Being scared and being fearful sounds like the same thing, but we recently read the book Courage is Calling, by Ryan Holiday, which argues otherwise. In the book, Holiday writes:
A scare is a temporary rush of a feeling. That can be forgiven. Fear is a state of being, and to allow it to rule is a disgrace. One helps you—makes you alert, wakes you up, informs you of danger. The other drags you down, weakens you, even paralyzes you. In an uncertain world, in a time of vexing, complicated problems, fear is a liability. Fear holds you back.
This distinction is interesting because it separates the quick from the continuous. The quick is our uncontrollable reaction that we evolutionarily acquired: a scare. The continuous is a choice that we oftentimes unwittingly make, to our own detriment. Understanding this difference empowers us to take charge of our thoughts and banish counterproductive fear.
If Fear is a Choice, Choose Well
Stoics described fear as a combination of emotion and judgment. Emotions are necessary, but judgment influences the degree to which we internalize emotions and, consequently, their amount of usefulness. This plays into the stoic philosophy of the dichotomy of control: you can control some things; others you cannot.
Fear is caused by many things, one of the most prevalent being our biases. Because biases cause blind spots, they make it difficult for us to take agency over our fears. Some of the most troublesome biases that contribute to fear include loss aversion, pessimism bias, and status quo bias. But overcoming them is not impossible. We can take measures to mitigate the effects biases have on our lives and seek out differing viewpoints from others to shed more light on the shadow of fear.
And we can use another bias to aid us in combating the effects of other biases: attentional bias. Attentional bias describes our tendency to focus on certain things instead of others. So choose to focus on what you can control. Direct your effort, energy, and emotions there instead of toiling away at things you cannot change. That will mitigate the effects of the other biases working against you, which in turn will reduce the power of fear over you.
The choice to do so is within your control.
The Takeaway
It doesn’t matter if you differentiate between scares and fears in a linguistic sense. Call it whatever you want. But there is a difference between the phenomena. There is an immediate response to new stimuli that is uncontrollable. And then there is a slower, sustained behavior. It’s understanding that this difference exists and the consequences of how you decide to respond to them are real.
Succumbing to the behavior that leads to paralysis is easy to do, especially if we think it’s something we have no control over. But we can control it in ourselves and influence it in others. Fear is a choice. Choose well.
