FEAR … or why looking foolish is a small price for a fulfilled life

A young F.B.I. cadet enters the creepy house of a psychotic serial killer which is stuffed with death mannequins, moths and rows of antic chemical jars. She slowly descends into the basement with her gun outstretched before her.

Suddenly the light goes out. In the pitch black, all of the sounds are magnified, and unseen moths fly into her face. She keeps creeping through the dark, knowing that the killer is somewhere in the house. She is trembling, her hands are sweating. Her pupils are dilated. Her heart beats out of her chest. Like all other heroes in extreme situations, she feels: fear.

Her name is Clarice Sterling and she is heroine of the superb thriller “Silence of the lambs”.

Fear is a lifelong companion

Fear is the most infamous of basic human emotions. All heroes feel fear. We all do. We all know it. Fear is our life long companion. Fear will never leave us. Better get used to it.

In fact, anxiety disorders are the most common mental health diagnoses affecting 1 in 5 people in the western world.

In the USA, home of the loud and the bold, the biggest fear is ironically glossophopbia, the fear of public speaking. A staggering 74% of Americans suffer from it; followed by 68% of Americans who suffer from necrophobia, which is the fear of death.

Though we are born with only two innate fears — the fears of falling and loud sounds to keep us surviving as toddlers — we `learn` many more fears on our journey called life.

But what is fear really? Well, one of the most basic definitions of fear is that it is ‘an emotion triggered by a perceived threat’. And fear does not only affect your mind but also your body. It typically causes an accelerated heart rate, shallow breath, dizziness, increase in adrenaline, sweating, and other symptoms. We often interpret these sensations as dangerous or as signalling danger.

But wait. The definition goes that fear is triggered by a ‘perceived’ threat; the word perceived implies that we often only fear a possible outcome, though there might not be any real danger.

This is a paradox: 99% of fear people experience today is non-physical; fear that only exists in our head. However, it can do a lot of harm to us. It messes with our confidence, it can take a toll on our mental health and on top of all, it makes us avoid acting the way we want because we fear the potential bad consequences.

Thus, fear can keep us from living the life we want to live and prevent us from doing the things we love and from loving the things we do.

Avoidance amplifies fear

Unfortunately, but quite understandably, most people try to avoid situations, things or people they fear.

From a psychological standpoint however, avoidance is the worst thing we can do when it comes to fear: It prevents our nervous system from ‘habituating’. Meaning that the feared object or situation remains novel to our brain and keeps on provoking anxiety.

In addition, avoiding fear tends to generalise the very same fear over time; e.g. if we avoid attending one meeting because of anxiety, we might end up avoiding all meetings. The dilemma with avoidance is that it often creates the very outcome we are trying to avoid.

Even worse: every time you avoid something you fear, you tend to experience a sense of failure; your anxiety gains strength while you lose some. Finally, avoidance eliminates practice. Without practice, it is difficult to gain mastery. Without mastery, confidence is less likely to rise.

This hopefully convinced you that avoiding what you fear is not good. At all. It will not only keep your fear but even amplify it.

Fear will be always there — and that is a good thing

Think about it. If it is impossible to delete fear or get rid of fear, that means fear will be always with us.

And in fact, that is good. Fear is an important and useful part of our life. It alerts us to dangers, identifies threats and brings out your survival instinct. It is an emotion that allowed the human species to survive thousands of years, despite wars, natural disasters and all kinds of predators. Fear is designed to keep us safe and alive from ancient times on. In other words, fear is completely normal.

When something terrifies us, our eyes widen and thus allow us to see the threat more clearly. At the same time our hearts begin to beat faster, pumping much-needed blood to the rest of our bodies, and adrenaline prepares us for either fight or escape the threat.

Even better, fear can be quite an arousing sensation. Remember all the video nights in our teenage years when we snuggled up on our parents’ sofas with our friends and deliberately exposed us to fear with the latest horror flicks? The sensation of fear is drug-like: Intense fear causes our brain to release chemicals that mimic the effects of marijuana and amphetamines.

Fear cannot and should not be eradicated. However, it has to be managed. Fear can be damaging for our life when it prevents us from doing what we need or want to do.

Face your fear and it will diminish

So how do we manage fear? The best way is to face it. If you face it, it will diminish.

Every time you confront your fear you gain power while your anxiety loses. Every time you confront your fear you add evidence of your ability to cope

Confronting your fear gives you a sense of accomplishment and empowerment. And if you do it repeatedly it will give you even a sense of mastery and therefore reduces the angst of failure.

Exposure isn’t easy but living in a life-long prison of avoidance is worse. And sometimes it takes only 20 seconds of overcoming your fear.

Remember Matt Damon’s character in ‘We bought a zoo’?! He is a nervous wreck when he first sees his love interest but it takes 20 seconds of courage to go talk to her. If he had avoided this 20 seconds of overcoming his fear, he would have never met the love of his life.

“You know,” Damon’s character says, “sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”

To reiterate: most fear only exists in the mind; the fear of failing, the fear of getting old, the fear of dying.

Learn to overcome fear or cringe in its existence to become a fragment of who you could be. In other words: Be courageous.

Courage is not the absence of fear

It is important to understand that courage is not the absence of fear, but moving ahead despite fear.

Courage is an existential choice we take. It is the empowering experience to stand up when we are feared and the odds are against us.

The word courage comes from French ‘coeur’, which means heart; and courageous actions should come from our heart.

Remember Braveheart? It took him all his courage and all his heart to overcome his fears and fight the overpowering English.

Lord of the rings: Frodo was feared all the way to Mordor and even Gandalf felt fear when he heard the distant orks’ drums in the mines of Moria. But our heroes were courageous enough to continue their journey all the way to Mountain Doom.

Standing up to evil and fighting for what we truly believe in takes courage, especially when it places one’s own physical safety or that of one’s family at risk.

Even more so, courage is required in almost every human activity or endeavour. Getting old demands courage. To allow oneself to love and commit to another person takes courage. To artistically express yourself takes courage. Changes to your career or relationship require courage. There is no meaningful life without courage.

And courage can be contagious. Remember great leaders like Alexander the Great or Spartacus fighting in first line and thus inspiring armies of men to follow them?!

A more contemporary example is one adorable Pixar character from their movie ‘Up’: Ellie Fredericksen. From her early childhood on, Ellie was this gutsy little girl, courageously exploring and never avoiding any adventures or fearful situations. On her deathbed, Ellie handed all of her bravery to her life partner, the timid and rather inactive Carl, asking him not to spend the rest of his life mourning her but instead spend it going on adventures. And so, Carl did; he left with his home to a foreign country and went on many adventures, which was a direct result of Ellie’s contagious bravery.

Life requires courage. You can never fully run away from fear, so embrace it.

Listen to Aristotle himself who believed courage even to be the most important quality we have: “Courage is the first of human virtues because it makes all others possible.”

Fear does not stop heroes

Heroes feel fear as we all do, they feel the same intense emotional sensations we do when they fear. Do Heroes ever get rid of their fear? Most likely not.

Some heroes even suffer from very irrational fear.

X-Men’s Wolverine might be the ultimate comic book badass, he is basically invincible, but he also suffers from a very common fear: he is suffering from aerophobia, the fear of flying.

Indiana Jones fights Nazi ghost-demons, is chased by giant boulders and confronted by aggressive bird spiders but there is one thing he is truly terrified by: snakes. Indy suffers from ophidiophobia.

Our beloved Peter Pan suffers from gerascophobia, which is fear of growing old.

Don Quixote, one of the classic heroes in literature, suffers from pragmatophobia, the fear of reality.

The sheriff in Jaws is afraid of the open water. Not the best fear to suffer from if you must chase and kill a big white shark.

Same with Marlin, Nemo’s Father and the hero in “Finding Nemo”, he is dead scared of the open sea since his spouse was killed by a predator’s attack. Now he’s overprotective of his young son and anxious about every single step he takes.

And so on…

But does fear stop heroes from doing the right thing? Does fear paralyze them and puts them into life-long paralysis? The answer of course is no. Though heroes have fears like all of us, they go into action and face their fears.

Or simply put: “The hero and the coward both feel the same thing: fear; it’s what they do with that fear that separates them.”

Heroes not only face the fears which are down in the deepest part of their soul. They also grow and learn through them. They come back with a gift and grow through their experience. The famous mythologist Joseph Campbell rightly said, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

Think of Marlin; he faces his biggest fears, swims through the whole ocean, dodges sharks and when Nemo is trapped in an enormous fishing net, Marlin does the bravest thing any parent can do — he trusts his kid to save himself. In the end, he not only has his son back but is also rewarded with a less anxious life and fulfilled life.

Think of good old Ron from Harry Potter. He is so deeply scared of spiders that he even freezes in fearful pain when he sees them; however, when poor Hermione was turned into stone, Ron overcame his fears and even questions those terrifying five-legged creatures.

Think of Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson, a former detective who suffers from acrophobia, the fear of height; only by facing this fear and dragging his love interest all the way up to a church tower, which is a disturbing thing to do for someone who is terrified of height, he defeats this fear and reveals the sad truth in this classic Hitchcock mystery.

The lesson here from heroes is that you need to face and overcome fears to live a better life.

Maybe there is no better case for facing your fear and using it to improve your life than the story of Bruce Wayne:

Young Bruce Wayne fell down a well and encountered a swarm of bats that terrified him and haunted him throughout his young life. But eventually Bruce decides to overcome his fears and turn this force against his enemies; and he becomes, yes, Batman.

What we fear doing most is very often what we most need to do. The more painful the journey, the more we enjoy the good ending.

Looking foolish is a small price for a fulfilled life

As we have seen in the last chapter, we merely regret things we haven´t done. The risk that you avoid your fears and don’t pursue your dream is terminal. You will end up in a wrong life, a life without joy and commitment and fulfilment.

Fear is in all of us. It is an ever-present emotion. Heroes accept this fact and follow their path anyway. Overcoming fear makes us stronger. Timidity can lead to mediocrity. Always be courageous. Fear of failure leads to wasted talent. Heroes have fears like all of us but they follow their path anyway.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Most people die at 25 and are buried at 75.” For some people, this metaphorical death — when they decide to settle for a mediocre lifestyle — comes earlier than 25. These people are afraid of taking a risk living the life they want to live, so they end up quitting in advance; they fear failure. Not trying seems the safer option.

We often avoid many rather easy situations: talking to a girl/boy we like, asking our boss for a pay rise or showing up to that meeting, only because we fear we might look foolish. But isn’t looking foolish an incredibly small price to pay in order to do what we want and live a more fulfilled life?!

Did Tom Cruise in Top Gun fear to look foolish when he started singing a song for his love interest Kelly McGillis in the middle of a lively restaurant? Maybe he did; but singing he did anyway and by that he won the heart of the love of his life.

Do it like heroes. Be audacious in the pursuit of your dreams. Be courageous, look foolish.

Remember, there is no such thing as fearlessness. Even the greatest heroes feel fear but at one point on their journey they decide to face and overcome their fears.

Fear might be the most powerful obstacle any of us will ever face in our lives. But overcoming it will reward us with the biggest gifts in life.

Facing our fear and being courageous ultimately determines of what we do with our life. And what we don’t do with it.

Face your fears. Heroes do. You will be rewarded. Really.