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Don't buy into the "no fear" bulldust
Saturday, 19 August 2006
Okay, stand back and hold your breath. I'm about to question one of the quasi-religious commandments of personal development. It's the one that says fear is all bad and should be overcome. That the aim of life should be to "live without fear", usually followed by some blather about love being the opposite of fear.
This, dear reader, is a load of absolute bulldust. If you live your life trying to completely purge yourself of any feelings of fear, then you're asking for Big Trouble with a capital B and T.
There's no denying that feelings of anxiety are unpleasant. And I also won't ague that a world without fear would be a very nice place. But unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. Nature has built the emotion of fear into us for a very good reason. Perhaps the easiest way to explain is by looking first at that other big negative in life - pain.
Obviously, we all hate pain. To experience it is just horrible, as everyone knows. But it 's part of us for a good reason. We've been specifically designed to experience it, and to hate it as much as we do. Why?
The simple reason is that pain lets us know something's wrong with our bodies. Often, that something is urgently wrong. Without pain, we wouldn't know that we were resting our hand on a hotplate and had better get it off pronto. Without pain we wouldn't feel that throb in the gut that tells us we have appendicitis. And without the threat of pain, we wouldn't know to avoid situations in which our body is likely to sustain damage.
A graphic example of this can be seen in people who endure from numb feet. Some people experience no pain in their feet after suffering some kind of nerve damage. This often results in constant injury to the feet, sometimes horrific damage, because the person doesn't realize when something's wrong. They accidentally bruise and batter their feet simply because their brain isn't receiving pain signals anymore.
Life without pain would be much worse than life with it, because you'd do terrible damage to your body all the time without even realizing it. Pain has a purpose. It helps us, even though it's very unpleasant.
Fear should be looked at in a similar way. We feel it for the good reason that we live in a world where terrible things can happen to us. It's our mind and body's way of telling us that there might be bad consequences if we fail to act in certain ways. As with pain, it's our mind's way of making us experience something awful in order to avoid consequences that are even more awful.
When I grew up, I knew a lot of people who bought into the "no fear" mind-set. I spent time hanging out with brave young men, who truly thought that fear was something for the stupid and the weak. Here's what happened to some of those young men:
- One of them was killed in a car crash, he was driving recklessly and had been drinking.
- One was killed in a motorcycle accident. I'm not sure what the exact circumstances were in this case, but he had a history of speeding and taking drugs when riding his bike.
- One was pushed off a bridge to his death during a drunken argument.
- One is in prison for armed robbery.
- One lost $50,000 in borrowed money buying tech shares during the dot-com boom.
- Most have had long periods of drug abuse, as they believed they could control drugs.
- Most have experienced poverty, as they thought school was for losers and weren't afraid of the consequences of not studying.
Such circumstances are common among the "no fear" crowd. If you've spent time with such people, I'm sure you have similar stories.
Meanwhile the kids I knew who experienced anxiety almost all grew up to be very successful. They had a healthy level of fear about the future and the consequences of making bad decisions. As a result, they worked hard to make sure what they were afraid of didn't happen.
You see this level of healthy fear and anxiety in most successful people. Top athletes are at least partly driven by the fear their rivals may beat them. Successful businesspeople worry about losing their customers to competitors. Good marriages are built, in part, on taking steps to avoid the worry of being abandoned.
Of course, such fears can be overdone, and some people are irrationally afraid. It's this type of dread that the easy-answer personal development gurus prey on, by offering the flawed assumption that all fear is bad.
The trick is to realize that fear is just an indicator. It's your mind and body telling you something, but it's a blunt instrument. Sometimes, you have to reject that message and go ahead anyway.
Pain is much the same. We accept the pain from a hypodermic syringe, because we know the advantage of becoming immunized against a disease. Our body doesn't understand why we'd accept any pain, but in some cases our mind knows better and acts accordingly.
Likewise, there are often circumstances where we listen to our fear, but decide to ignore that message. Being afraid to ask out a potential partner is one such circumstance. The fear of being rejected can be weighed against the advantage of finding a significant other. The mind can see the reward of the latter is worth the discomfort of the former.
Work to overcome your irrational fears. But don't reject fear altogether as some people advise. It's there for a good reason.
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