Understanding Fear

When we anticipate fear, we anticipate a lack of inner resources to deal with it.

In the last few years, someone made up an acronym for FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real. It’s catchy and useful, but there are people that try to use this acronym as a solution for fear itself, as if by discounting the word it will be quickly defused in a person’s mind. No matter how many times you spell out the acronym, it’s not going to change most people’s minds on the stuff they fear.

I have a fear of getting into deep water, like lakes and oceans. I can stand in a few feet, but once I hit the sandbar and can’t feel the earth beneath me, I’m immediately fighting my way back to shallower water.

This fear has extended to my ability to do river floats or many other kinds of water sports. But there’s a large contradiction to this extension: I can handle being on boats, but why not other flotation devices like a tube or a kayak?

This is when fear becomes impractical: Sure, what’s the point of getting myself into open waters? But there’s little reason to extend this fear to all water-related activities, especially as I do just fine in a boat.

I must ask myself: What do I actually fear by being in open water? And what do I really fear about sitting on a tube on the Truckee River?

Asking these basic questions, I made a discovery: My fear of open water is not what it can do to me, but what I do to myself. Once the sandbar ends, my inner resources leave me—these resources include personal strategies, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that make me feel like I can do just fine in shallow water.

In shallow water, I am resourceful: I know I can get myself back to safety, and that I have nothing to worry about. I know how I can move myself back to shore if the currents get strong, and I can stay resilient if something does go wrong.

In deep water, I lose these resources. I don’t know if I can move myself effectively, and I get panicky because anything can go wrong.

If we return to the acronym of FEAR—false evidence appearing real—it’s not that there’s evidence that I will drown if I get into deep water. Instead, I’ve created false evidence that I won’t know what to do when it happens.

I hypothesize that Fear is a temporary state of resourcelessness; and for most modern, comfortable, safe people, fear only comes around in anticipation of future events. In our daily lives, we usually don’t do many activities that would strike fear of the current moment. At the office or home, there aren’t many sources of in-the-moment fear.

Regardless, people are commonly fearful of future events. Whether it’s a performance, having to move homes, or a possible negative interaction you might need to have with a friend or coworker, most sources of fear in this age are rooted in anticipation of possibly frightful situations.

When reality hasn’t set in, anything could happen, and some people catastrophize the future. In some cases, like driving a car down a dangerous backcountry road, this skill is useful.

But if someone is constantly anticipating and planning for the worst for simple events like driving to the grocery store or swimming in the deep end of the beach, they’ll be so geared up for the negative experience that fear might already set in by thinking about it.

They may even start spinning it out, as if bad things could only turn worse.

I think this is what happened to me. Around 7 or 8 years old, I developed a fear of deep water. Yet I was still taking canoes and jet skiing when I was little. Then I moved to Iowa and hadn’t set foot near the ocean for years. Without exposure to the water, my fear expanded into activities that I never even had an issue with.

In summary, I associated deep water with any type of natural water, and then natural water with any water activity. Thus, my anticipated fear of water engulfed all water activities.

Anticipated fear, when left unchecked, can screw up things we always liked. It feels as if I’ve been leaking my inner resources over the years of avoiding deep water, and as a result lost out on easily doing activities I’ve enjoyed in the past.

However, I did emphasize that Fear is a temporary state of resourcelessness, and if my theory is correct that most fear is Anticipated Fear, then perhaps these resources actually do exist when we push ourselves to engage in our fears.

I’ve always entertained the pop-science version of exposure therapy: start doing the things you fear, and you’ll soon discover (or re-discover) your inner resources when doing them. As a person that used to have huge social anxiety, I took jobs on crew to work on this issue—and it worked in spades.[^1]

(Note: I do recognize that people with PTSD have a different relationship with fear. Whether anticipated or in-the-moment, the triggering circumstance is not just triggering one’s beliefs in resourcelessness, but a separate response in which the original triggering memories will be relived as if it’s in-the-moment. I don’t think exposure is the best remedy for those with PTSD, because their fear is not based on standard emotional logic, but neural and nervous system responses that requires a lot more work on the triggering process itself rather than the triggering circumstance. In other words, it’s not the deep water but their relationship with past memories.)

If you do have a fear that you would like to get over, try this quick exercise: Imagine that you are engaging with the fear right now. Let’s say you are afraid of heights; imagine you need to follow a trail right next to the cliff’s edge to get back to your car.

Think about what you can do to keep yourself safe: Walk slowly, hold on to something, and wait for any wind to die down so you can feel more confident about crossing. Any way that you find more control over your environment while you engage with your fear. Don’t worry, you’re in a safe place: your head!

Also don’t worry if it doesn’t work the first time. One of the great challenges about most Anticipated Fears is that after time, they become part of your identity, which makes it even harder to shake off. The more times you tell people about your fear, and the more times you make decisions to shy away from it, the more you say to yourself, “I really have a fear of X.” Implicitly you are establishing in your subconscious that you “aren’t the person to do X”.

Using your imagination to engage with your fears—and providing yourself the resources to feel more comfortable or successful—can work for many people after several attempts, but if the fear is ingrained in your identity, you may need to move on to more in-depth techniques like Self-Concept, which is a really fun way to use experiences you are comfortable with and enjoy to rebuild your fear-influenced experiences as something resourceful and useful.

I’ll get to that another time.

Thanks for reading,

Dom

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Footnotes

[^1]: My challenge is that I always got paid to do what I feared—if I have to pay to do something I don’t want to do, I’d rather just pay for something else. This is a barrier I’ll be more willing to get past as I find more financial stability.