How to be afraid and actually make better decisions
Photo credit to @helloimnik via Unsplash
Being afraid really sucks. It's not something anybody really likes to experience, and yet every single human being experiences fear pretty regularly. Maybe frequently. Maybe most of the time.
(For the purpose of this conversation, we are excluding things like neurological conditions/certain brain injuries/phobias/etc that have a physiological and psychological impact on typical fear responses in the human brain & body. I'm not a doctor and can't diagnose, and I am not giving medical advice.)
Today we are focusing on the fear that most of us feel regularly around common life things: job changes, ending relationships, debuting a new skill in front of others, meeting new people, giving a presentation at work, setting healthy boundaries, etc.
There is an idea floating around that we should strive to become fearless. It's the idea that if we "just stop being afraid", then we could succeed in any area we so deeply want to pursue. While there are good intentions behind this advice to "be fearless", conceptually it really misses the mark of functional applicability.
What do I mean by that?
You can't apply advice that is functionally...impossible.
Fear isn't our enemy.
Fear isn't our weakness.
Fear isn't something to get rid of like a pesky gnat divebombing you while you eat tacos at happy hour.
Fear *is* a tool.
When used in a helpful way, fear will expand your life---with more good stuff, more ease, more balance, better decision making.
When used in an unhelpful way, fear will restrict your life...and you. It will keep you in a state of perpetually stressed, and it will also pile on more fear. So the next time you feel fear, it's likely to be even harder to do the thing you want to do.
Fear comes in a few varieties. I call them Helpful Fear vs. Unhelpful Fear, and Expansive Fear vs. Restrictive Fear.
-Helpful Fear is the kind of fear that alerts you when you're in literal danger and you need to get to safety.
(Example: If there is a honeybadger on the loose or a piano falling from a window, run away!!)
-Unhelpful Fear is the kind of fear where you know you're physically safe, but you hold yourself back from doing a thing because you can't for 100% certainty guarantee your desired outcome. This is about perceived emotional safety* - a topic deserving its own post, coming soon.
(Example: "I want to ask that person on a date but I'm afraid they'll say no. What if they tell everyone and they all laugh at me?" That's unhelpful fear because you’re not in literal danger and your fear is preventing you from saying something that you really want to say, because you're uncertain of the outcome that could happen after you say it.)
Once you've determined if your fear is helpful or unhelpful, you can further consider these subcategories of fear:
-Expansive Fear is fear that you feel when you want something, feel afraid of actually going for it or unsure how exactly to go about it, but you give it a go anyway because you truly do want the thing you want because you know that on the other side of this temporary fear is something that will expand your life in a positive way (even if there are some rocky steps between here and that point).
-Restrictive Fear is fear you feel when you want something, feel afraid of feel afraid of actually going for it or unsure how exactly to go about it, so you hold yourself back from acting at all and you remain in your current reality because your philosophy is "the devil you know is better than the one you don't know".
When you feel afraid, consider two things:
Is this fear helpful or unhelpful?
Is this fear expansive or restrictive?
Think of your emotions as tools in a toolbox: each emotion is an equally important tool because each one has a different job and gives you specific information only it can give.
Remember: fear is an emotion, and emotions are simply temporary sensations trying to give you more information about the situation.
You like information. It makes life easier to understand and do stuff!
Our emotions are hardwired in; you can't pick and choose your emotions like you're at a Vegas buffet. If you're a human, you have emotions. Doesn't matter how well you ignore/repress/deny/conceal them, they’re still in there.
Most of us weren't given the instruction manual to help us know even just the names of emotions--let alone how they physically feel when they're present in our body, or what information they're trying to tell us.
You can start practicing how to work with emotions and make your life easier. Or you can continue to resist and/or repress them and make your life really, unnecessarily hard. This is why it becomes so useful to balance logic *with* emotion.
Your logical "brain" is already very strong because you exercise your logic often.
Your emotional "brain" is just undeveloped; it doesn't go to the gym of life, so it's not very strong yet.
It's like someone who does lots of bicep curls at the gym but doesn't ever do leg day.
They still have legs, but they're just not as well defined or strong as their arms. Wouldn't their overall physical function be easier if they were working out their whole body rather than just focusing on a main area because that's what other people will see?
More on how to work WITH rather than against your emotions next time - stay tuned!
*Note: Unhelpful fear is nuanced and deserves its own post, regarding literal physical safety vs. perceived emotional safety. “Unhelpful fear” is still fear and it is still 100% valid. It becomes unhelpful because it limits you unnecessarily in life. There are ways to practice working with the kind of fear that falls into the “unhelpful” category. It is valid to feel and it just takes some practice to work with it rather than to be limited by it. More on that in another post.