

It’s the resistance to fear that doesn’t let us see that what we fear most is just what we tell ourselves is going to happen. Most of the time the thing we fear will happen doesn’t happen, so we spend so much of our time living in fear of things that never transpire in reality. My coach often says fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. When we spend so much time worrying about things that haven’t happened, we end up living through difficult things twice – once in our minds and once in reality. And if you are a constant worrier, then you might live through difficult situations over and over and over in your head, without it ever actually transpiring in reality.

Why would you choose a strategy that has you losing, when you can opt for something that sets you up to win. Doing some fear setting and moving forward WITH the fear, is the best way to discover your real strength and resilience. And from experience I can say that it’s so worth it. Think about how many times you were afraid of something, only to be totally surprised by how well it turned out or how much fun you had in the end?

References:

1. David, S. (2016). Emotional Agility: Get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life. New York: Penguin Random House.
2. David, S. (2017). The gift and power of emotional courage. TED2017. Available online at: https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_david_the_gift_and_power_of_emotional_courage?language=en
3. Ferris, T. (2017). Why you should define your fears instead of your goals. TED2017. Available online at: https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_why_you_should_define_your_fears_instead_of_your_goals?language=en