About fear

Being alone, dying painfully, dying alone, darkness, irrelevance, public embarrassment, isolation, losing freedom...

What is it about such emotion that we keep it until our days? Whether you were designed or evolved, or a mix of both, you carry fear with you. It was either a competitive advantage of the species or a gift you received. Either way, it is a feature that is not uncommon and very often defines us as individuals. What is it that we decide to talk about it every now and then, so often disregarding it and so often choosing to fight it?

Why is it so uncomfortable that we feel the urgency either to run from it, to wrestle with it or to completely eliminate it as if it was some disease? Why would we be supposed to face it and what is it supposed to do with being brave, with being courageous?

A little bit of me

Fear is, I'm afraid, my predominant emotion. I can't simply escape from it or pretend it fictitious in my life. It triggers me, it's been with me since I can remember and if inside out (Yes, the child's movie) is somehow exact, that skinny purple freaky is seated down in the center of my console and has been there cotton vest and all, essentially since I recall.

The reason I say this is because while attending a recent event, we were asked who had fear, and I said I was about 45% fearful at the time (I'm slightly below right now, but it's all about the coffee) and I came to think... Does this somehow interfere with my ability to perform? The answer is NO. But, does it influence my decisions? Absolutely YES! And this was revealing to me, because somehow, at a point in my life, fear stopped being a thing to curse upon, a disease that was crippling me, an intoxicating feeling of powerlessness and turned into a tinder for my potential.

And this I need to explain. I wake up every morning and make the conscious decision to stand up, get ready and hustle mainly for one reason: I HAVE FEAR. I fear that I will stay the same, I fear to be bored, I fear to be the one I used to be 3 years ago and I fear to be the same version of myself 5 years, 5 months, 5 weeks, 5 minutes from now. It's not a shiny hope to become the best version of myself, it's not the happiness that comes from achieving my goals, it's not a profound passion that consumes me in the way people infatuate with their dreams, it's absolutely not the desire to change anything in the world. It's fear what keeps me up, the urgent feeling that staying the same is something terribly bad.

I'm open to discussion about how moral or immoral this may be for anyone, but I won't question its effectiveness. I'm not terrified, I'm not panicked, I'm not in fight-or-flight mode, but this emotion, this tiny individual inside of my head drives my actions. Makes me considerate, cautious, sometimes dubious, consistently inquisitive and absolutely a great strategist. It triggers my depression, yes, but also my most amazing actions and plans. No emotion has only a bright side and I suspect from this tale that neither has any emotion only a dark side.

A little bit about it

So, if I'm not killing my fears and I'm not the brave man who "conquers his fears" or defeats them, what does it make me? What do I do with fear that is actually working for me?

I came to the realization that I simply embrace it, I made it my best friend. There was a time, unknown to almost everybody around me, when fear lead me to some of the worst decisions in my life, when my insecurities rooted in fear turned my life into a gooey mess that was heading nowhere and such happened not once, but nothing short than a dozen times. My decision making was poor under the influence of fear, but it was not about the emotion itself.

Fear is not exclusive to humans. One of the basic emotions, fear is the automatic response to a set of stimuli that our systems subconsciously interpret as potentially dangerous. The more certain (To a point) we are about the danger, the more intense we experience fear; the safer our body feels about it, the smaller the fear. It is not rooted in knowledge, as we have been told. Its house and food is our experience, actual or imaginative. Whether we lived it or simply repetitively thought about it as a reality, fear is the result of a recurring response that we confirm as true with our experience.

It starts with an idea, that proves itself right (It's rewarded) whenever it kicks in, we act it and nothing bad happens. Thus, it's pretty often, because being fearful usually prevents us from doing anything. But, the reward score gets 100x every time something bad happens and you think you could have done something about it, and you didn't (It's related to guilt, but that's a different story). It doesn't matter if there were attenuating circumstances, if conditions were simply catastrophic, biases become stronger at every occurrence of the thing we fear, even if it does not happen to us. The best/worst part, it is that fear is not a certainty, instead the actual environment it thrives upon is precisely the ambiguity of a decision, the possibility of things going wrong and not having a plan to solve them.

Why do we fear? Because being too comfortable was the reason many ancestors of ours did not survive, and the ones who did were more cautious to certain life-threatening situations that well, we don't need to fear anymore, but we simply do.

So, is it useful? It has been so far, but it tends to overkill by preventing us to do things.

A little bit of you

I haven't met many people whose defining emotion is fear, I won't get to use the fingers of a single hand if I try and count how many of them have this as a primary emotion, so my advice may not apply directly to you. But...

You definitely have fear as an emotion, and it speaks to you. LISTEN TO IT. Do not act its advice, not always, not most of the times. Simply, only, listen to it. Sometimes you will find that your guts are guiding you correctly and you should step out the path you are in, many more times you will find an unconscious bias that has been feeding on misinformation to prevent you from doing great things. But none of the above will come if you recklessly confront your fears; acting by fear is as dangerous as acting against it, and in both cases you would be conditioned by a very primal emotion. So, instead of fighting it, just listen to it and then, be rational and decide.

Second, you have a predominant emotion in your life. Find it, it's the thing that comes first when you hear shocking news, like really unexpected things. Besides surprise, how do you experience them more often? Do you see the bright side of it? Do you catastrophize about it? Do you feel sad? Do you feel humored? Do you want to share them with somebody? Do you need to fact-proof it?

Once you identify your master emotion, the colored guy in your brain console, get to know that buddy, make it your friend, give it a face, make it a character in your life story, give it a job, make it work for you, for your purposes, for your survival, but also for having a more rewarding experience of conscious life.

P.S. Having nightmares actually works in me as an inspiration the day after I have them, and it's been proven in multiple studies as a mechanism of the brain to train our conscious selves for solving difficult situations.