Fear 101 – A Basic Understanding Of This Emotion

There are some things it’s good to have a healthy fear of – drinking poisons, leaping off tall buildings, and sex with gorillas – situations in which our physical body is in imminent danger of annihilation, dismemberment, mutilation, or extinction.

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” – Bertrand Russell

All other fears – the ones we face most often every day – are illusions. They should be given no more credence or authority over our actions than television commercials, election-year promises, or people who try to sell us flowers in airports.

These types of fear are simply the anticipation of pain…not the key word…anticipation. This means you are projecting into the future…more on this in up coming issues.

Most people approach a fearful situation as though fear were some sort of wall. Let’s say the situation is walking up to someone we do not know and saying, “Hello.”

As we think about approaching the stranger, the wall begins to form. As we imagine what the person may say in response, the wall grows denser. (The other person’s response is almost always imagined in the negative: “Would you leave me alone!” Seldom do we imagine the other person looking up at us and singing “Some Enchanted Evening.”)

If we begin to move in the general direction of the person, the wall becomes almost solid. It seems an impenetrable barrier. We turn away, humming a chorus of “If I Loved You.”

The Wall of Fear is Not Real

Fear as a barrier is an illusion.

We have, however, been trained to treat this illusion as though it were real. This belief served us well in our childhood years. Our parents taught us to be afraid of everything new. This was – at that time – good advice.

We were too young to know the difference between the legitimately dangerous and the merely exciting.

When we grew old enough to know the difference, however, no one ever taught us to take risks, explore new territories, and treat fear as energy for doing and learning new things.

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Fear as a reason not to do should be tucked away with all those other cozy childhood myths – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. (The Tooth Fairy was particularly hard to let go of.)

“I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens. It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.” – Woody Allen

If fear is not a wall, what is it? It’s a feeling, that’s all. It will not (cannot) keep you from physically moving toward something unless you let it. It may act up and it may kick and scream. It may make your stomach feel like the butterfly cage at the zoo.

But it cannot stop you.

You stop you.

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” – George Bernard Shaw

The fear of meeting people, for example, is a particularly silly fear. Given that it’s in a place where they’re not going to slug you (Hell’s Angels bars are not recommended), the worst that can happen is that someone will reject you.

You are left with rejection.

If you don’t try, however, you have rejected yourself, and are left with exactly the same thing as if you had tried and failed – nothing.

If you do try, however, you may get what you want.

Even if you get rejected, you’ll learn more from the experience than if you had never tried. You may learn, for example, that certain ways of approaching certain people in certain situations work better than others.

We can learn as much (sometimes more) by what doesn’t work as by what does. If we don’t explore all the ways that really do and don’t work, we are left with only the untested techniques from our imagination and what seems to work in the movies.

As Dr. Melba Colgrove once said: “Anything that’s worth having is worth asking for.

Some say yes and some say no.”

To overcome a fear, here’s all you have to do: realize the fear is there, and do the action you fear anyway. Move – physically – in the direction of what you want. Expect the fear to get worse. It will. After you do several times the thing you fear, the fear will be less.

Eventually, it goes away.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

“People living deeply have no fear of death.” – Anais Nin

Fear is something to be moved through, not something to be turned from. In fact, if you feel carefully, you’ll discover that the only difference between fear (a supposedly negative emotion) and excitement (a reputedly positive emotion) is what we choose to call it.

The sensation is exactly the same.

We just add a little “Oh, no!” to fear and a little “Oh, boy!” to excitement, that’s all.

Fear, then, can be seen for what it truly is–the energy to do your best in a new situation.

So, with that in mind, let’s return to death.

(“Oh, no!” “Oh, boy!”)

Until next time…if you’d like to get started on controlling your fear pick up a copy of Develop the Mental Strength of a Warrior today!