Fear
Fear
/fɪə/
noun
- an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm.
‘Beyond fear, lies victory’, is a cliché, advertisement one-liner we all have heard so many times that the natural response is to ignore it. Fear, however, is something that’s best not ignored. As the Oxford Dictionary puts it, fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm. Like all emotions, fear too is a signaling mechanism of our brain that can unlock great potential when understood and managed properly. One particular word in the definition of fear that stands out among the rest: Threat.
It is widely accepted that fear is an evolutionary trait that came to be dominant among almost all species to promote survival. This aversion to threat is what ensures an organism doesn’t go around jumping off cliffs and diving into suspicious-looking bright red pools. Fear is our brain’s way of subtly telling us that it does not know what something holds or that the last time someone did this in our ancestry, it did not turn out pretty. So it is natural for our brains to take little to go “Unga bunga, I don’t know what that is so let’s not do that.”
When faced with some uncommon and/or endangering situations, be it social, physical, or emotional, our brain goes into one of the three F modes: Fight, Flight, or Freeze. Which mode is chosen to switch to is the result of one’s lifelong experience and conditioning. This is part of the response chain that exposes our ground reality, our true personality, and our inner self.
With the context established, we can now come to understand and summarize the elements of fear:
I. The element of Possible Harm: ‘Possible Harm’ refers to the things our brain automatically classifies as bad, like jumping off a cliff or shoving one’s hand into fire. Although this involuntary response is an evolutionary marvel, I’d say this element is the boring bit. I might trigger some neurologists but a bunch of grey stuff and some wires doing things on their own is not ‘super interesting’.
II. The element of being human: “To err is Human” and so is to be scared. To be scared is to be vulnerable, to be exposed to being hurt in the process, and to truly care about something, even if it is yourself. This is the most human we can be. To risk losing something with the promise of, sometimes, nothing in return is what separates us from other species. This element is what acts as the essential catalyst, providing the fuel to the fire, which is the final element in the equation of fear.
III. The element of the Unknown. While it might sound faintly similar to the first, this is far more interesting and keeps getting better the more you think about it. A common example is the fear of darkness. You see, I find the fear of the dark funny. Not that I am not scared to go out alone in the dark, but the fact that we are scared of absolutely and literally nothing. Think about it. You go around your life during the day not knowing if a bus might hit you or a bird might fly into your face and poke you in your eye or heck, if the world will even exist tomorrow. But the sun sets, the sky darkens a bit and it’s enough for us to imagine man-eating monsters and soul-draining ghosts. This fear of what we don’t know is what I find interesting. The slightest bit goes out of the ordinary and our brain is ready to go haywire with all the rest of our senses. ”Alloweth th’re beest dram unknown and i shalt doth the rest”, says the brain waiting to mess with you.
This fear of the unknown is so strong that as a species, we have devised various ‘life hacks’ to minimize or sidetrack it. From offering sacrifices to worshipping stones, from meditating peacefully to chanting prayers so loud that you wake up everyone in the neighbourhood, we have tried almost everything that may or may not make sense. However, I believe the solution is pretty simple. To cut it short, fear is either an instinctual reaction to an immediate danger or an emotional response to or the lack of prior experience or information about a situation. This puts everything in a different perspective and unlocks some cheat codes for this game of life. Knowing that you can’t know unless you try provides a way to overcome fear. It is by experiencing new things that we can train our brains to better contextualize the situation. It is by doing the things you fear that you overcome the fear itself. It does not mean that one should simply jump off a cliff or dive into said suspicious-looking water, but one should always open oneself to new experiences.
Whenever faced with difficult or scary choices in life, I come back to Nora Allen’s words from The Flashpoint Paradox: “Accept what you cannot change, Have the courage to change the things you can, And have the wisdom to know the difference.”
Being vulnerable and taking calculated risks can land a person a great deal of happiness if not success. Risking some embarrassment for a life-changing moment isn’t that bad of a trade after all, is it?
