Must fear be overcome?

The Shrink

Back in the 1980s, self-help guru Susan Jeffers told us to “feel the fear and do it anyway”. Her message was that fear is a normal part of life and that we would be wrong to take any feelings of anxiety as warnings to avoid the things we are anxious about. Instead, embracing our fears, we should throw ourselves into that new job, relationship, journey.

The phrase, and the message, has stuck, and there are very good reasons why we should follow Jeffers’ advice. If we want to do something but are apprehensive, pushing ourselves to do it is probably the best way forward. If we wait to feel differently, we might wait for ever.

In the “12 steps” tradition there is a saying that “it is easier to act your way into sober thinking than think your way into sober acting”. This principle that changing how we act is one of the most effective ways to change how we feel is a cornerstone of cognitive behaviour therapy. Even if certain fears cannot be abolished, our best bet is to accept them and ... do it anyway.

Does this mean we should always push ourselves to conquer fear? Surely not: clearly there are times when it is crucial to listen to its alarm calls. Even Jeffers made the point that her advice did not extend to things that were highly risky or morally dubious. Just as always staying within our comfort zone is not advisable, it should not be a dogma that we must always force ourselves to get out of it.

But while anxiety about setting off up a mountain in a blizzard might be an easy example of a fear to heed, many others lie in a grey area. Assessing how rational our fears are and how important the feared action is can be difficult.

A useful question to ask, borrowing a phrase from acceptance and commitment therapy, is whether making ourselves do something is in the service of valued action. The best time to feel the fear and do it anyway is when it helps us to pursue what we most value in life.

The Sage

Most people will admit to having at least one irrational fear. Some can’t step on an aircraft but will happily drive, while others freak out at the sight of even a small, harmless spider. If such phobias become too debilitating, the obvious solution is to go to a therapist of some kind to try to get over it.

Philosophers, however, have assembled a rather different catalogue of irrational fears, and therapists would be pretty useless at ridding us of them. Several philosophers have claimed that death is nothing to get too worked up about. For Socrates, the irrationality of this fear lies in worrying about something of which we are entirely ignorant. For all we know, death “may be the greatest good that can happen” to us.

For Epicurus, it is as illogical to worry about not-being after death as it is to think that life was terrible before you were born. Nothing can be bad if there is nothing for it to be bad for. If you’re wondering why both philosophers nevertheless showed every sign of wanting to live, I’d simply say that there is a difference between fearing something and preferring for it not to happen.

Kierkegaard, in contrast, thought that “fear and trembling” was an appropriate response to the big existential choices we face, but complained that people worried more about the loss of “an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc” than they did about “losing one’s self”.

What is common to Kierkegaard and the ancients is the idea that our instinctive emotional reactions may be very poor guides to what should really concern us. Whether we are wrong to be afraid or simply fearful of the wrong things, we would all do well to question what the proper objects of fear are. If we do so, we might find that most of our anxieties are not fears to be conquered, but distractions to be ignored as much as possible.

Rather than worrying about whether our aircraft will land safely, for instance, we ought to think more about what kind of life we’re going to live if it does. The one thing we should find more fearful than dying is never to have truly lived.

The Shrink & The Sage live together in south-west England.

Stephen Grosz returns next week