When Worry is Worthless, When Fear is a Friend
by Kare Anderson
"Worry is interest paid on
trouble before it falls due."
- W. R. Inge
We women generally worry more than men. Yes?
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 invaluable book, The Gift of
Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From
Violence.
Better to learn how to 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.
What can we do? Revise FDR's advice, "The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself" by
using our gut instincts well, with this variation:
"There is nothing to fear unless and until you
feel fear."
Whenever you've felt profound fear, it was linked to
the presence of danger, imminent pain or death.
Said DeBecker in a National Public Radio interview,
"When we get a fear signal, our intuition has
already made many connections. When you feel
fear, try to 'link' it back to a past situation
where the feeling that was similar to see if your
fear is, in fact, justified."
When you feel it, take notice to find the link back
to see if you need to take action. How
rational are our fears? In the 1960s a study
was done on what single word evoked the greatest
psychologically strong reactions of fear. The
study included words like 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.
Yet man is a potential predator with far more
abilities to approach, disguise and deceive.
While the media often portray human violence as
random, de Becker points out how it seldom is, and
how you can anticipate the patterns in most cases,
if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and
take action.
DeBecker's book offers specific criteria for how 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.
Most of what people worry about has a low
probability of occurring, because we tend to take
action about those things we feel are likely to
occur. This means that very often the mere
fact that you are worrying about something is a
predictor that it isn't likely to happen.
The connection between real fear and worry is
similar to the relationship between pain and
suffering. Pain and fear are necessary and
valuable components of life. Suffering and
worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life.
Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and
shortens your life.
When worrying, ask yourself, "How does this
serve me?"
To be free of fear and yet still get its gift,
consider these techniques:
1. When you feel fear, listen.
2. When you don't feel fear, don't
manufacture it.
3. If you find yourself creating worry,
explore and discover why.
We Choke on Anxiety
Anxiety, unlike real fear and like worry, is always
caused by uncertainty. it is caused,
ultimately, by predictions in which you have little
confidence. If you predict you will be fired
and you are certain that your prediction is correct,
you don't have anxiety about being fired, but about
the ramifications of losing a job.
Predictions in which you have a high confidence free
you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept,
prepare, or to do whatever you need to do. You
can reduce your anxiety by improving your
predictions, thus increasing your certainty.
It is worth doing, because the word anxiety, like
worry, stems from a root that means "to
choke," and that is just what it does to us.
Our imaginations can be fertile soil in which worry
and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we
assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are
in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable
law: "Only that which is absent can be
imagined." In other words, what you
imagine -- just like what you fear -- is not
happening.
Kare
Anderson is a trailblazer in media, business,
and politics and a former journalist for the Wall
Street Journal, Le Monde, UPI,
and other newspapers. Kare was Pacific Telesis'
first Wideband and Cable Division Director, a
co-founder of a national public affairs and
advertising firm, and now president of the Say it
Better Center. In government, she was a state
senator's chief of staff, co-founder of nine
political action committees and appointed
commissioner. Kare's a frequent strategic
communication coach to leaders in business and
government. Visit her website http://sayitbetter.com
