Let’s just get it over with; think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable:

You’re afraid.

I’m afraid. Everyone is afraid.

If you don’t think you’re afraid, it’s because low-level (or more) fear has become your baseline. If you were a goldfish, fear would be the water in which you swim. 

What Do You Love?

To understand fear, that most primitive of protective reflexes, we must have some idea of what we value.

Do you value your life? Are you afraid of death? It is relatively rare, but there are people who are not afraid to die. You probably aren’t one of them.

Do you value being pain-free? How about your mobility? Your sanity? Your independence?

Do you have children? Parents? A spouse or significant other? 

Even if if you aren’t personally afraid, it wouldn’t take much morbid imagination (especially from someone like me, who spent many years in emergency medicine) to conjure up a scenario that is truly terrifying.

We are all afraid of something.

And that’s just the show-stopper, high-level stuff.

Do you value your job, your career, your paycheck? Your home and car and ability to buy food?

Let’s get more mundane. How important is your dignity, your reputation, your family name? How much do you value your online status, your followers, your children’s privacy?

Maybe you value your toys: cars and planes and electronics; the ability to connect to the Internet at all.

Once you have an understanding of what you value, you can begin to delineate the fears associated with the attachment.

What Are You Afraid of?

Because what we worry about—what we fear—is losing that which we value.

This would be a great place to segue into the strict Theravāda Buddhist doctrine of non-attachment, and how attachment (to things, people, even life) is the root of suffering.

But a) I’m not a Bodhisattva, or even a practicing Buddhist (although I do value and try to follow many of the underlying principles), and b) this article is not about near-Bodhi-tree enlightenment experiences.

Are you afraid of making mistakes? Everybody is. And everybody does.

It’s the fear of public speaking, of raising your hand in class, of performing: “What if I choke?” The loss here is the loss of looking perfect; the danger of losing our false dignity.

I once had a very famous musician play a set at a venue I owned on San Diego. The packed house was excited because he was going to play a new song (which went on to be a huge hit for years) in public for the first time. In the middle of the second verse, he stopped, looked into the standing-room-only audience and said, “I forgot the fucking words!”

And nobody cared. The audience laughed and clapped, and the singer started over and performed the song, his status, dignity, and reputation intact.

“Imperfect human” is redundant.

We fear losing life, loved ones, health, our dignity, our ability to earn compensation. These worries were normal and in any case, unavoidable. But if left unchecked, they can wreak havoc with your mindset and trash your peace.

Fear is a survival mechanism: the sudden shock of fear is part of an activation of the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system. It bestows upon us almost superhuman abilities as it shunts blood to skeletal muscle, increases the heart’s ability to supply oxygenated blood to vital systems, frees up glucagon energy sources from the liver, dilates pupils and airways, sharpens our senses.

When you are home alone in your room and hear someone rustling about in the front room, fear is a normal part of your instinct to protect yourself.

But when the impulse to run away or enter battle stays past the immediate threat, or becomes tied to smaller, non-life threatening events that go on and on as part of daily life, fight or flight becomes resignation and depression.

And this would be a great place to segue into a discussion of Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS; yes, really), but that is a psychophysiological story for another time.

When fear manifests as unceasing anxiety, it is a protective mechanism gone awry.

(Don’t get me started on “Generalized Anxiety Disorder.” I was trained on diagnosis via the DSM like every clinical psychologist, but I have a very different take on F41.1 that is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.)

The Worst That Could Happen

So what do you do about fear?

The cure depends upon the source.

If you are like the vast majority of the Internet-connected world (which, at the time of this writing, is estimated to be 68% of the global population, some 5.5 billion people; and nearly 100% of “first-world” populations), a great deal of your fear creates a great deal of wealth for the media, social and otherwise.

Fear-mongering is big business. You want people to spend their money? Give them something to fear.

It didn’t take long after the June 1, 1980 advent of the 24-hour news cycle for marketers to realize that scared people spend money on safety. (Did you ever tour the original CNN headquarters building in Atlanta? Quite impressive.)

The answer to this prevalent source of anxiety and fear?

Turn. It. Off.

Seriously: just turn it off. Go outside. Have lunch with a friend (who has also turned off the electronics and doesn’t want to talk about how the sky is falling). The media’s only hold on you is your frantic craving for cheap dopamine hits. Just stop.

What about all the other fears: loss of your job, your house, your parents, your prestige, your Tesla and your Rolex (or your bicycle and your Timex)?

I can’t promise you that nothing bad will ever happen to you.

I can promise that you have survived every bad thing that has happened so far.

Fear is just wasting energy worrying about things that probably will never happen and are likely out of your control anyway. That energy that could be put to better use, like experiencing joy right now in your real life, or choosing and pursuing a new, exciting life purpose.

The way to balance bad stuff is to ensure you experience lots of good stuff.

The trick is in gaining resilience. It’s easy to realize that you have to bounce back after a setback, but it’s difficult to actually do it. Enough setbacks and not only is the cockiness of youth knocked out of you, but your self-esteem can be knocked out as well.

You have to be humble enough to realize that you’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to fail. Some people will never forgive you. Those weren’t your people anyway.

But you have to be strong enough to realize that the only way to move forward is to have the strength to push through it. Start over. “Fall down seven times, get up eight (七転び八起き).”

So my advice—my lived experience (and I have had more than my fair share of failure and other crappy stuff)—is this:

Feel the fear (and Do It Anyway)

In the end, there are only two kinds of experiences: wins and lessons.

Don’t be afraid: you will either crush whatever it is you set out to do, or you will learn how to get better.

(Interesting fact: the most often-repeated phrase in The Bible is some version of, “Be not afraid.”)

Fear is always present when we try something new. Don’t let that stop you—you have to push through it to break the new ground you say you want.

Do it scared.

Do it now.

Do it even if it’s not perfect (hint: it will never be perfect).

Turns out that Rough-Rider Teddy Roosevelt was right: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

EVERYTHING YOU WANT IS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF FEAR.

You’ve got this. We’ve got this; I’m right there with you.



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- JWW