And it can also push you into painful, burning shame. Fear can also stiffen you into rigid over-control of yourself and the people around you. “It may have shrunk you, so you have stayed small in some ways, limiting your potential and what you can achieve. In her book Fear Less, the performance psychologist Pippa Grange sets out the ways that living in a “fear culture” affects our lives.
Confront your fear update#
If you then go through that situation, and learn ‘This wasn’t as bad as I thought it was’, that, typically, will update that mental portrayal of the situation.” There are clearly more tangible potential rewards for stepping outside your comfort zone, too – a better social life, a pay rise, more intimacy in a relationship, a new skill. “When you’re afraid of something, you have a mental representation that tells you it’s dangerous. It’s hard to generalise, says Kross, about the psychological effect of facing one’s fears, or stepping outside the comfort zone, but doing it can change the way you think. It may be relatively minor – getting up an hour earlier to exercise might not trigger a debilitating phobia, but might feel uncomfortable – and it could still bring benefits to your life. It could be making a big decision, such as leaving a relationship, or a job. It could be going on a date, or giving a presentation at work, or having a difficult conversation with a relative. Those are the instances in which you want to try to regulate the fear.”ĭifferent things are daunting to different people, of course, and there is a spectrum to their severity. Instead, he says, it’s about facing the fears, or overcoming the discomfort, that prevents us from doing the things “that are really important for our wellbeing, our relationships and our performance. Kross doesn’t see the benefit of taking on fears for the sake of it – you don’t have to jump out of a plane or do a bungee jump unless you think it will drastically improve your life. Fear, when appropriate, is a safety mechanism, but “it can sometimes become miscalibrated, so that the fear doesn’t match the reality of the circumstance”.
Confront your fear how to#
“People often ask: ‘How can I prevent myself from ever having those kinds of fearful responses?’ My initial reaction is: ‘You wouldn’t want to live life without the ability to experience fear,’” says Ethan Kross, professor of psychology and management, director of the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan, and author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It. But it isn’t about becoming generally “fearless”, as if we could override all of human evolution. In her bestselling 1987 book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers advised people to try something “small or bold” outside their comfort zone each day, building confidence “so that stretching your comfort zone becomes easier and easier”. “Then you start to feel better about yourself – you’re aware of what you can do, more willing to take positive risks. Facing fears can increase confidence and self-esteem, she adds, and achieving a goal is associated with a release of dopamine, the feel-good hormone.
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