Yesterday we talked about Anger. Today we move on to one of the most basic but also most important human emotions: Fear.
Whether or not we like to admit it, fear drives many of our decisions. Human beings would have gone extinct long ago without a healthy self-preservation instinct. Unfortunately, the same fight-or-flight response that saved our early ancestors from lions, tigers, and bears can be detrimental in today’s modern world, causing unnecessary anxiety. The good news is that fear is often based on irrational assumptions, and by understanding what triggers fear, we can start to question these assumptions in scenarios where the voice in our head is making things out to be worse than they actually are.
So what am I scared of? What makes me feel nervous, afraid, and terrified? And when and where do I most often lose my nerve? Once again, my journal on Empath proves to be a valuable source of information.
It’s interesting to see that words like “work” and “sleep,” which are among the most significant drivers of anger in my life, are also important triggers of fear. Seeing this, I dug into clusters of anger- and fear-related posts made around the same time and found that often, they were not only related, but fed on each other to create a potentially unhealthy cycle. Here’s one recent example:
On Thursday 4/19 around noon, I posted that I was angry about a meeting that didn’t go the way I’d hoped and that was causing me to feel stressed. Then at 2am the next morning, I posted that I couldn’t sleep and that I was worried about being up all night, at least in part because I knew I needed rest to perform well at work the next day. I found multiple examples of anger-fear pairs like this in my journal hinting at the same vicious cycle:
1) Something goes wrong at work
2) This causes me to feel angry and stressed
3) Stress prevents me from getting a good night sleep
4) Poor sleep causes me to feel anxious about performing at work
The cycle can also work in the opposite direction. Here’s an example from the previous month where I post feelings of nervousness on Monday about going into another tough week and follow it up on Tuesday with an angry post expressing that I’m running out of patience:
Here, the cycle looks a little different:
1) I‘m under a lot of pressure at work
2) This ongoing pressure creates pent up stress
3) At some point, my stress levels approach a breaking point
4) I react with anger to vent the stress and protect my boundaries
Let’s review: Fear and anger are linked, they can create a vicious cycle, and I must understand my fears to break this cycle. So what else am I afraid of?
Unsurprisingly, around the time my daughter Kinley was born, I began to feel nervous about my ability to be a good father. These feelings first surfaced a month before Kinley’s due date and tended to resurface whenever she would get sick (which as any parent of an infant in daycare knows, is quite often!). These feelings ranged from mild nervousness over small colds to more intense fear the week Kinley got croup. Fortunately, Kinley always bounced back quickly and is about as healthy and happy as two parents could hope for, but I still worry about her. My mom tells me this feeling never entirely goes away : )
And then there’s President Trump. I haven’t posted often about The Donald, but he figures prominently in both of the terrified posts I’ve made on Empath:
Apparently I wasn’t alone, as the overall percentage of fear-related posts on Empath shot from 9% in the months before the election to nearly 50% the week President Trump was elected. You can read the full analysis here. I wish I could say that my fears have abated since Trump took office but they haven’t. And unlike my other fears, I’m not sure these ones are so irrational.
So we’ve established what I’m afraid of, but when and where do I feel afraid? Here are a few patterns, many of which look similar to my patterns for anger:
- I over index on fearful posts early in the day, even more so than anger.
On average, my anxiety level declines as the day goes on.
- I over index on fearful posts at the beginning of the week. I tend to relax as the week goes on until Sunday, when I start to feel anxious again.
- Similar to anger, nearly all of my fearful posts occur at home or at work.
So what have I learned? Like anger, fear accounts for a relatively small share of my emotional experience. However, my anger- and fear-related feelings are clearly linked, and together they account for over 20% of my posts on Empath. Since fear often leads to anger, understanding what I’m really afraid of and overcoming those fears should also help me manage my anger. Specifically:
- I can apply the “Five Whys” technique to get to the root of my fears.
Why am I afraid of going to work? Because I feel a constant need to perform.
Why do I feel a constant need to perform? Because I don’t want to fail.
Why don’t I want to fail? Because I’m afraid of disappointing people.
Why am I afraid of disappointing people? Because I need to feel like I belong.
Why do I need to feel like I belong? Because I moved around a lot as a kid but was able to make new friends by performing well at school and in sports, so I associate competence with social acceptance. - I can evaluate whether my underlying assumptions are rational.
Even if my Five Whys analysis isn’t perfect, it highlights that my anxiety at work doesn’t really have to do with work at all, but a need to feel accepted. But if I screw up one meeting or presentation, are my colleagues going to reject me? Of course not! Which helps to explain why my anxiety level steadily declines from morning to evening and from the start of the week to the end - because sure enough, things are never as bad as they seem.
So what am I so afraid of? And if there’s really nothing to be afraid of, then what do I have to be angry about? So often, the answer is nothing at all. - I can practice mindfulness to stop the fear-anger cycle before it starts.
One of the reasons why meditation is so powerful is because it teaches us to be more aware of what we’re thinking and feeling in the moment. The more we do this and the better we get at it, the more able we are to identify irrational thoughts when they arise and reframe them before they trigger unhealthy emotional cycles. So the next time I’m in a meeting that doesn’t go well, I can rewrite the narrative in my head from “You let people down and they’re going to be disappointed in you” to “This meeting taught you something that is going to make you a better professional going forward.”
Now that we’ve explored anger and fear, we move next to sadness before turning the corner into all the good stuff: calm, happiness, and excitement. Since many of these feelings are connected, I’ll continue to point out interesting links and parallels along the way. See you again tomorrow!
