Pushing Past Fear
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” — Frank Herbert
I’ve recently been spending all my time watching videos about rock climbing.
Bouldering, free soloing, Olympic climbing events, flashing — in the past week I’ve gathered more information about climbing than I knew about the sport in the past 22 years of my life.
I’ve honed in particularly on one climber — Alex Honnold.
One of the world’s most famous climbers, partly due to an Oscar-winning documentary covering his free solo climb of El Capitan. Also a really chill dude who seems to be completely calm when facing everything in life.
As someone who climbed up 3,000 feet (2,307 meters) with no ropes, you definitely get asked one question in particular:
“How do you deal with fear?”
And even though I didn’t climb up 3,000 feet without ropes, I wondered the same question to myself.
On a panel during the Nobel Week Dialogue 2019, Honnold sat down with Armita Golkar, a psychology researcher from Stockholm University, to talk about fear.
Golkar defines fear as follows:
“Fear is an adaptive survival response to a threat or to a predictor of danger. That is the most fundamental property that we need in order to survive and avoid harm. The other part of is the subjective experience or conscious feelings that we have when we say “I’m afraid.”
But one thing doesn’t necessarily cause the other.”
We often tie feelings of fear to actual fear — that if we are feeling afraid, then there must be an actual threat. But in reality, that’s not only the case.
In our world, where most of us are cushioned from life-threatening situations, we only occasionally feel true fear, fear that would cause harm or significantly reduce our quality of life.
Yet feelings of fear are something all of us are aware of — and may feel often.
What do you fear?
For me, I fear a lot of things. I‘m scared of dying alone. I‘m scared of being left on read when reaching out to my friends. I’m scared of being judged for what I post on social media. I’m scared of rejection when shooting my shot to a person I like. I can’t even post a selfie online without constant worrying and fretting.
I’ll even probably be afraid to share this post publicly across all of my social media, in fear of people laughing at what I write or — even worse — people thinking it’s crap.
Chances are that a lot of you reading this feel similar fears. Maybe you’d like to send flowers to your crush. Maybe you’d like to post covers of you singing your favorite song. Maybe you’d like to share some of your thoughts on Medium. But fear is stopping you — whether that be fear of rejection, other’s opinions, or even a fear that you’re just not good as you think you are.
But these aren’t fears that are fundamental. They’re feelings of fear — subjective responses to things that we perceive to be a threat.
To face these perceived fears, Golkar says this:
“The sense of mastery or control can modify these feelings of fear, which can then modify the fundamental property of fear.”
We perceive fear to things that are unknown. We fear what is uncertain. Our minds creates so many scenarios about what could happen — which, if you’re anything like me, are more often negative rather than positive.
So we need to get some sense of control in order to be able to deal with those feelings of mastery.
The only thing is that if we never start, we have no hope of getting control.
If we spend our time fearing every single possible outcome, both positive and negative, the fear will continue to exist. You’ll never post that Medium piece. You’ll never make that Youtube channel. You’ll never end up saying hi to that cute online stranger.
So the answer is simple: push past the fear.
Easier said than done? Maybe, but think about it again: what’s to lose?
If you post a bad Medium post, maybe people will think it’s completely horrible. But realistically, they’ll not even give it that much thought.
The risks we associate with the majority of our fears are not threats to our lives — but rather, threats to our egos. We fear that we’ll be perceived in a negative light. We fear that no one will like us. We fear that we won’t get what we want.
But in reality, most of these fears never materialize.
So push past the fear. Just give it a shot once. Post that selfie you’ve kept in your phone for months. Say “hey lol” to that girl/guy you’ve been admiring since high school. Start that company you’ve always dreamed of making.
The point isn’t for the fear to disappear. The feeling of fear will always persist.
But it won’t be as scary. As you do something you’re scared of more often, you either learn that reality isn’t as scary as you feared it to be or you learn how to push past the fear and even ignore it. You learn to control your feelings of fear.
In the words of Alex Honnold:
“When I talk about fear, I always frame it in the same exact way, where there’s actual rational fear that makes sense because it’s your body responding to danger, and then there’s the perceived fear and that the challenge in a situation like rock climbing is being able to differentiate between the two and knowing which to heed and which to ignore.”
Fear, in any situation, is not something that we have to continuously bend to. Just because we’re afraid to do something, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it.
Obviously, some fears need to be heeded, no matter what. This isn’t a message for you to be completely reckless and do whatever you want. Maybe you have fears that truly would impact your survival or quality of life significantly. Continue to heed those fears.
But learn which fears you can ignore. Learn which fears are irrational and unfounded. Learn to push through the fear.
So whatever you may fear, this is the encouragement to push past it. To give it one shot. To risk it all and see what may happen.
To this day, all the fears I’ve mentioned above are still very scary to me. But I’m trying to reach out to friends more, even though they may still leave me on read. I still spend a lot of time hovering on the post button, thinking about the impacts of posting a Tweet or an Instagram story. I’m still often hesitant on posting my Medium articles on my socials. But I try to push past the fear anyway as much as I can. And it turns out that it’s not scary as I imagined it to be. (I’m still working on gathering the courage to randomly DM my internet crushes, but I’ll get there)
The fear doesn’t go away. But it becomes more manageable. I don’t make the fear disappear — I’m learning how to push past it and how to make it smaller.
If Alex Honnold can deal with his fear and climb up El Capitan without a rope, I can learn to deal with my fears.
Slowly, I’ll face my fears. Slowly, I’ll reach the summit.
