Fear is Back in Fashion

“You’re a scaredy cat!”

In my junior school playground, that was an insult of the highest order. One of the earliest rules of the school yard was: “if you feel afraid… deny, deny, deny!”

Sound familiar? It’s no surprise that in professional environments, fear has not always been welcomed with open arms.

Many of us see fear as a pest: fogging our brains, making us feel uncomfortable and bringing with it a sensation of dread that holds us back.

It’s true, fear does fog the brain. When we feel scared, our amygdala, a peanut-sized part of our brain’s temporal lobe instantly thinks “sabre-tooth tiger, run!”

It activates our fight-or-flight response and shuts down the pre-frontal cortex’s ability to respond rationally.

For some, it’s fun to fight the fear fog over a horror film but for most of us, it’s hard to argue that fear is a great state to be in when you’ve got lots to do.

In the professional world, for a long time, the narrative has been simple: the lower your fear levels, the higher your chances of success.

Feel Fear & do it Anyway

Where fear was previously seen as the opposite of resilience and self-control, increased emphasis on vulnerability and authenticity is changing the tide.

The “feel fear and do it anyway” mantra is creeping in as an antidote to the simplistic view that “scaredy cats aren’t strong” and we should eradicate fear from our emotion set.

This new school of thought sees fear and resilience as partners in crime. Channel the fear right, and you find the resilience to step outside your comfort zone. Not in spite of the fear, but because of it.

Susan Jeffers, author of Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway, argues that channelling fear in the right direction can propel us forward: “you will learn to live your life the way you want — so you can move from a place of pain, paralysis, depression and indecision to one of power, energy, enthusiasm and action.”

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How to channel fear

Who can help us reach that state of “feel fear, do it anyway” nirvana?

The Navy SEALs have their “full benefit” mantra, impressing upon individuals that there is a learning to come from any challenge. In searching for the “full benefit”, we fixate on what we learn, rather than what we’re afraid of, and the trade-off becomes worth it.

We might feel fear on the starting line for a marathon, only to find that fear replaced a few hours later by the mental and physical strength we gained as a result. The Navy SEALs channel that fear at the starting line, giving them extra firepower to unlock the “full benefit” of mental and physical strength.

Another take, recently featured in my weekly newsletter, is from Gay Hendricks in his book, The Big Leap, Conquer Your Fear and Take Life to the Next Level. He borrows a definition of fear from the founder of Gestalt Theory: “fear is a kind of breathless excitement”.

Once we internalise that, we shift from fear “happening to us” to fear as an emotion we can regulate. Hendricks advises using deep breathing as soon as you sense fear creeping in, to channel it towards an excitement that can fuel a hyper-focused mind.

When you’re giving a presentation and you control the “breathless” part of the “breathless excitement” you’re feeling just before, you will be left alert and ready to give it your best. Fear quickly becomes a setback-turned-superpower.

What happens if we don’t feel fear? It might be because the moment doesn’t register with us as important or challenging. We therefore don’t acknowledge the learnings and unlock the full benefit and we don’t reach that state of hyper-alertness. Instead, we might even become blasé, overconfident or find boredom creeps in to take fear’s empty place.

However, we might fail to feel fear because it’s masked by other emotions. How to find it and channel it for better?

Fear Sneaks Up on Us

Faced with an act of bravery, a deadly snake or a scary movie, fear’s presence is obvious. But most of us don’t find ourselves in life-or-death situations very often. Even on bad days, work rarely incites zombie apocalypse levels of fear. And this means that fear often slips in unnoticed.

From a fleeting moment of anger or frustration to a feeling of resistance, fear is disguised by surface-level feelings on a daily basis, and we fail to see fear as the true cause.

This gives fear a tendency to fester, fogging our brain without us realising. Before we know it, physical symptoms of fear creep in and can feel as if they’ve come out of nowhere.

How to see it coming:

Ask your preferred gen AI or search engine for symptoms of fear and they’re unmistakable: from the sweaty palms to the heart palpitations, we all recognise it. But by then, we’ve got our work cut out to get it under control. What if we could see it coming before it takes over?

The internet doesn’t have a silver bullet for that: the better we know ourselves, the better we can see it sneaking up on us. Either we see and know the trigger (”ah, this always makes me anxious!”) or we’re familiar with the surface-level feelings under which fear is hiding: (”ah, I know this irritable side comes out when I’m nervous”).

The better we know ourselves, the quicker we can find it. And the sooner we oust it from its hiding place, the sooner we can move towards the golden state of “feel fear and do it anyway” before it overwhelms us.

After all, now fear is back in fashion, it’s never been safer for scaredy cats to channel their fear for good.

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