Fear vs. Critical Thinking: Navigating our Emotional Landscape

A personal exploration on the psychological layers of fear, to understand how it affects our lives.

A while back, I joined a group on Meetup called “Intellectual Pursuits”. The group gathers twice a month to give its members an opportunity to voice their opinions on various contemporary and contentious topics. The discussions covered a large range of disciplines such as philosophy, ethics, psychology, politics, and more. Here’s a short list of memorable subjects: animal testing, abortion rights, gun control, generational heritage, eugenics & cloning, assisted suicide, electric vehicles and their sustainability impact, etc. These are all buzzwords of course, excellent for sparking debate, yet they often lack a definitive resolution or consensus among those who fervently support or vehemently oppose them on principle.

On one occasion, the debate prompt was: “Emotions vs. Critical Thinking” A title I found compelling. The use of the word “vs” cleverly hinted at the contrasting nature between the two sides. The topic centered on the influence of human emotions on our ability to think critically.

To tackle this issue, I had to reframe it as a reflective inquiry. Among all the emotions I have ever experienced, which had been the most intense? The most overwhelming, moving, sublime, or terrible? And what was my response such emotion — did I surrender to its sway, or did I attempt to analyze, master it, and adapt my life accordingly?

Long story short, I’ve concluded that fear is the very essential, primordial emotion that lays at the foundations of my psyche, which opens the door to a spectrum of other emotions and feelings that, to varying degrees, governs my live. Although this was an introspective exercise, I think the answer applies to all of us. This is quite a bold statement, so let’s approach it step by step.

Understanding Fear

Vocabulary aside, if fear was to be given a general definition of, what would everyone agree on? Probably a scenario associated with pain, danger, stress, or any type of negative outcome or projection of outcome. This is quite abstract, and examples vary based on personal experiences. Yet, there must be some kind of common denominator everyone agrees on, by which the great majority could admit: “Yes, I am afraid of that”.

Indeed, we could list those psychological mechanisms and necessities that trigger our survival instinct, and I am guessing everyone would have to agree on the fact that failing to fulfill those requirements is cause of concern… but this whole interpretation is more like Maslow’s subject matter. For the sake of this article, we can probably simplify a bit instead.

I would think that roughly all of us are — or have been at a certain point in our lives — worried about things like death, social rejection, hunger, physical pain, illness, loneliness, failure, etc.

Then a smaller portion also harbors fears of more tangible things, such as spiders, fire, heights, confined spaces, or the prospect of job loss. These fears differ greatly among individuals: some can just stay calm and collected in the presence of an abnormally developed insect, while others may succumb to panic, marked by hyperventilation and an inability to manage their reactions.

Okay so, already two facets of the medallion become evident: on one side this emotion is ancestrally rooted in us, centered on the factors that contribute to our existence and the preservation of our existence. On the other side, this emotion takes the form of an urgent issue that cannot be overlooked, which we must address right away and guarantee positive results.

The first type operates subconsciously and, albeit with different intensities, it influences all our lives. Since we are familiar with the determinants of this type of fear, educated, or otherwise informed about them, we can handle the situation when needed, in a composed and controlled manner. This is a non-blocking form of fear, one that we can control or mitigate, or perhaps even forget till a later time.

The second type occurs at our conscious level, but it only affects some of us. This form requires immediate intervention, most likely because the situation that spawns this type of fear is unexpected, and we are not prepared against it. Often our behavior is automatic, instinctive, and not always leading toward the best outcome. Let’s focus on this second type for a moment and the way we deal with it.

Fear, Anxiety, and Phobia

Picture this: you’re invigorated by the healthy resolutions of the new year, and you decide to hike up the mountain on a glorious spring morning. Suddenly, with unexpected chuffing and huffing, a ravenous bear pops out of the bush, barely awakened from hibernation. Since the goriest thing you have ever seen in your life was your neighbor’s cat dismembering a mouse, how do you react to the dreadful sight of the colossal mammal? You realize that it likely hasn’t seen food for the last seven months and chances are high it could give you the same treatment the cat gave to the mouse. In the back of your mind, you recall some self-proclaimed survival expert fool yapping about fighting the urge to run for your life in such situations; and behave accordingly instead. Should you lie down? Stand still? Make yourself appear larger and make loud noises? Chances are that your self-preservation instinct reaches your legs long before those unconvincing thoughts reach your rational mind. Before you know it, you’re hurtling halfway down the hill already, with the evident intention to break your neck if the bear doesn’t catch you first. (Fun fact: for a short distance grizzly bears can run faster than a horse so running is not really the best idea).

In the second scenario, image that you are a young adult man, and you have spent half of your life being shy with the opposite gender, in particular those you are attracted to. When you were little, other kids at school started to make fun of you as soon as they had discovered the recipient of your love letter. And when your beautiful princess rejected you, those mini devils would torture you until the end of the school year. It was only a natural consequence that you lost confidence in yourself, and became very close and secretive about who you fancied, to the point that many of them wouldn’t even be aware of your feelings… how many chances did you lose? Yet, for some good fortune, you’ve grown up to become a fine male specimen, one that many women would be glad to be acquainted with. Your confidence rose, and so did your resolution to leave your timid past behind. One day you approach a girl you’ve been secretly admiring at the gym, especially during her yoga exercises. You ask her to go grab a bite after your workout, and to your surprise, she accepts without much hesitation. You’ve never been single again.

Finally, imagine yourself watching your favorite horror show in your dark living room, when a tingling sensation develops on your leg. Sprawled out on the couch, sipping the most hipster cleansing drink you could put your hands on, and munching away on colorful veg chips, you force your own nerves at bay in a posture of defiance against the stressful contents of the movie. Anew, the foreign sensation comes to complement the scenes on the screen, and that would be perfectly in tune with the eerie atmosphere, except for the fact that the tickle on your calf does not seem to originate from your hair standing from all the jump scares. Horrified, you realize the foreign sensation seems to have willfully changed direction, now quickly and uncontrollably rushing up your body. Ever since you were a little girl, first your parents, then your boyfriends, used to stand up against hairy intruders of your private quarters and protect you against their unimaginable intentions. But now you are alone, a victim of the images your mind is portraying of the living creature that seems to have taken control of your nervous system. You can’t force yourself to look down, let alone chase the thing away.

In the first example, our protagonist is surprised by a wild animal, and the first instinct is to run away. In this case, the source of danger materialized unexpectedly: the person has no past experience to help them deal with this type of problem. They are frightened and since they have no clues to help them act in the best of ways, their survival instinct kicks in, taking control of their decision process, and they run from the dangerous situation. They react to their fear in an irrational way.

In the second example, our hero is very familiar with the nature of his troubles. For many years, he has lived in a state of anxiety at the perspective of rejection by the girls he likes. To prevent the rejection, he has always avoided the problem altogether, until he finally decides to overcome it. Because he is so familiar with the situation, he is prepared and ultimately successful. From then on, he got rid of his shyness, making it a problem of the past. He responds to his fear in a rational and proactive way.

In the last example, our heroine is forced to face a problem that she has never learned to handle on her own. As a result, her fear degenerated into a phobia that obstructs her critical thinking, rendering her completely incapable of action. This is also a form of reaction to her fear, but it’s passive as her panic has taken priority over her ability to think and behave accordingly.

Is fear real?

Although fear, anxiety, and phobia differ in the intensity of the emotion, and whether people react or respond to the situation depends on their degree of familiarity with the problem, what brings these three interpretations together is the necessity to overcome an obstacle that affects our lives now or in the near future.

This is the key takeaway: fear is an illusion generated by incorrect, impartial, or lack of information needed to guide us through the resolution of a problem. Fear injects in our present a projection of an uncertain and uncontrollable future, and nobody likes to not be able to control their own future.

“Fear is not real. It is a product of thoughts you create. Do not misunderstand me. Danger is very real. But fear is a choice.” (Will Smith — After Earth — 2013).

Cypher Raige, protagonist of the movie, characterizes danger as a pervasive yet intangible factor that impacts everyone’s life, the extent of which is beyond our control. Fear, he explains, is our response to this hidden danger.

If we accept this concept, with a slight stretch of our imagination we can also recognize how everything in our lives is a source of danger, as everything has always been out of our control since the day we were born. This is only true until the moment we learn how to deal with that danger. It is self-evident that we have mastered most of our survival problems by the time we’re adults, a conquering process that usually develops at the very early stages of life, but never fully stops. And we are so good at this, that our reactions against these sources of danger have become so automatic and spontaneous that it feels weird to imply that we are just dodging a dangerous situation…

Yet every single choice we make implies some degree of danger, for how infinitesimal that may be. A rational individual simply chooses — subconsciously more often than not — the option with less relative danger. The choice is fear-driven, even if subconsciously so, as we want to increase our chances of success, trying to avoid unpleasant outcomes:

• Bob takes the car to go to work because he’s afraid he won’t make it on time if he uses public transportation,
• Mary doesn’t wear a bikini at the beach, because she’s a bit overweight and she fears judgment,
• Little Timmy brushes his teeth three times a day because he fears the dentist,
• People vaccinate every year because they fear contracting the flu,
• We all eat because we are hungry obviously (survival instinct), but under the hood, we fear the consequences of food deprivation.

Will Smith’s quote captured my interest because it presented danger as a catalyst for fear. Despite the fact that I often consider movie quotes insightful (sarcasm), I must disagree with the idea that fear is non-existent. Just because a person has conquered it or decides to ignore it, doesn’t mean it ceases to exist. Fear is very real; it just expresses itself with different intensities.

Now that we’ve discussed the second type of fear, the one that acts at a conscious level, and the ways it manifests itself, how do we reconcile this with the first type, the more subconscious one?

Well, it’s very simple, the second type is just a subset of the first type. Every expression of fear, and our reaction vs response, varies depending on our familiarity with it. At the same time, each conscious expression of fear is an embodiment of a more subconscious type of fear that is ancestrally rooted in us, and upon which our survival depends.

Survival is not only being able to sustain our biological functions but also being able to successfully integrate into our social and cultural environments.

It is the existence of fear that gives meaning to courage.