How rational are our fears?
In late 2007, a study discovered the word that evoked the greatest fear. The study included the words spider, snake death, rape, murder, and incest.
“Shark” evoked the strongest reaction.
But why? Sharks rarely come in contact with us. Three reasons: the seeming randomness of their strike, the lack of warning for it, and the apparent lack of remorse.
Why this is especially important for women to understand? Because we women worry more than men. Much more.
And worry leads to fear, as Adrianna Huffington has noted in her book, Fearless. Yet, how can we know when a fear for personal safety is justified and when a worry is sapping our spirit and making us see the world simply as a dangerous place?
“Our fears are fashioned out of the ways in which we perceive the world,” wrote Gavin Becker, author of The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence.
Recognize when someone’s hostile or other less apparently dangerous actions are, in fact, a danger to you, so you can act to protect yourself and not let unfounded fears and worry contaminate your life.
Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain, or death. Said DeBecker, “When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections.
When you feel it, take notice to find the link back to see if you need to take action. That’s important because as the “shark” study showed, our fears are not always “rational.” Yet we can put ourselves in danger when we disregard our genuine fears.
The most apparently unlikely people are predators. While the media often portray human violence as random, de Becker points out that is seldom. You can anticipate the patterns in most cases, if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and take action.
You can better protect yourself by learning to recognize and act on the intuitive signals you pick up but reject as unfounded.
Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture.
Worry, anxiety, concern, and wariness all have a purpose, but they are not fear. Any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really should not be confused with fear.
Worry will not bring solutions. Worry distracts from finding solutions. It is a form of self-harassment.
To free yourself from worry sooner, understand what it really is. Most people worry because it provides some secondary reward, such as:
- Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.
- Worry allows us to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something. Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.
- Worry is a cloying way to have a connection with others. Worry somehow shows love. The other side of this is the belief that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about that person. As many people who’ve been worried about know well, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.
- Worry is a protection against future disappointment. After you complete an important project where the success of your approach won’t be known for some while, for example, you can worry about it. Ostensibly, if you can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens.
But how would you want to spend the time while you find out: worrying, playing or initiating another action on another endeavor?
For some people, worrying is a “magical amulet,” according to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman. Some people feel it wards off danger. They truly believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening.
