Is It Okay to Be Afraid?

Hi everybody, it’s Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and this week I’m coming to you from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. For a few American listeners, are going, “Where? Just think middle of Canada and pretty far north.” It’s a lovely city, it’s great. I’m here speaking to a wonderful audience, a bunch of people in heavy industry that have safety concerns in their industry. And one of the conversations I had with somebody today was about fear and the nagging fear that something might go wrong in the workplace. And it motivated me to make this video on the precipice of Halloween, and the time when we kind of celebrate fear. And fear is, in fact, somewhat worthy of celebration, and it’s valuable to us even when we don’t like it. And so that’s what this video is about, is how to manage fear, celebrate it, and work through fear. So stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful.

So, what’s the deal with fear? None of us want it, and yet we probably all recognize that at some very instinctual level, that it’s good and necessary. Fear is instructional, just like every other emotion is, and we evolved as a species to feel these emotions so we could correct behavior and be more likely to pass our genes on to the next generation. And fear is kind of the most obvious one. It’s super powerful, and it’s all about survival. So when we feel something that, “Oh my goodness, it’s scary,” there’s likely a perceived perception of some survival risk at stake, that there’s the saber-toothed tiger coming at us, or the semi-truck barreling down in the wrong lane, and we get these instant, very overwhelming senses of terror, and this need to take action in order to survive. And of course, the instructional part when we’re in a place where there is an objective experience where we should be terrified is nothing but welcome. It’s fantastic. We should welcome and celebrate fear all the time when it occurs in those settings, so that we pop out of the lane that the semi-truck is bearing down in, or we run away from the saber-toothed tiger. And all those times when our survival is genuinely at risk, we have fear to thank that we get through it, assuming we do. But fear, when felt over and over and over again, when we have a tendency to go back into the same emotions over and over again, or have certain triggers that bring us back into those emotions, it becomes irrational and it starts taking away from the quality of our life. And kind of most importantly, I think it can create traits in our character that are conditioned by fear, but there isn’t the actual threat present through those normal parts of our day. So, for example, if I experience fear a lot in my childhood and they’ve got abusive parents, or I have a big brother that beats me up, or I’m just living in a really rough neighborhood and I see a lot of horrible things happening to people, I may have this fear response over and over and over again. And then because we humans use our big prefrontal cortexes to imagine fears, we replay scenarios and we imagine the fear. And then guess what, over time, I may go from being fearful at times to having timidity as a character trait or I may have a trigger fuse to rage because that’s been my response to fear. And these traits of rage or timidity become part of my personality, and that, of course, then becomes problematic. So the fear is instructional and wonderful and great in the real moments of actual survival risk, but it’s detrimental to our well-being and our ability to form relationships and experiment with new and novel and fun things in life if fear has created a personality trait that makes us timid or potentially enraged. And I can tell you a specific technique that I was taught following a very serious plane event. I was in a plane and blew up an engine. We thought we were going to crash and die. In fact, someone across the aisle from me literally screamed out, “We’re gonna die!” And I believed her. In fact, I pulled up my cell phone and thought, “What will I say if I can reach my wife on the phone and say my last words about how I love her and the family and all that kind of stuff?” Because I really didn’t think I was gonna die. It was a pretty terrifying experience. But the plane eventually re-stabilized in its previous precipitous drop, and we turned around, smoke was all through the passenger cabin, but we landed safely in the Vancouver International Airport with a million emergency vehicles around us, and we all lived for another day. But I was scared of flying in planes for quite a long while, and it was a part of my lifestyle that I really didn’t find convenient at all to be afraid of planes. In fact, I would avoid having to take planes in my life, became significantly more complicated by me avoiding planes. And now, as many of you know, I fly all over every week. I’m in a airplane, it feels like I’m going somewhere. And the basic technique that I was taught to overcome this fear was to over and over and over again familiarize myself with the experience. And so I was instructed to remember every aspect of this flight that went bad, and I would feel this tremendous anxiety and all that fear come back to me as I was remembering it, the first hundred times maybe less. But the whole first bunch of times, it was a terrifying experience to remember this terrible experience. But after a while, the experience became so practiced that the emotion came out of it. Does that make sense? I experienced the emotion over and over again in my mind, until I got to the point where it just simply became a much lesser, less anxiety-provoking thought. And most of the unwanted fear we have is, of course, the ones that come arise just from thoughts. I want real fear when I run into dangerous burglars on the street or muggers, but I don’t want fear thinking that, “Oh, I’m going out onto this well-lit public thoroughfare and then start imagining muggers coming and being all fearful.” So by imagining the scenarios and then working with them in a way, saying, “Oh yeah, okay, I can see this over and over and over again,” and even boring the worst thing on burglars takes my hot burglar, takes my wild burglar, takes my wallet, it starts becoming less powerful. In fact, even when we imagine our own death, which may be hard for people to hear, but it’s a great Buddhist and stoic tradition where you imagine deeply the moment of your death, and if you do it enough times, it loses all of the smoke and fire and flames and exhilaration fear that we originally have when we think these thoughts. So this would be sort of, I don’t know if it’s properly called this, but exposure therapy, and a lot of phobic responses are overcome with just that kind of repeated exposure until it just becomes benign. And of course, we can rationally think through our fear responses in a similar way so that we are less likely to get afraid. So if you’re going out on Halloween night and you know you’re going to run into ghosts and goblins, that rational perspective says, “Oh, I don’t really like wolves and goblins, but I can expect them,” and we take the emotion out of that moment. I hope that makes sense, and it’s kind of a weird thing for a positive psychology expert to talk about, but of course, to be happy, we need to have fewer negative emotions, and fear is certainly one we don’t want to have happen more than we need to. We want to celebrate it when it comes in at the right times and it’s instructional to our survival. I hope all that makes sense. I hope you like this kind of content. If you do, click the like button, share it with your friends and family, and we will see you again. Bye for now.