Motivating Power of Fear

We, humans, are – to a large extent – irrational beings. What motivates us is not necessarily based on logical calculation but on emotions. Thus, our 3 prime motivating factors are desire for gain, fear of loss, and need to love and be loved. In this post – and I usually don’t write posts like this – I’d like to illustrate the motivating power of fear based on my own personal experiences. Hopefully, my stories are sufficiently entertaining to warrant this write-up…

When I was a little boy, I used to bite my nails. It was bad. My mother tried everything to get me to quit this horrible habit, to no avail. Then, one afternoon, she came up to me and told me that one day I would meet a beautiful girl and would be very attracted to her, but one look at my ugly nails and she would never look at me again. I was too young to be meaningfully interested in girls, but the fear of what my mother described was so profound and real that – you've guessed it – I never bit my nails ever again. I quit that nasty habit cold turkey.

In the early 2000s I got into horseback riding. Every weekend I'd drive from Manhattan all the way to Montauk (sometimes both on Saturday and Sunday) to ride with my trainer. One day this guy I knew through work tagged along. He said he was an experienced rider. My trainer was leading, I was following him, and my guest was in the back – the three of us were riding single file, trails are narrow there. So, we are loping in the woods, my guest loses control of his horse, it jumps in front of mine and kicks her hind legs at my horse. Except that it ends up kicking me and breaking my tibia – I was lucky that horse had no horseshoes on her hind legs or else it could have shuttered my bone. My tibia was cleanly broken in half plus a fracture. We were in the middle of the woods, so to get to the road, I had to ride my horse for a while with a broken leg – a painful experience... I was taken to an emergency room in the Hamptons, and they put a full cast on me (I declined a surgery as I didn’t want a bunch of screws put in my leg, which would allow for a knee-high cast, and opted for natural healing of the bone instead). Before discharging me, the doc told me that if I wanted my leg to heal faster, I should quit smoking – I had been a smoker for 12+ years – he said something about nicotine reducing the amount of oxygen that gets to the healing bone or something like that. I didn't care about details. The fear of not being able to live an active life (on top of horseback riding, I traveled quite a bit, etc.) was so compelling that, after I left the emergency room, on the way back I smoked one cigarette (my guest was driving my car), my last one ever. Again, I quit that horrible habit cold turkey.

But my story with a broken leg has a second act. I was in the cast for 6+ months, then there was a brace, then physical therapy… Some people suggested that dairy products are good for healing (calcium), so I consumed a lot of them (and not the fat-free or low-fat variety), and justified eating pizza. I had never had issues with weight before in my life. I was young and cockily would eat whatever I wanted without gaining an ounce of weight. But this time it was different. By the end of my ordeal with the broken leg I had gained 22 pounds. I tried dieting (meaning, eating very little), but – as I once put it to a couple of people while dining on rich food at a Ukrainian restaurant in the Lower East Side in NYC – I couldn’t shake it off. I realized I was missing something and started reading materials written by bodybuilders, etc., on how to get in shape – as one bodybuilder put it, who would you go to for fitness advice if not the fittest people on the planet, that is, bodybuilders and fitness models? Long story short, within 3-4 months I was pretty ripped and in the best shape of my life. In several more months I was down to 4-5% body fat and physically was able to do things I’d never dreamt of. More importantly, I utterly stopped consuming refined sugar, processed carbs (breads, etc.), and all sorts of other bad stuff and replaced them with much better nutritional alternatives – I haven’t had pizza in 12 years and I don’t miss it! Again, the fear of being overweight made me quit unhealthy food cold turkey.

So, fear is a powerful motivator. Arguendo, everything we do is motivated by the fear of death. Imagine if we were immortal… We’d probably be sitting there like Ancient Greek Gods on Mount Olympus pretty much doing nothing… Except for squashing ants from time to time to egocentrically assert our own importance. Curiously, we aren’t Gods but still act like that…

I digress… Back to the motivating power of fear. Often it kicks in only after bad things happen. It took a broken leg for me to quit smoking. It took me gaining weight to start eating right. And so on. The bottom line is that, it is simply irrational to wait for bad things to happen to start doing the right things in our lives. However, this is a typical human – and irrational – modus operandi.

Human, all too human…