This is the third post in the ‘When bad feelings do good’ series. This post will focus on ‘fear’. (See also Part 1: anger and Part 2: anxiety)
(posted on main website 8 August)
In cultures that tend to divide emotions into good and bad, fear is usually placed in the bad category. But when you think about it, fear has functional, entertaining, useful aspects to it, and at some point most of us will even be drawn towards opportunities for fear. Other times we have to make a call, do I need to approach what I fear, or should I run and hide?
Fear can keep us safe
If we didn’t have fear, we would do dangerous things. Urbach-Wiethe is a disease involving damage in a part of the brain called the amygdala. Veronica O’Keane, a clinical psychiatrist and neuroscientist, and author of ‘The Rag and Bone Shop: How we make memories and memories make us’, calls the amygdala the emotional spark because of its role in emotion, especially fear. She also describes an example of one woman, SM (the case has been widely documented so you can read more with a quick google, for example here). This woman experienced several near death situations but she didn’t stop putting herself in these situations. In circumstances where you might expect her to feel fear, she described curiosity instead. (Although it's worth pointing out that SM is just one person describing her subjective experience so it's hard to draw too many conclusions).
Set boundaries
So don’t criticise your fear response next time you feel it's holding you back. It’s conscientiously determined to keep you safe. Maybe too safe. Ok so maybe you need a little chat with your fear to create some boundaries. Eat, love, Pray novelist, Elizabeth Gilbert describes a process that she uses every time she is about to start a project that she is afraid of. She writes to her fear and gives it the opportunity to speak openly. She then writes down all the fears that come up in relation to the project, and she says the first revealing thing is that there aren’t that many: the list is never infinite once you actually give fear the chance to get it all out. She then responds to thank her fear for doing its job, and tells fear that now she is going to do hers, and carry on regardless. I haven’t tried this one yet but I’m keeping it in my pocket, and writing about it now is a good reminder. Let me know if you try it!
Personal growth, resilience and challenge
Although an obvious purpose of fear is to keep us away from things, in reality sometimes the fear is an indicator that we really need to step towards something, and sometimes we are irresistibly drawn to it. Confusing aren't we?
In a coaching session recently one of my clients was talking about taking his side hustle to the next level, and the fear and fun associated with that step. He is also a trail runner and we compared it to being drawn to crossing stepping stones over a stream: the sense of fun and fear that comes from knowing that it is not the most secure route - the thrill of the challenge. He'd forgotten this was the purpose of the project, and remembering the fun helped balance the fear.
In a conference session I attended, Master Certified Coach, Evan Spargo, said that where there is a challenge, there is fear. You might manage to reach a comfortable place but sooner or later, to continue to grow and develop, you need to seek out a new challenge, and the fear that comes with it. Fear can, in that case, be an indicator that something is worth doing. Overcoming that fear takes strength, and makes us stronger in the process. If we see someone doing something that requires overcoming fear, we take it as a sign of their strength and respect them for it.
I love this video of the first time Keala Settle sung 'This Is Me' in The Greatest Showman, beginning with a brief account of just how scared she was at the start. As she starts to sing you can see all that fear, which makes it even more powerful when you see her push on through the fear. All that emotion becomes a hook for the other performers to tap into, as well as the audience. And that's another interesting thing about fear, it bonds people. I think it is also a good lesson that fear will always be there, so there is no point in waiting until you no longer feel the fear to do it, at some point you have to just jump.
In some cases, literally. I'm not exactly an adrenaline junkie myself but on a boat trip a few months ago I jumped from the top of the boat into the water purely because I wanted the challenge, exhilaration and satisfaction of doing something I was afraid of. It took me a while to get the courage. I spent some time strategising, which didn't help at all. I did a 'warm up' jumping off a lower deck. And still I was scared, hesitant, and finally triumphant when I did it. Humans are irresistibly drawn to that challenge of overcoming fear.
“The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is -
to live dangerously!”Nietzsche, Philosopher
Get curious
Sometimes fear is just unfamiliarity, or comes from not knowing enough about your fear object to manage yourself safely. In both these situations you are probably best sidestepping the urge to avoid what you're afraid of and instead get up close and curious. When we first moved to Thailand I was scared of snakes. It wasn’t a phobia-level fear but it was not helpful or pleasant considering I love hiking in the forest, and it is very common for them to enter homes and gardens, so you can’t really avoid them. I attended a talk about snakes and spent a little time learning about them. Then if I came across certain types I knew they weren’t dangerous. I knew to stomp through the forest so snakes (and scorpions) would scatter before I arrived and to avoid the leaf piles. I knew if I came across a snake that was dangerous or if I didn’t know if it was, I should freeze and slowly back away. The more I learned the more my fear was diluted by curiosity and interest. But definitely still a lot of caution! SM felt curiosity instead of fear to the extreme, because of her condition, but it gives a hint about how to make fear more manageable: build on any kernel of curiosity you notice in yourself.
This small spotted coral snake we saw while hiking is probably not dangerous to humans but I would stay clear just in case
The fear-for-fun sweet spot
The Recreational Fear Lab 'investigates the conditions under which fear can be fun, social, and inherently meaningful' using empirical scientific methods. One piece of research found that whether people identify as someone who enjoys the genre 'horror' (55%) or not (28%), the amount of fear they expect to feel during scary entertainment is the same, but the difference is in whether they expect to experience joy alongside it. Another of their studies involved taking participants to a haunted house and asked them to either try to feel more fear, or to feel less fear. Following these instructions people did manage to alter the amount of fear they experienced, and both groups felt equal satisfaction from the experience. Looking at heartrate changes and enjoyment levels, they found that there is a sweet spot: people enjoyed it when it was just the right amount of scary - neither too tame nor too terrifying.
The researchers also link this to a cognitive theory of play related to the brain as a prediction engine. I’ve talked about the brain's love of predictions previously in another post. The theory is that the brain seeks opportunities to learn and improve predictive capabilities. Too much uncertainty resulting in too many prediction errors can mean the environment is too volatile to learn from, but not enough uncertainty or too few prediction errors can also limit opportunity learn. So just the right amount of uncertainty and prediction error is perfect for the brain to enjoy flexing its muscles. Horror films are often carefully designed to cycle through building uncertainty and suspense followed by resolution and back again. And this could be one of the reasons why 55% of people enjoy it. Personally I’m in the 28% these days. Not my kind of fear. But if I think of the boat jumping, it was something that was uncertain enough to be exciting and scary, but at the same time was within a level of risk I could manage.
When it's not bad, it's good
So fear is helpful to keep us away from dangerous things. But sometimes it crops up when there isn't really danger, but a challenge or opportunity. In this case you could say that noticing fear is a reason to celebrate. So much good can come from following fear. We can:
Practice experiencing and managing fear
Develop inner strength and resilience through our ability to overcome
Signal to others that we are brave and strong
Experience the elation that comes with conquering fear and surviving
Appreciate peace or life, seen from a new perspective against the contrast of living dangerously
Give the brain a chance to practice prediction
Create a bonding experience with other people
Achieve difficult things
Have new experiences and learn new things
Any more? And of course all of these can be done by following the fear, or walking alongside the fear. Fear doesn't have to go away for us to be able to have these experiences, it can be part of it.
What do you like about fear?
This post intends to provide interesting information and insights but it is not recommending that you put yourself in danger, or tolerate a fearful situation out of your control. This post does not provide a replacement for therapy. If you are feeling disproportionate or unmanageable fear, please seek appropriate professional support for your circumstances.