Erik Van Alstine

Erik Van Alstine

Author. Leadership strategist. Expert in Perceptual IntelligenceTM.

3 Ways to Whip Useless Fears.

We all know what fear feels like. That feeling in the pit of our stomach. The spike in heart rate. Our hands sweat. Our mind runs fast and furious.

Fear is an “emotional response to a perceived threat.” Whenever we believe something bad is about to happen, we feel fear.

But if we’re wise, we quickly separate useful from useless fear:

  • When the perceived threat is real, fear is useful. It’s a healthy and prudent fear that motivates us to avoid real danger. “The prudent see danger and take refuge,” wrote Solomon the ancient sage, “but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.”
  • When the perceived threat isn’t real, fear is useless. It’s an unhealthy fear that motivates us away from opportunities for better things. “Never let the fear of striking out get in your way,” said baseball great Babe Ruth.

Then we respect the useful fears while working to eliminate the useless ones.

How can we eliminate useless fears? Here are three ways…

#1: Separate physical from psychological harm.

If we fall off a building, it will harm us physically. If we put a butter knife into a light socket, it will harm us physically. If we walk into a dark alley in a dangerous neighborhood, there’s a good chance of physical harm. In these situations it’s good to feel fear.

I think it’s a good idea to expand “physical harm” to include economic harm and relationship harm, because these are subtle forms of physical harm. When we lose our job and the bank account plunges to zero, that’s real. Money is physical, so the harm is physical. We’re not at the job anymore so our location is different. That’s physical. When a spouse leaves, that’s physical. The person is no longer present, and the conversation and the cooperation we would have had together is no longer present, that’s physical reality. When spouses or friends fight, even if it’s just words, that’s physical too. They separate from each other. The situation changes. There’s a real impact when a relationship breaks down.

But “psychological harm” is another matter. There are many instances when we don’t get harmed physically but feel pain mentally. Let’s say we lunch with a co-worker and his friend Critical Carl. Carl hears about what we do and says, “You’re not qualified for that job. You’re too young.” The crazy truth is, it’s our choice to let Carl’s words “harm us.” The American politician and activist Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” So we follow Eleanor’s advice. We refuse to consent. We laugh off Carl’s remark, and, if there’s a hint of truth to it, we invest time to shore up our qualifications.

We can do this without becoming offended by Carl or feeling any anxiety about what Carl said, because there’s a massive difference between a situation and our view of a situation. If our view of ourself, Carl, and the situation is right, we can hear Carl’s comment and not feel a hint of anxiety.

But if it’s our boss saying, “You’re not qualified for your job,” there’s a real threat of physical economic harm here. We might lose our job, and that’s real.

So while we can be psychologically immune to our boss’s insult, we should feel some anxiety here because the job loss threat is real.

#2: Accurately estimate the chance of harm.

Once we’ve defined a threat as real or imaginary, and physical or psychological, there’s another step we can take to tackle the real ones. We can accurately estimate the chance of harm. Some threats are so unlikely to happen that they’re actually imaginary, even though they seem real.

  • If we get eaten by a great white shark, that’s real harm. But the chance of a shark eating us is one in 11.5 million. So it isn’t a real threat. We should go snorkeling in Hawaii instead of staying out of the water.
  • If we get blown up by a terrorist bomb or shot by a maniac sniper, that’s real harm. But the chance of that happening is so low that we should never fear these things.
  • Most of the bad things we see in the news are real, but so unlikely that we should see them as imaginary as far as it relates to us.

We not only assess the physical threat, but the chance of threat. If the chances are low, like one in a million, we should see it as the non-threat that it is.

Unfortunately, it’s human nature to miscalculate our chances. We’re all a bit like Dumb and Dumber’s Lloyd Christmas proposing a relationship to Mary Swanson:

#3: Keep the right view in view.

I heard marriage expert Les Parrot say, “Awareness is curative.” That’s a powerful idea. Once we’re aware of the differences between physical harm and psychological harm, and aware of the chance of harm, that awareness alone might cure the fear. We see that the danger isn’t real, and in that moment of clarity, the fear goes away.

But not all the time, because awareness is a moment-by-moment affair, and we build habits of perception over time. Moments of clarity give way to moments of imagination, as we go back and replay the fearful movies on the mental screen. We often don’t overcome useless fears immediately because we play the terrifying pictures again and again.

We’ve got to control the scenes on our mental screens. Eventually we can break the power of fear by disputing imaginary threats, over and over, until we habitually see false threats as they are.

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