Two friends came to me last week with variations of the same problem: They faced a big, overwhelming obstacle and they were scared. Being open about fears is uncommon, particularly for men, and their confidence brought with it a lot of responsibility. Like Brené Brown says, “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.” What I said in response mattered – it could encourage or discourage, support or cut down. And in the heat of the moment last week, I’m not sure I got that balance right.
The beauty of this newsletter is that it gives me the time and space to reflect on things properly. Links and quotes don’t have a place during intimate moments with friends, but they do here, where you can digest at your own pace.
Fear is our body’s way of alerting us to danger. No surprises there. But as we’ve evolved from a species that lives in the wilderness to one that lives indoors, our biology has not updated its threat levels. We’re flooded with cortisol and adrenaline whether we’re up against public speaking or a roaring tiger. It’s important to recognize that.
Tim Urban explains this dynamic better than anyone:
“Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 50,000BC, which leaves modern humans with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation with tribal-style social survival in a world where social survival is no longer a real concept. We’re all here in 2014, accompanied by a large, hungry, and easily freaked-out woolly mammoth who still thinks it’s 50,000BC.”
Facing your fears starts here. Tackle the physiological response first, and understand that there are no tigers lurking in the bushes. Failure, rejection, embarrassment – these are all scary, don’t get me wrong. But they’re different risks altogether from the ones our bodies are calibrated for.
Once you understand why your heart is racing, your palms are sweaty and you’re afraid to get out of bed, you’re ready to do what Tim Ferriss calls Fear Setting: List out the things you’re afraid of, rank them on a scale of 1 (not bad) to 10 (catastrophic), and then identify things you can do now to avoid those outcomes:
“As soon as I cut through the vague unease and ambiguous anxiety by defining my nightmare, the worst-case scenario, I wasn’t as worried about taking a trip. Suddenly, I started thinking of simple steps I could take to salvage my remaining resources and get back on track if all hell struck at once.”
Here’s an example from a recent fear of mine – sharing this newsletter on social media:
- Fear: No one will read it (Risk Level 1)
- Fear: More pressure to meet deadlines (Risk Level 2)
- Fear: People will think I’m weird (Risk Level 3)
- Fear: My writing will upset someone (Risk Level 5)
When I listed out my fears, it was clear that no outcome was catastrophic, and most were phantom risks entirely – once I had put a name to the thing I was afraid of, I realized there was nothing there:
- No one will read it -> No one reads it today!
- Deadline pressure -> I need deadline pressure!
- Think I’m weird -> So what?
- Upset someone -> Hasn’t happened in two years of writing…
Without Fear Setting, we have no choice but to take the signals from our body – run! – and assume there must be a tiger waiting to pounce. We have no choice but to assume that every scary outcome is catastrophic, when most are not. So ask yourself:
- If I fail in this job, what will happen?
- I get rejected by this person, what will happen?
- If my writing sucks, what will happen?
The final step is preparation. Expose yourself to the outcomes that you fear, and see for yourself that they aren’t so bad. As Ryan Holiday puts it:
“Think of practice as immunity: Immunity to fear; immunity to weakness; immunity to your own sense of doubt and hesitation. Practice even what you think you can’t do, and you might find that you have more capacity than you considered possible.”
We all have examples of this. What did you think was scary that no longer is? For me, sharing my writing has made me less afraid of criticism and rejection than I was two years ago. I respond to similar situations – reaching out to someone via email, giving an opinion at work – with a correspondingly low level of fear. The Fear Setting exercise is automatic for experiences I’d categorize as “exposing my true self.”
Give it a shot.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
To Be Happier, Write Your Own Set of Personal Commandments – Gretchen Rubin
Currently reading Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project, and the Personal Commandments are one of my favorite concepts.
The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman – Jia Tolentino
“But the worse things get, the more a person is compelled to optimize. I think about this every time I do something that feels particularly efficient and self-interested, like going to a barre class or eating lunch at a fast-casual chopped-salad chain, like Sweetgreen, which feels less like a place to eat and more like a refueling station.”
What I’m Listening To:
SONY – Acquired Podcast