Recognize If Fear Will Help or Hurt You
Fear hasn’t caught up with modern life.
One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Franklin D. Roosevelt:
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Unfortunately, it’s easy to miss the meaning of this statement. It’s a lot deeper than you might realize. In a nutshell, it means fear is often not what it appears to be.
Another great quote from Paulo Coelho adds perspective to this statement. This quote, from The Alchemist, is:
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.”
When you put the two quotes above into the same context, they help define one another. It adds up to this: The main thing we fear is the suffering fear will cause us.
Fear is part of how animals on Planet Earth survive to propagate the species. Fear of predators and other life-threatening situations sets them up to fight, flee, or freeze. This is true of human beings, too.
The problem we’ve run into is that fear hasn’t evolved in the same way we have.
Tangibles and intangibles
Fear of tangible threats is super helpful. There’s a cliff ahead, slow down and don’t run over it! You’re crossing a busy street, look both ways so you don’t get hit by an unwary motorist! These are tangible matters that can threaten your ongoing existence.
Intangibles do not have the same measure. The intangible things we fear are generally not life-or-death. The fear of failure, success, not being respected, and the like, are not fears of life-threatening possibilities. Tangible fears are things that might physically harm you, whereas intangible fears are likely to harm you mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, if at all.
Defining this is important because while tangible fears might help you avoid injury or death, intangible fears are often not about the thing you fear itself. It’s really all about potential suffering.
It’s not failure or success I fear, it’s being abandoned and then suffering from that. Having nobody on my side and nobody to turn to might well cause a lot of suffering. And nobody wants to suffer.
Comfort zones regularly tie into this. Comfort zone is a misnomer. More often than not, it’s actually a stability, familiarity, or known zone. You know what to expect, everything is familiar, which is why you stay there – even when it doesn’t suit you. Fear of suffering from leaving the zone unnerves lots of people. I grok this.
You and I, however, are empowered with the ability to recognize if fear will help you or hurt you.
Will fear help or hurt?
When you’re in danger of injury or death, fear can protect you. That’s fear that helps. It’s part of human evolution to recognize danger and fight, flee, or freeze. People often forget that we are, after all, merely animals in the greater animal kingdom of the world.
When you experience fear of missing out, of being forgotten, of insufficiency, these are not life-threatening. These might protect your ego, or some element of your values and beliefs, but they are constructs. They are not set in stone and are changeable.
Fear, particularly intangible fear, is often learned. It’s even offered as a good thing, such as the fear of god. (I could go on a major tangent here, but if god is love, why are you supposed to fear love?) Fearing outsiders, those who think or feel differently from you, people of different genders or skin colors, is not real. Any fear of that nature is learned.
This means it can be changed. Altered. Growing up, I knew what homosexuality was, and up to my teenage years, found it “other” and disconcerting, and felt some fear. In college, I met openly gay people, and found they were not so different from me, and discovered it was irrational. Learning this, I went from tolerance to acceptance to open support.
You’re always learning and are never too old or too young to choose to change. And that’s the key, really. You can choose change. When you have an intangible fear, you can change it. This, however, isn’t necessarily easy.
Choices made and not made
You have the power to control what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, your intentions, the positivity or negativity of your approach, and your actions. In fact, you, and only you, can and do control these.
Because intangible fears are learned, reactions to certain situations are automated. Things happen that cause you to get angry, or scared, or excited, or whatever. After the initial reaction, however, you decide where to go.
For example, you get into a car accident. Immediately, you get angry, maybe irrationally angry, at the other driver. That reaction is automated. You, however, decide if you will take that anger and scream at them and maybe get violent; or pause, calm down, and approach them rationally. You choose what follows the initial, automated response.
To do this, you start with active conscious awareness. This works only in the present. Right here, right now, you can become mindful by recognizing and acknowledging your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions. All these are in your control, and all can be changed and altered by you.
Sometimes this is easy. Other times, not so much. It depends on all kinds of factors, your subconscious beliefs and values, outside influences, situations, and more. Elements both in and out of your control.
Fear can help you or hurt you, and you decide whether you accept it, resist it, fight it, or work through it. You’re empowered to choose. Hence, you can choose to act or not in any given situation.
Recognizing if fear will help or harm you isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge fear, and determine if it’s tangible or intangible, you will know if it is a fear that helps or harms you. Knowing that intangible fear tends not to be life-or-death, nor physically harmful otherwise, you can make choices and decisions to change your reactions and not let fear overwhelm or control you.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The better aware you are of yourself, here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-thirty-second (632) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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