‘Fear is nothing more than a mental monster you have created, a negative stream of consciousness.’ Robin Sharma (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari)
This isn’t completely true, there are really two instances when we feel fear:
Real situations where the tiger approaches, and imagined situations where there could be a tiger but you don’t know for sure. This is where we start telling ourselves stories.
F.E.A.R. is an acronym for “False evidence appearing real” which neatly sums up the most common instance of fear in modern society.
Without going into the biology and chemistry, fear causes us to act usually in one of three ways – Fight, Flight or Freeze.
When men lived in caves the right reaction to fear was what kept them alive.
In current times fight and flight responses have assumed a wider range of behaviors – the fight response could be angry, argumentative behavior and the flight response social withdrawal or even substance abuse.
We can learn to embrace fear as positive when we are crossing the road and we don’t see the car coming or learn to control our reactions so that we don’t fall prey to unnecessary negative stress.
Many people ‘project forward’ in their minds all sorts of negative outcomes and fear stops them from doing things. It can be how a situation will work out or how someone will react.
They delay taking action and it gets worse.
They get stressed about the situation, stressed because they have delayed it and stressed because of being indecisive.
I’m not saying we should rush into things. Decisions have consequences. It is important to take the appropriate care when deciding.
Clearly more care needs to be taken over investing thousands of dollars than what to have for lunch.
However there comes a time when we should not wait for more data. Too much data can make the decision even harder.
If you have thought through the situation properly there should be no reason to be afraid and delay.
‘Productive paranoia’ can be channeled to think about our fears and prepare for them. Care must be taken not to just look at the more alarming scenarios but also the subtle and less spectacular.
Harness fear and use it to prepare for probable and possible situations thus leveraging the results and keep negative fantasy well under control.
