Your Relationship with Fear

We talked about failure in the last chapter, this lesson is about the other F word and that is Fear.

Fear is that primitive, hardwired drive that’s been keeping humans alive since before we had language to describe it. Fear is one of the most powerful emotions you have. It sharpens your senses, floods your system with adrenaline, and can make you run faster and fight harder than you ever thought possible. In the right circumstances, it’s extraordinary.

The problem is that most of us are triggering it in entirely the wrong circumstances.

If you’re living a reasonably safe life, the kind where your physical survival isn’t genuinely on the line very often, fear shouldn’t be dominating your day. But for a lot of people it does. Not because they’re in danger, but because this ancient alarm system is misfiring. The same mechanism that was designed to get your ancestors away from predators is now activating when you have to send a difficult email, have an uncomfortable conversation, or try something you’ve never tried before.

I think about fear as the emotional glue that holds together all the things you’re uneasy, uncertain, and anxious about. Left unchecked, fear doesn’t just slow you down, it stops you entirely in your tracks. I see people living smaller lives than they’re capable of because fear has quietly created boundaries that restrict their lives.

Fear Is a Liar

The first thing you need to understand about fear is that it doesn’t tell you the truth, well not the whole truth, anyway.

When fear speaks to you, it tells you about the worst possible outcome from all the possible outcomes that could realistically happen. It shows you the catastrophe, the humiliation, the total collapse of everything you know.

It doesn’t show you the version where things go okay, the version where you stumble but recover, the version where the thing you’re terrified of turns out to be nowhere near as bad as you imagined. Fear is not interested in a balanced assessment of the situation, it’s interested in one thing and because of it, it keeps you exactly where you are.

This is important to understand because if you make your decisions based on fear’s version of reality, you’re making decisions based on a distorted picture. You’re letting a liar called fear decide your fate. The catastrophe fear is showing you is almost never the thing that actually happens, but if you roll over and give up you’ll never find that out.

Fear Is a Guide

Here’s the thing fear doesn’t advertise, it’s also a guide.

Fear tells you when something is dangerous, yes. But it also tells you where you’re lacking, where you’re uncertain, where you need to grow. The things that frighten you are rarely random, they tend to cluster around the things that actually matter to you, the areas where you sense a gap between where you are and where you need to be.

Fear of public speaking tells you that communication matters to you and maybe you don’t yet feel capable or have polished and practised enough. Fear of starting a business tells you that financial security is important and you’re not yet confident in your ability to create it. Fear of relationships tells you that connection matters and maybe you’ve been hurt before. Follow the fear and you’ll find where the work needs to be done in your life.

Fear tells you where you don’t want to go, but if you listen carefully, it’s also telling you where you need to go.

That’s not a comfortable thing to hear when you’re in the grip of it. But it’s useful. You need to learn to challenge yourself, and nibble away at your fears. Perhaps doing something that scares you a little each day is the first step to conquering fear. Not base jumping, not anything extreme or stupid. Perhaps all you need to do is to keep stepping up to the mark and getting out of your comfort zone a little, because if you don’t, that comfort zone gets smaller and smaller until there’s almost nothing left in it as the walls of your life close in on you.

Fear Is Fuel

Fear is also one of the most powerful motivators you have, that is if it’s pointing you in the right direction.

Think about how fast you move when you’re genuinely frightened. That motivation is primitive, and it’s real. Fear moves you away from risk and into safety. But here’s where it gets interesting, you can use that same energy to move towards something better too rather than just away from something bad.

The fear of not achieving your potential, the fear of still being exactly here in five years, or the fear of looking back at your life and seeing all the things you never tried. That kind of fear, properly channelled, gets people out of bed in the morning.

Fear works both ways: it can fuel you forward or it can keep you paralysed. The difference is your relationship with it. Understand it and you can direct it, without any insight into fear it may direct you away from everything you want.

Theme parks exist because of fear. Fear, packaged correctly, is exhilarating and exciting, even addictive. Some people, myself included, actively go looking for it when life gets too comfortable. Skiing fast, snowboarding, extreme sports, there’s a reason people do these things. Fear, in the right context, makes you feel alive in a way that nothing else quite matches, the problem isn’t fear itself. The problem is having a broken relationship with it.

When Fear Gets Out of Balance

Too much fear, too often, and something interesting happens, you stop noticing it. You become habituated to a constant low-level alarm state, and that’s when things go wrong in ways that are hard to explain, your judgement deteriorates and your risk assessment breaks down. Decisions that should never be made get made and I’ve seen too many people take unnecessary risk, and I’ve seen it end careers, marriages, and cause injury and death.

At the other end of the spectrum, fear that’s been overwhelming, fear rooted in genuine past trauma, can make the most ordinary situations feel like emergencies. A hair trigger response to things that don’t warrant it, a life lived braced for the impact of an explosion that isn’t coming.

Neither of these is a good relationship with fear, what you’re aiming for is proportion. The CEO who’s appropriately nervous before presenting to the board and only takes necessary risk, nervous enough to prepare properly, but not so terrified they can’t function. The student who feels enough pressure to open the books, but not so paralysed by exam anxiety that they can’t sit the exam.

Fear calibrated to the actual stakes of the situation is the key and that’s what you’re aiming for.

There are quite a few things that can prevent you calibrating your fear response. People often self-medicate with alcohol or other substances to numb their fear response and turn the volume down. It works short term and it costs a lot long term, because the fear doesn’t go away, it just waits and grows, and when it comes back, which it always does, it usually comes back worse. If that’s a pattern you recognise in yourself, it’s worth talking to someone properly rather than trying to manage it alone.

Building a Better Relationship

The goal isn’t to eliminate fear, you couldn’t do that even if you wanted to, and you wouldn’t want to if you understood what you’d be giving up. The goal is a better relationship with it.

That means being honest with yourself about which fears are proportionate and which aren’t. It means examining the fears you carry rather than suppressing them and hoping they disappear. It means getting used to having a bit of uncertainty and a few unknowns in your life, because that’s what expanding your life actually feels like so get used to being a touch uncomfortable.

Too often people self-medicate, avoid, distract, anything to not have to sit with fear. But without actually engaging with it, understanding it, and building a real relationship with it, it keeps showing up in different areas of your life.

Fear is a liar, fear is a guide, fear is fuel, with the right relationship, you can use it to help not hinder.

This isn’t therapy. If you’re dealing with clinical depression, severe anxiety, or trauma, please see a professional. I say this as a doctor, not as a disclaimer.

Further reading

• Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (3rd ed.). New York: Holt Paperbacks.
• LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Barlow, D. H. (2002). Anxiety and Its Disorders (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
• Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. New York: Guilford Press.
• Gilbert, P. (2009). The Compassionate Mind. London: Constable.