I went to a discussion group recently that stimulated this post. The topic was “fear and proportionality”, but it also ventured into territories such as:
- What is the opposite of fear?
- Does fear serve any purpose?
- Should we feel fear?
- Should we try to eliminate fear from our lives, and if so, how to go about that?
- What changes can we make with regards to fear to live a better life?
Fear is inherently uncomfortable, so there is often a wish / belief that it should be exorcised, defeated, overcome, etc.
A meme I’ve seen in various places goes something like, “punch fear in the face.” While I partially agree with this sentiment, it lacks some nuance.
During the discussion I noticed two different uses of the word fear arise:
- Fear – the emotion
- Fears – the scary future narratives/scenarios we imagine
I can more easily get onboard with the goal of ultimately banishing #2. People, in general, spend far too much time imagining “fears”. They also might spend far too much time avoiding the emotion of “fear.” I suspect this has to do with the belief that fear is bad and serves no purpose, which drives an impulse to repress it and push it away whenever it shows up. But in order to pull off such a feat, we often have to keep ourselves and our lives small — forego opportunities and experiences that are good for us or in line with our values and dreams. We also often construct unhelpful beliefs and defenses. It might even be that spending lots of time engaging in “fears” (imagined scenarios) is just one such defense / strategy that allows us to avoid feeling “fear” in our bodies.
Emotions and thoughts drive each other. One person brought up the idea of “managing thoughts” (referencing Wayne Dyer). “Managing thoughts” is cognitive therapy in a nut shell, and is very helpful. Also, as was pointed out, allowing the emotion of fear is important. I see these as two complementary approaches that can work together, both acting on opposite ends of the thought-emotion feedback loop. Like slowing down a heavy swinging pendulum from two sides instead of one.
Emotional/limbic system fear circuitry is woefully out-of-date, and rationality is woefully underdeveloped. I have heard we have special circuits for fear of snakes that operate outside of conscious awareness — neural expressways direct from eyes to amygdala, bypassing the neocortex. But we don’t have those for driving cars and motorcycles. Or sugar. Which all pose a lot more danger than snakes. AND — we’d all be dead without our limbic fear circuits, so I’m grateful for the imperfect wetware. We’d also be dead or at least barely functioning without our rationality that evolution also provided. So we need both, at least if survival is important to us. The big trick is to learn to integrate these two major tools and discern when to use each and in what way. People in general probably underuse rationality and overuse the limbic emotions, which can result in fear being disproportionately higher OR lower than the statistical/probabilistic danger at hand.
However, some people have learned to become a bit too rational to the point of emotional “deafness,” and ignore the visceral, body-level fear, cutting them off from their intuition (I have done this). And that disavowing of limbic emotional fear can also lead to poor decisions from and under or over estimation of danger. Interweaving both, in optimal measures that stem from the specific situation, is a real art, and I’m not sure I’ve discovered any rules that reliably apply.
A lot of the real dangers of today are largely outside of our individual control: pandemics, climate change, nuclear and biological weapons… but these didn’t exist in our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptation). So we over-worry about such things with no effect except to drain us.
A quote comes to mind (A therapist I forget the name of): “9/10 people need to loosen up. Only 1/10 people need to tighten up.” However, I’d modify the quote to something like, “Pretty much everyone needs to loosen up in most ways and also be more vigilant in a few other ways.”
The EEA also presented a very different landscape of danger and safety in daily life that we did have individual control over. Who knew that tightening our bodies before a physical impact was probably adaptive in the EEA but hurts us in a modern car accident? Who knew that fighting may have (at times) increased survival in the EEA by demonstrating dominance, but now just gets us fired and arrested? How many of our old “skills” like this are now useless or even counterproductive?
We’re not afraid enough of…
- Driving because in the EEA travel was at a safe walking or running speed.
- Guns because an EEA weapon wasn’t nearly as lethal.
- Sedentary work slowly killing us because in the EEA any chance to sit down and rest was a boon.
- Eating poorly because in the EEA there was no junk food and we needed any extra calorie we could get our hands on.
We’re too afraid of…
- What we see on the news (generally), because in the EEA, if we heard about it, it was close to us and likely impacted us directly.
- Social humiliation because in the EEA it could have meant a significant drop in the tribe hierarchy.
- Strangers and differences, because in the EEA, new people were often a rare threat from another tribe.
Somehow we have a knack for poor calibration of fear in just about every situation.
Noticing all this breeds the temptation to say we would be better off throwing out every fear instinct, that fear is bad, and the goal should be to eliminate fear altogether. But I don’t believe this is the case. I still think, even with so many examples of our mind’s fear strategies being dismally uncalibrated, that we are far better off with what we have than with nothing.
It’s perfectly fine to complain about how confusing our fear feelings can be. But to say we should not feel fear, or that not having fear is a goal we should strive for is, I think, far more confusing.
Also, I think fear doesn’t care about that part of us that says fear is bad and should be defeated. Fear happens on its own according to what is happening and who it’s happening to. We can choose to allow it now, or we can choose to kick it down the road a bit until it resurfaces. In the first case, our lives tend to expand and we can take on more. In the second, we tend to stay small and feel more lifeless, in addition to the fear.
If the fear is disproportionately high, the task is to allow it. If the fear is disproportionately low, the task is also to allow it.
I have found that allowing fear (the emotion) to exist, neither trying to extinguish it or fuel it, helps bring it into proportion with the statistical danger of the situation. However, it can take time (seconds, minutes, hours, or days, depending on the situation).