Understanding Fear | learntolearn.com

February 07, 2023

Article last edited on June 2, 2016 by Admin

So what is fear? Above all it is a natural and necessary emotion. Fear thus prepares the body to provide a major effort, physical or mental. It is fundamentally useful.

Who has never been afraid, afraid of exams or afraid of taking a plane? In both cases, it is the same emotion, fear. It’s an emotion, just like joy or anger, but it’s one of the most misunderstood emotions, probably because it’s mistakenly associated with cowardice. Yet everyone will feel fear in the face of danger, the only difference will be in how you react to it. And then who doesn’t like to be scared once in a while, in the Rollercoaster or in front of a good horror movie? Fear increases the intensity of our emotions and causes captivating chills. Depending on its intensity, fear can manifest itself in different forms: anxiety, stress, etc.

 What is fear?

So what is fear? Above all it is a natural and necessary emotion. Fear triggers the release of adrenaline, consequently the heart beats faster, the breathing becomes faster, the muscles and the brain are better irrigated and nourished, and therefore we become more efficient. Fear thus prepares the body to provide a major effort, physical or mental. It is fundamentally useful.

 Why are we afraid?

Fear manifests itself in the face of danger, something unusual that will require more than our “normal” level of activity to deal with. If you find yourself facing a dog that is about to attack, being ready to sprint immediately is an excellent survival tactic rather than standing and watching the dog curiously. Fear offers us the means to mobilize all our resources to face this danger. However, fear is an instinctive reaction, the immediate goal of which is to ensure our survival. It allows us to mobilize quickly to flee a rabid animal, but it instinctively pushes us towards the simplest and fastest choice to succeed, flight rather than confrontation. And often the fear is irrational. Claustrophobia, fear of spiders, vertigo, fear of flying, fear of the dark, all fears are not based on solid foundations, the danger is sometimes overestimated or misinterpreted. Fortunately, fear is not in control. It does not control us unless we choose to let it. As human beings, evolution has endowed us with reason, and in the face of fear, we remain free of our choices. We can rationalize how best to deal with this danger, and succeed, to our greatest benefit, in overcoming it. Fear is a natural and essential emotion in our lives. 

Of course, there are various degrees of fear, when fear becomes paralyzing, or registers in a harmful way in the form of a permanent stress in our everyday life, we must seek external help to better manage. But on a normal level, fear is a natural and essential emotion in our lives. Its purpose is not to destabilize us, but to provide us with more resources to succeed in situations of need.

 Why are we afraid to take an exam? 

What scares you is to fail. Yet you will still take this exam, because your reason naturally knows this paradox: you are afraid of failing but if you do not pass the exam you will certainly fail. Despite the fear, you will therefore pass your partials. And thanks to fear you can mobilize more resources to succeed. Fear is then an ally. Thanks to it, you are fully focused during the session, you know what is at stake and rather than dreaming in front of your copy, you work actively to produce the best possible result.

So we feel fear before an exam because we are afraid of failing. Let’s dwell for a moment on the notion of failure. What is failure? It is not having achieved a goal that we had set ourselves. There can be two reasons for this, either we were poorly prepared for it, or the objective was too difficult for us to achieve. If we had prepared poorly, failure allows us to bounce back to discover our mistakes and better prepare ourselves for the next time. He is a trainer, he becomes a lesson for the future. If the failure is due to a bad objective, too difficult or too far from us, it is just as formative, it invites us to review our priorities, better identify and define our objectives.

And that’s what scares us about failure, it makes us question ourselves. However, failure does not change who we are, it just informs us of our limits, and invites us to go beyond them, to redraw them or simply to better understand them.

Identifying and wallowing in failure is a bad strategy. Failure does not change the core of our identity, it just allows us to better understand what our limits are and by doing so, make choices to push them back, or learn to accept them and find our way elsewhere.

Letting go helps to take a step back. Learning to let go of past failures allows you to reinvest in the future, and not attach yourself to a distorted negative image of yourself. By clinging to this distorted image of oneself, one feeds one’s fear, and the next exam will be all the more frightening and destabilizing. With a step back, our mistakes of the past become a source of lessons allowing us to build a new strategy for our future.

By accepting fear as a useful and constructive emotion it becomes an ally. It allows us to mobilize all our resources to pass a difficult test. However, we must not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by it, not feed it with our past failures in order to keep it as an ally and not as an enemy. Succeeding in accepting, using and controlling our fear and facing the test allows us to learn more about ourselves. Without the slightest difficulty or obstacle in the way of a life, without any challenge, we could never test who we are and find out what we are capable of.

Dossier and article: Sandrine Banas

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