How Much of Your Life Is Decided by Fear?

Some of the most important things fear takes from us don't look like losses at all.

And I am not talking about the more obvious — and sometimes wonderfully specific — fears: spiders, balloons, flying, or even clothing buttons. Yes, there really is a phobia of buttons. Human brains are endlessly inventive.

These are specific phobias, and modern psychology has developed highly effective ways of working with many of them, particularly through behavioural and cognitive behavioural approaches. Hypnotic techniques can also be part of treatment.

But those aren't the fears I mean.

I am talking about fear that doesn't necessarily look like fear at all.

No panic. No trembling. No desperate urge to run away. In fact, sometimes it looks perfectly sensible.

It can be the hesitation before saying what you really think. The decision postponed because you're still not quite certain. The opportunity you don't take because you might fail. The relationship in which you gradually make yourself smaller because losing it feels more frightening than losing parts of yourself.

Or simply all that thinking we do before doing something that matters.

And perhaps the most convincing one of all:

I'll do it when I feel more confident.

Nothing dramatic happens.

We don't make the call. We postpone the decision. We stay quiet. We wait until we feel more certain, more confident, more ready.

And life carries on.

I think that's what makes this kind of fear so difficult to recognise. It can take years to notice just how much authority we've quietly handed over to it.

I have thought about this, in one form or another, through very different experiences in my own life. Some decisions I made quickly. Some took far too long — years. Some things frightened me and I did them anyway. Others I probably avoided for very respectable-sounding reasons.

With hindsight, it's surprisingly difficult to fool yourself.

There is a passage from Carl Jung that I have returned to many times:

“For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated…”

— C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation

The older I get, the more interesting that last sentence becomes to me.

What an extraordinary claim.

Not taking a risk doesn't simply mean that we might miss an opportunity. Jung suggests something stronger: that somehow the meaning of life itself is violated.

I am not sure I would put it quite as dramatically as Jung did (he was Jung, after all), but I think there is something important here.

Fear is not the enemy

Fear gets rather bad publicity in therapy.

We talk about overcoming it, conquering it, getting rid of it. But biologically, fear is an extraordinarily successful system. Without it, our ancestors would probably not have survived long enough for us to sit here worrying about whether somebody has misunderstood our last WhatsApp message.

Fear notices possible danger. It prepares the body. It makes us cautious.

Thank goodness for it.

The difficulty begins when feeling safe becomes a condition for living.

When I'm certain, I'll decide.

When I'm less anxious, I'll travel.

When I'm confident enough, I'll apply.

When I know they won't reject me, I'll tell them what I actually want.

When I know I won't fail, I'll begin.

There is something very seductive about this arrangement. We aren't saying never. We're saying not yet.

And “not yet” can last a surprisingly long time.

Because life, annoyingly, refuses to provide the guarantee we're waiting for.

The bargain we make with fear

This is where modern psychology gives us a useful explanation for something Jung was describing in very different language.

When something frightens us and we avoid it, we usually feel better.

Immediately.

That relief matters because the brain learns from it: Good decision. We escaped.

But it may also learn: That thing really was dangerous.

Next time the alarm arrives sooner. We avoid again. We feel relief again.

It is an extremely efficient little system — unfortunately working in the wrong direction.

Over time our world can become smaller without us consciously deciding to make it smaller.

And fear doesn't need to ruin a life dramatically to do this.

It can simply edit it.

A conversation removed here.

An opportunity there.

A boundary never expressed.

A decision repeatedly postponed.

A relationship tolerated long after something inside us knows it isn't right.

An ambition quietly abandoned.

A version of ourselves kept hidden because somebody might not approve.

Nothing terrible happens.

And that's precisely the problem. We don't necessarily notice what has disappeared.

So what did Jung mean by “risk”?

I don't think he was suggesting that we should all resign from our jobs, climb Everest and confess our feelings to inappropriate people.

At least, I hope not.

The psychologically important risks are often very ordinary.

Saying no.

Allowing somebody to be disappointed with you.

Asking for what you need.

Beginning before you feel completely ready.

Letting somebody see the less polished version of you.

Trying something without knowing whether you'll be good at it.

Stopping something that no longer feels right.

Making a decision without achieving 100% certainty first.

For some people, even resting can feel risky. If you've spent years being useful, responsible and available to everyone, doing absolutely nothing for an afternoon can produce an astonishing amount of discomfort.

Why?

Because underneath many of these situations is the same uncomfortable fact:

I cannot completely control what happens next.

No, you can't.

Neither can I.

And I suspect quite a lot of unnecessary anxiety comes from our heroic attempts to negotiate with that fact.

I would change one thing in Jung's sentence

Jung writes that “only boldness can deliver from fear.”

I'm not entirely convinced.

It sounds as though first we must somehow build enough courage, and then we can act.

My experience — personally and in therapeutic work — suggests that it often happens the other way around.

We do something small while still uncertain.

We discover that discomfort rises and falls.

We say what we think and survive the fact that somebody doesn't agree.

We make an imperfect decision and deal with its consequences.

We try something new and discover that being a beginner is embarrassing but not fatal.

And gradually the brain receives something more useful than reassurance.

Evidence.

I did it.

I coped.

Perhaps I don't need certainty in order to move.

Confidence often comes afterwards.

This is one of the reasons behavioural work can be so powerful in therapy. Talking and understanding matter enormously. I want to know why a pattern exists, what it has been protecting, and what experiences helped create it.

But at some point I also want to know:

What becomes possible now that you understand it?

Otherwise, insight itself can occasionally become a very sophisticated way of standing still.

What freedom means to me

All of this has gradually changed my understanding of psychological freedom.

I don't think freedom means reaching some wonderfully evolved state in which we are permanently calm, confident and untroubled by uncertainty.

I haven't met that person yet.

And if I ever do, I will probably be slightly suspicious.

We are human. We become frightened. We doubt ourselves. We get things wrong. We care what other people think even when we wish we didn't.

So the aim cannot be a life without fear.

For me, freedom is much closer to being able to live according to what matters to us without allowing fear to make every important decision.

Sometimes fear deserves our attention. Sometimes caution is wisdom.

Sometimes leaving is courageous. Sometimes staying is.

Sometimes the brave thing is to try harder, and sometimes it is finally admitting that you've tried hard enough.

So perhaps the useful question isn't:

Am I afraid?

Of course you are sometimes.

Perhaps the better question is:

Is this fear protecting something genuinely important, or has it quietly started running my life?

One question to take away

If you've read this far, I won't give you ten therapeutic exercises and a downloadable checklist.

Just one question.

What would you do differently if you didn't need to feel completely certain first?

Don't answer too quickly.

Perhaps it is a conversation you've been postponing.

A boundary.

An application.

A decision.

An ending.

A beginning.

Or something so small that nobody else would even recognise it as courage.

This is how I now understand Jung's words.

We don't need to eliminate fear before we live. We need to become a little better at recognising when fear has stopped protecting our life and started restricting it.

And perhaps this is what From Fears to Freedom means to me more than anything else.

Not becoming fearless.

Having more freedom to choose.

Even when fear has something to say.