How To Take Back Control Of Your Life

By Gary Null, PhD

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles,
but most of them never happened.”
Mark Twain

Fear is a primary reason that people don’t progress. I talk to many people who read good self-help books, seek counseling, attend workshops and seminars, and yet remain stuck in their problems. Fear in all of its manifestations frequently hides behind the door we refuse to open. Nothing changes until they break through their fear.

Sometimes fear is justified, but most of the time it is the result of illusion. I’m going to try to differentiate between the two types of fear — real and illusory — and show you several ways of dealing with each. You can approach real fears pragmatically. Illusory fears need to be eliminated from your mind.

This distinction is not mine. It is the oldest piece of practical wisdom the West possesses. Two thousand years ago Seneca wrote to a worried friend that we suffer more often in imagination than in reality — that there are more things likely to frighten us than to crush us, and that most of our torments come from anticipation of evils that never arrive. For twenty centuries that was philosophy. Recently it became data. Researchers at Penn State asked people with generalized anxiety disorder — the champion worriers of the human race — to write down every worry as it occurred, for a month, and then track which ones actually came true. The answer: 91.4 percent never happened. And of the few that did, most turned out better than feared. The most common score for an individual worrier was one hundred percent false alarms. Better still, the patients who reviewed their own ledgers and saw the evidence with their own eyes recovered fastest. Seneca’s insight, it turns out, is not just consolation. Checked against reality, it is arithmetic.

And there is a second thing philosophy knows about fear that you should carry through this essay. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noticed that what we call anxiety is usually not about danger at all — it is about possibility. He called it the dizziness of freedom: the vertigo you feel when you look over the edge of your own life and realize you could choose differently. That is why the fears in this essay cluster around freedom’s doorways — speaking up, being alone, being out of control, changing, beginning. The dizziness is not a warning to step back. It is the sensation of standing somewhere that matters.

(Note: My answers are not the only solutions nor are they necessarily right for you. Rather, I hope they will inspire you to think of answers that are personally meaningful. In addition, my questions should help you generate questions of your own. Some thoughts will appear immediately, whereas others will come to you later.)

This section will help you to explore what you’re afraid of and analyze how you manifest your fears. It will encourage you to think about ways of letting fear go so that you can live a more full and vital life.

What Are You Afraid Of?

Many factors can cause fear. See which of the following makes you fearful.

Fear of Losing Self-Esteem

You lose self-esteem when you fail to live up to your image. Athletes who lose a game posture themselves in a humiliating fashion before the public. They don’t say to themselves, it’s just a game. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. It’s not all that important. They take themselves seriously and take losing to heart.

Psychologists now distinguish between self-worth that is contingent — staked on outcomes, appearances, and other people’s applause — and self-worth that rests on your own values. The research, much of it by Jennifer Crocker at Ohio State, shows that contingent self-esteem is a rented house: every game, every promotion cycle, every glance in the mirror is a landlord who can evict you. People whose worth is staked externally suffer more stress, more conflict, more depression — not because they fail more, but because every event is a verdict. The fear of losing self-esteem is really the fear of a repossession, and the cure is to stop renting.

Where in your life do you strive to maintain an image for fear of losing self-esteem? You may feel bad about not getting a promotion, for example, or about not being able to appear responsible.

Fear of Being Out of Control

If you’re like most people, you’re terrified by the possibility of your life getting out of control. When was the last time you really played? When I first wrote this, the people I was describing were the baby boomers, then in the thick of their careers. Does this sound like you? Every minute of the day is purposeful. You work too hard and never have time just to enjoy yourself. You become successful at doing things but not at just being. I meet a lot of people like this. They always feel the need to be responsible and productive. They can’t spend the weekend just hanging out and having fun. They always feel the need to be doing something. They’re afraid of losing control. Even their vacations are planned out and timed from beginning to end. They’ll go to Cancún and spend a half hour playing tennis and a half hour scuba diving. An hour after arriving, they’re wondering if they could make a deal on a condominium. All their meals are during meetings.

I regret to report that this disease did not retire with the boomers. It jumped generations and got a technology upgrade. The smartphone turned every hammock into an office; surveys now find a majority of American workers checking email on vacation, many of them concealing their time off from employers altogether — there is a name for it now, quiet vacationing — and hundreds of millions of paid vacation days go unused every year. Meanwhile the psychiatrist Stuart Brown, who spent his career studying play, concluded from thousands of life histories that chronic play deprivation in adults shows up as rigidity, joylessness, and a smoldering low-grade depression — that play is not the opposite of work but a biological need, and its absence has a clinical signature. The fear of being out of control has never had more enablers. It has also never had a clearer diagnosis.

When I go to a resort, I’m nowhere to be found. I’ll be on a hammock somewhere, resting. I go away to rest. I don’t want to do any business. I don’t want to think. I just want to relax and play.

Being out of control asserts that you are different and independent and not just like everyone else. Allow yourself to be out of control. Be creative in a way where you do something spontaneous and completely out of character. Let yourself go, and use being out of control as a way of growing.

On a societal level, being out of control can have positive implications. I constantly work to break through barriers in order to make people aware of their alternatives. Years ago I said on television that AZT was hurting AIDS patients and that alternative therapies were helping people stay alive. I was out of control in the sense that I was saying things that other people wouldn’t dare speak about. They were in a controlled situation, but I wasn’t.

That claim deserves the same honest audit I have given every other claim in this essay, because the returns are in, and they are humbling in both directions. On the narrow point, the record partly bears me out: the early practice of giving AZT alone, at the original high doses, was a failure. The drug at those doses was brutally toxic, and the large Concorde trial published in 1994 found that starting AZT early, by itself, did not lengthen life. Saying so out loud, when saying so was heresy, was legitimate.

Most journalists will not risk being out of control. They have too much to lose going against the system. When I first wrote this I named Mike Wallace and Tom Brokaw — men bound by fear of losing their jobs, their power, and, as a result of these losses, their self-esteem. Both are gone from the anchor desk now — Wallace died in 2012, Brokaw retired after a half century — and the gatekeepers they represented have largely been replaced by algorithms. Here is what that experiment taught us: the fear survived the technology. Anyone on earth can now say anything to everyone, and yet self-censorship did not disappear — it changed masters. People no longer fear the network president; they fear their own audience, their own side, the pile-on. The bottleneck was never the broadcast tower. It was always the psychology. Think of what would happen if more people didn’t play by the rules. We could progressively move forward as a society. Until enough people break those barriers, fear will keep us trapped.

Fear of Loss of Place

You may fear losing your place in different areas of life. In a relationship, for example, you become jealous and hurt if your partner tells you that he or she has met someone else. Jealousy has always puzzled me. I’ve never understood the concept. If I were in a relationship where someone didn’t want to be with me anymore, I would feel fine about that. It wouldn’t be a problem. I would get on with my life rather than feel hurt and betrayed. I wouldn’t compete against anyone or fight for someone. I don’t see the point in that. I would just move on.

There is a reason the fear of losing a place is so much stronger than the pleasure of having one, and the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky measured it: losses weigh roughly twice as much as equivalent gains in the human mind. We are built lopsided. A thing barely valued while held becomes precious the moment it might be taken — the job you complained about for years becomes unbearable to lose. Knowing the bias is half the defense. When the terror of losing a place seizes you, ask: is this place actually worth what I’m feeling, or is my accounting simply rigged? Often you will find you are fighting to keep something you never much wanted.

As a student, you may have feared losing your place in school. People are put under a lot of pressure to perform well in school. Remember the people who were always competing for A’s? Their lives were often imbalanced. They had to give up developing other areas of their lives in order to become school-smart. There’s a type of person who always strives for goals but neglects the process leading up to their attainment, and this is sad. The person achieves something but learns nothing in doing so; everything gained boils down to a trophy to be displayed, and it’s only through the trophies that the self-esteem is manifested. I see this all the time.

Fear of Authority

Authorities want to dominate you. They make you feel that you must comply with their demands — or else. In any confrontation with authority, you may feel afraid, and you react by humbling yourself. The IRS sends you a letter and panic sets in, followed by anger and helplessness. How can you fight an institution that has everything on its side? You’re just one person. You allow this insensitive, uncaring bureaucracy to affect your life.

How deep does this reflex run? In the most famous experiment in the history of psychology, Stanley Milgram put ordinary people in a room with a man in a gray lab coat who calmly instructed them to deliver electric shocks to a stranger. Two-thirds of them went all the way to the maximum voltage — past the screams, past the pounding on the wall — not because they were cruel, but because a composed voice of authority kept saying the experiment requires that you continue. Milgram’s subjects trembled, sweated, protested, and obeyed. Remember that when the letter from the bureaucracy sets your heart pounding: the pull you feel toward automatic submission is not a personal weakness, it is standard human equipment — which is exactly why standing up for your rights has to be a practiced decision rather than a mood you wait for.

Or you get pulled over for a traffic violation. Whether you are guilty or not, you feel helpless and act childlike. You answer the officer’s questions obediently and try to act humble instead of standing up for your rights.

Fear that Your Real Needs Will Not Be Fulfilled

Most people live unfulfilled lives. They learn early in life that their own needs are unimportant and carry that belief with them into adulthood.

Parents often live through their children instead of helping them discover their own interests and attain things important to them. As a result, children may become ego extensions of their parents’ dreams. A high school student becomes a football player because his dad wants him to be an athlete. Perhaps the child wants to be an artist. He is actively discouraged from doing so. His father tells him that art is something girls do. The boy’s need to explore life through art is supplanted by his father’s need for him to become an extension of his ego. Conversely, a child might want to become a football player but not explore that possibility because his parents fear the sport is too brutal and unnecessarily competitive. Once again, the child is acting out of a need to be accepted by his parents.

Most schools distance children from their own interests as well. They program pupils to learn some things that are not relevant to their lives. A curriculum board that is out of touch with students dictates what the children are supposed to be learning. Teachers force them to regurgitate facts instead of exploring what is interesting and important to them. As a result, the student’s natural curiosity is killed early in the game. Children either learn to become school-smart to get good grades, or drop out if they see nothing in it for them. Either way, they are never encouraged to explore and fulfill their own real needs.

When I wrote “real needs” I was speaking from observation. Psychology has since drawn up the list. Self-determination theory — built by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and tested now across decades and dozens of cultures — finds that human beings have three psychological needs as real as the need for food: autonomy, the sense that your actions are your own; competence, the sense of growing mastery; and relatedness, the sense of mattering to others. Thwart them and well-being collapses on schedule, whatever the salary. Feed them and people flourish, whatever the circumstances. Notice that the childhood I described above — the football player who wanted to paint — is a precision strike on the first need. The fear that your real needs will never be met is often just the accurate memory of years when they weren’t. The memory is valid. The forecast is not.

So you can grow up with your real needs never being met. You may learn to be a certain kind of person who acts and reacts in certain predetermined ways. But maybe those ways aren’t you. Maybe the real you has a different voice. If you are still in touch with your real needs, you end up living a surreptitious existence where you keep a real part of yourself hidden from others lest they judge you harshly for it.

Fear of Manipulation

You may be fearful of manipulation, and with good reason. Often, people don’t accept you into their lives without wanting you to be a part of their agenda. For example, they’re lonely and want you to fill the void.

The best way to avoid being manipulated is to be very aware of how someone makes you feel. Don’t just listen to what a person says; look at her or his actions. If a person tells you that he accepts you for who you are but tries to get you to do things that are against your nature, then you’re dealing with a manipulator. That person is using you to get something for himself.

Sometimes two people manipulate each other. They overlook the way they are treating one another because they want the relationship to supply them with something else they need, such as good sex or financial security. Two egos are working together, but each is working toward its own end. Sooner or later, people suffer as a result. Honesty, compassion, decency, and ethics are ultimately more important than the other things you think you need.

A lot of people are in recovery programs where they are acknowledging having been used or having used other people. They are learning to be upfront with others and not to be afraid to tell others what kind of person they are. They’re learning to say to someone, “This is what I need and expect in a relationship.”

Fear of Failure

You may be afraid to do something for fear of not doing it correctly. Therefore, you don’t even make an attempt. If this describes you, ask yourself, what is the worst that can happen? Consider that most people don’t do things perfectly the first, second, or even the tenth time. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. It is only through doing that you learn. Keeping something in your head until you can execute it flawlessly will never work. That’s not how humans function. Learning is a process that involves practice through doing.

“What is the worst that can happen?” is not a rhetorical question — it is a two-thousand-year-old Stoic exercise with a name, premeditatio malorum, the rehearsal of evils. Seneca instructed his students to imagine the feared thing in concrete detail — poverty, disgrace, exile — precisely because fear does its damage as a fog, and a fear examined in detail shrinks to its actual size, which is almost always survivable. Modern clinicians run the same play under a different name: exposure. It is the single best-validated treatment in all of psychotherapy, and its logic is the mirror image of avoidance. Every time you dodge a feared thing, the relief you feel pays the fear its wage, and it grows. Every time you walk toward it and discover you survive, the brain lays down new learning over the old alarm. Neuroscience adds one crucial detail: the old fear circuit is never erased, only overwritten — which is why one brave attempt is not enough, and why practice is not a nicety but the mechanism itself.

Aristotle settled the other half of this question long ago: courage does not mean the absence of fear. The fearless man, he pointed out, is not brave but rash. Courage is acting rightly while afraid — and like every virtue, he taught, it is acquired exactly the way a craft is acquired: we become builders by building, harpists by playing the harp, and brave by doing brave acts. You do not wait to feel courageous and then act. You act, and the courage accrues to you afterward, like a muscle from a workout.

If you were encouraged early on to do things regardless of the outcome, then you probably felt accepted for yourself. You tried things and did the best you could. You probably attempt new things with little anxiety.

Most of us, however, were not so fortunate. As a result, we’ve become a nation of spectators. We sit on the sidelines and pay good money to watch people who’ve conquered fear perform. More people would be actively engaged in things if they didn’t have to combat the fear of doing them wrong.

Fear of Not Being in a Relationship

So many men and women have suffered in relationships that made them feel trapped. They were living in a war zone, stepping gingerly around emotional minefields. They were scared to say or do anything that might trigger some unwanted reaction. As a result, they would edit their thoughts, feelings, and actions just to keep arguments from erupting. They would do things just to please their partners, regardless of their own desires. They would go to a movie they didn’t want to see or entertain people they didn’t like. Everything they did was to accommodate the other person.

This happens frequently if you feel a need to be in a relationship, any relationship. You may feel unacceptable being alone. When I first wrote this, the average man or woman felt that he or she must be married by thirty or thirty-five or be considered strange. The statistics have since surrendered: the median age of first marriage has climbed toward thirty and past it, nearly half of American adults are single, and living alone is now so common that whole industries serve it. The stigma I described has genuinely faded. But watch what did not fade. The dating apps discovered they could monetize the fear of being unpaired, and loneliness became a business model with a swipe interface. The pressure that once came from your mother now comes from an algorithm showing you an endless shelf of people who seem to be doing love better than you. The costume changed; the fear underneath is the same one, and so is the danger: if you are susceptible to a fear of being un-paired, you may get into a relationship for the wrong reasons and end up feeling trapped.

Fear of Speaking Up

I know people who keep silent about other people at work who are goofing off, doing bad work, stealing, or lying. They won’t say anything because they’re afraid of confrontation. Or they’re afraid of what people will think, say, or do to them.

Keeping quiet about your point of view hurts you. The situation stays with you when you keep it inside. Part of you knows that you have to have enough courage to stand up and speak out when something is wrong.

It hurts more than you, and this has now been measured at scale. The Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson, studying hospital teams, stumbled on a paradox: the best nursing units appeared to make more medication errors than the worst ones. They didn’t. They reported more, because people felt safe to speak; the “low-error” units were simply hiding theirs, letting them fester and repeat. Out of that finding grew the concept of psychological safety, and when Google later ran a massive study of what distinguished its highest-performing teams, psychological safety — the shared confidence that no one is punished for speaking up — came out as the number one factor, ahead of talent, ahead of resources. The silence in your office is not politeness. It is a tax the fearful pay in errors, in ethics, and in results, every single day.

A man once walked into my office when I was out. He acted obnoxious and rude to the people there but nobody said anything. When I heard about what had happened I asked why they had kept quiet. They said they didn’t want to offend him. He might have been an important businessperson.

The next time this person came to the office I was there. I confronted him and he was shocked. I asked him if he would treat his daughter or his wife this way. Then I said that the people in my office were wives and daughters too. If the only person he was going to treat with respect was me then I couldn’t do business with him. I couldn’t trust him.

If you’re like most people, you keep quiet because of your conditioning. You’re taught to keep your mouth shut, to stay in your place, not to rock the boat, not to stand out. You become constrained by fear.

I’m suggesting that you correct or challenge situations as they arise. You can’t change everything, of course. You can’t make other people change. But you can let them know where you stand. And you can be an example for others. When you stand up, suddenly someone else will follow. You will help another person find the courage. The researchers confirmed this too, by the way: in the conformity experiments we visited earlier in this essay, the presence of a single dissenter — one voice breaking ranks — collapsed the pressure on everyone else. One is all it takes. Be the one.

Fear of Incompleteness

Do you ever feel as if your life is incomplete? Perhaps you’re filled with regret because time has passed you by and you realize that there are certain things you wish you had done differently.

On the subject of regret, the research delivers one finding you should frame and hang on the wall. The psychologist Thomas Gilovich asked people about their deepest regrets and found that in the short run we regret the things we did — the botched attempt, the embarrassing failure — but in the long run, overwhelmingly, we regret the things we did not do. The failures get explained, repaired, even cherished as lessons. The unattempted life has no such mercy; it just sits there, perfect and unlived. An Australian palliative nurse named Bronnie Ware, recording the deathbed reflections of her patients, found the same thing at the very end of the road: the most common regret of the dying, she reported, was I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, and not the life others expected of me. Notice the word they chose. Not luck. Not money. Courage.

Maybe you thought a relationship would make your life complete. So you devoted most of your time searching for the ideal relationship instead of looking inside and strengthening yourself.

There is no perfect relationship. You have to start a relationship with yourself. You need to be a friend to yourself before you can be a friend to anyone else. Love, honesty, patience, and understanding begin with you.

Fear of Aging and Dying

When you’re young, you think you have an unlimited time in which to live. As you get older you accept that you do not have that kind of time. We do have a lot of information now about how to live longer. With what we know we can easily live to ninety healthfully. If you’re very disciplined, one hundred or one hundred and ten is possible. When I first wrote this, I pointed out that the average life span had increased from sixty-eight to seventy-four in just twenty years, and I predicted we would add another sixteen years in the twenty after that.

Time to check my math in public. The average did keep rising — American life expectancy reached seventy-nine in 2024, an all-time high after clawing back the pandemic’s losses — but that is five years short of my forecast, and several years behind Japan and much of Europe. My extrapolation failed, and the reason it failed is the most instructive fact in this section. The earlier gains came from conquering infections and saving infants — victories delivered to people. The next gains had to come from how people actually live — food, movement, stress, purpose — and as a nation we largely declined the offer. But here is the other half of the ledger: the individual promise held up completely. The number of American centenarians has multiplied and is projected to quadruple in the coming decades. The research on the world’s longevity hot spots keeps finding the same unpatentable prescription — plants on the plate, daily movement, tight community, a reason to get up in the morning. The averages describe what populations choose. They have never once described what a disciplined individual can do. Ninety, healthfully, remains exactly as available as I said it was. The nation didn’t take the deal. You still can.

If you’re forty, you’re not even halfway there. At that point you’ve gotten your pace and direction. You have greater knowledge, patience, and willpower than you did when you were young. You have developed a lot of skills. Before you had unbounded energy. Now you have sustainable energy. It’s like being in the tenth mile of the marathon. That’s where you finally feel comfortable. Now you’re in your stride. So look at aging from a positive point of view.

You do start to show signs of aging, of course, but there is a lot you can do to slow it down. You start to get wrinkles. Your body starts to lose some of its elasticity. You start to lose your hair. Everyone in my family is bald. I would be too if it weren’t for the fact that when I was thirty I began researching what men can do to keep their hair. Now my hair is so thick I have to get it cut once a week. It grows incredibly fast. My hair color is natural and I have no wrinkles. My skin looks younger today than it did twenty years ago.

The idea that we lose strength with age is also misleading. Athletes used to think that after twenty you could no longer be a swimmer. When you were thirty you could no longer be a boxer. At thirty-three you could no longer be a basketball player. At thirty-five you could no longer be a football player. What nonsense. How long you last as an athlete depends upon how well you condition yourself.

The decades since have demolished those ceilings in public, on television, with trophies. Tom Brady won the Super Bowl at forty-three — an age at which, when I first wrote this essay, a quarterback was presumed to be a decade into retirement. LeBron James is playing his twenty-third professional season past his fortieth birthday. Phil Mickelson won golf’s PGA Championship at fifty. The gymnast Oksana Chusovitina was still competing at world level in her late forties against teenagers. And below the famous names, masters athletics — competitive track, swimming, weightlifting for people in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and beyond — has become one of the fastest-growing corners of sport, with age-group records falling every season. The question was never what the body can do at forty or seventy. It was always what a body that never stopped training can do. Those are different questions with different answers.

I’m an athlete. The year I first wrote this, I won Track and Field Master Athlete in the Metropolitan Athletic Congress. I set six American age group records indoors and two outdoors. I won twenty-seven championships in that one year, and I beat records that I set ten years earlier. And I hadn’t even reached my peak. Why? Because I’m willing to go one step beyond my fear.

If you wake up in the morning with fear, you won’t get very far. You may fear you’re no longer attractive; that you don’t have the same capacity you used to have; that you’ll never win competing with people who are twenty.

It’s only when you let go of fear that you have control of your day in a constructive way. That control allows you to go forward.

As for the fear of dying itself, philosophy has spent its whole history on that one, and its findings agree with this essay. Epicurus offered the coolest argument on record: death is nothing to us, since while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist — the two of you will never actually meet. Marcus Aurelius drew the practical conclusion: it is not death a man should fear; he should fear never beginning to live. And Montaigne, who titled an essay “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” discovered that rehearsing mortality does not darken life — it liberates it, because a person who has made peace with the deadline stops wasting the project. The modern echo came from Steve Jobs, dying young and knowing it, who told a graduating class that remembering he would soon be dead was the most important tool he had ever found for making the big choices — because death exposes every fear of embarrassment and failure as trivia. Almost everything, he said, falls away in the face of it, leaving only what is truly important. The fear of death, examined closely, turns out to be the strongest available argument against every other fear on this list.

Our parents accepted the inevitability of the aging process. They thought they were old at thirty-five or forty. It was considered normal to eat the wrong foods and to end up with high blood pressure and diabetes. I’ll never forget the day my mother decided to cut her hair and change her clothes because she had turned forty. I came home from school and said, “What’s going on? Why do you have old people’s hair?” She said she was acting her age. She would never think of going out to jog because she didn’t want to seem out of place. It wouldn’t look right.

When I first asked, in this essay, when you last saw a senior citizen in a gym pumping iron, it was a rhetorical question — the answer was never. Today the answer is this morning, in any gym in America, and science supplied the turning point. In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the physician Maria Fiatarone put frail nursing-home residents aged eighty-six to ninety-six — some using walkers, average age ninety — on an eight-week weight-training program. Their strength increased roughly 170 percent. Their muscles measurably grew. Their walking speed rose; some graduated from walkers to canes. Eight weeks, at ninety. Strength training twice a week is now official public-health guidance for older adults precisely because the muscle never stops answering the phone. Working out keeps the body tight, the posture up, the bones mineralized, the osteoporosis at bay — everything I said it would. The only thing that ever stood between a seventy-year-old and the weight room was the fear of looking out of place, and that fear, at least, is finally dying on schedule.

Fear of the Consequences of Personal Neglect

I was talking with a friend of mine, the owner of a video store. He’d gone through a lot of stress and had gained a lot of weight. Now he was having chest pains. I advised him to get the weight off and to deal with his stress. Otherwise, he might end up having a heart attack. He told me he was afraid this might happen. He was angry with himself about it. I said he should use his anger constructively and start taking care of his health. The next day he went for a complete physical examination and cardiovascular stress test just to see what was going on. His video store has long since gone the way of all video stores. Chest pains, unfortunately, never go out of business.

Until you take care of yourself, you’ll have fear and anger. Self-loathing occurs when you neglect yourself. And this applies not just to your physical needs; you must also tend to your emotional, intellectual, and creative needs. You need to stimulate your brain through reading, for example. And you must take care of interpersonal needs. People need to hug, to share, and to love.

How Do You Manifest Fear?

Your fear can emerge in many ways. Do you identify with any of these modes of manifesting fear?

Sickness

Getting sick keeps you from having to face your responsibilities and unpleasant situations. When you’re sick, you don’t get pressured. People tend to your needs and are kind and accepting.

Let me add a line of care here that I owe you: real illness is not a moral failure, and nothing in this section is an accusation aimed at people fighting genuine disease. What the research does confirm is the narrower point: psychologists who study coping find that avoidance — using anything, including the sick role, to sidestep what frightens you — reliably predicts worse outcomes over time, while approach — facing the feared thing in some form — predicts better ones. The question to sit with is honest and private: has being unwell ever quietly worked for you? If any part of the answer is yes, that part is fear wearing a hospital gown, and it responds to the same treatment as every other fear in this essay.

Complaining and Blaming

Whenever I hear someone moan or complain, I know they’re reacting from fear. They make excuses for not doing anything. “I’d get out there but it’s too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too breezy.”

Some people are always blaming someone else for their problems. “It’s not my fault, it’s yours.” “You made me sick.” “You gave me a headache.” People who are always blaming others may think they’re getting rid of their responsibilities; actually, they’re just manifesting their fear of the responsibility.

Compulsive/Addictive Behaviors

Fearful people often engage in compulsive and addictive behaviors. They compulsively eat, drink, or gamble, for example. Instead of going out and doing something constructive with their lives, they will engage in acts that hurt themselves. Gamblers who risk everything are in effect saying, I hate myself so much that I’m willing to destroy everything I’ve accumulated, including the love for my family and my home. I’m going to give it all away because I don’t know who in the hell I am and I don’t know how to get in touch with my real needs. I’m not happy. If I was, I wouldn’t be gambling.

Compulsive/addictive people are wrapped up in their fears. They act in ways that disguise their feelings of terror, as they try to convert their fear into something else.

Escapism

Our society is very escape-oriented. People find creative ways of displacing their real fears. When I first wrote this, the anesthetic of choice was the soap opera — other people’s make-believe catastrophes as a vacation from your own. The soap operas have mostly gone off the air, and what replaced them should embarrass no one into thinking we progressed. The average American now spends most of the day’s free hours on a screen, and the newest ritual has a name the dictionaries have already accepted: doomscrolling — feeding on an endless stream of the world’s disasters, which researchers link to rising anxiety and poorer mental health. Understand the mechanism, because it is exactly the one I described: as long as the catastrophe on the screen is bigger than the unfaced problem in your life, the problem gets to wait another day. The screen is not the disease. It is the anesthetic. The question is what the anesthetic is for.

Chronic Tension

A chronically tense person is hypercritical. Their intensity is palpable. You never feel relaxed and spontaneous around such a person.

The tense person doesn’t always understand why he’s on red alert all the time. The fear that is breeding this energy is not apparent. But if you’re a chronically tense person, until you get in touch with what underlies that tension and how it affects you, it will limit you.

Notice any unresolved fears that keep you chronically tense. Do you find yourself getting into fights? Are you afraid of losing control, of being less responsible than others expect you to be, or of showing your uncertainty to people? Your tension becomes a symptom of that.

Withdrawing and Hiding from Your Real Feelings

When a person hides his (or her) fear, he’s afraid to let others know what he’s really feeling. They might criticize him for it. If he’s honest with them, they might come down on him like a ton of bricks.

Maybe he had an experience in the past that taught him not to be honest because it was too painful to be. Soon he is dishonest not only with others but with himself, not admitting even to himself that he is fearful. The problem is that now he is living a very limited life. Because of his hidden fear, he’s never explored the options available to him.

Neuroscience has delivered a beautiful finding about the alternative. When people simply name what they are feeling — put the emotion into words, “I am afraid,” “I am ashamed” — brain scans show the amygdala, the alarm center, measurably quieting, while the reasoning cortex comes online. The psychologist Dan Siegel compressed it into a prescription: name it to tame it. Hiding a fear keeps the alarm ringing in a sealed room. Naming it — even privately, even on paper — turns the volume down by mechanism, not metaphor. Every exercise in this essay that asks you to write your fears down is quietly running that machinery.

Describe a Life Circumstance You Would Like to Change

Ideally, how would you like to respond to fear? Practically, how do you respond?

Think of a situation that you handled inappropriately. Afterward, you probably thought about what you could have said and done differently. You changed the scenario in your mind and came out the hero. You developed an ideal way of handling the situation that was different from the way you actually dealt with it.

Strive for the ideal. I would love to finish the marathon in under two hours. When I’m training I fantasize about having the strength and speed of a gazelle. I acknowledge my practical speed and work from there.

When I first wrote that sentence, no human being had ever run a marathon in under two hours, and the experts had published proofs that none ever would. Then, on an October morning in Vienna in 2019, Eliud Kipchoge did it — 1 hour, 59 minutes, 40 seconds. It took engineered conditions: a flat course, rotating teams of pacers, years of preparation aimed at that single ideal. Which makes it a perfect illustration of exactly what I was teaching. He acknowledged his practical constraints and worked from there, toward an ideal everyone certified as impossible. His own slogan afterward said it better than I can: no human is limited. The ideal is not a standard you owe anyone. It is a direction, and a direction is enough.

You don’t have to live up to your ideal. And don’t criticize yourself if you can’t reach it; it may be outside your grasp. But you can at least try for it.

Which Attitudes and Behaviors Do You Need to Change?

List the attitudes and behaviors that don’t work for you. Until you correct them, nothing will change. You will repeat the same old patterns of behavior and continue to manifest the identical problems. If you continue to eat the wrong foods, you will stay overweight. Until you take responsibility for your health, you can continue going to the doctor for vitamin drips and colonics but nothing will really change.

Sit quietly and write about what doesn’t work for you. What are you doing that isn’t healthy? Are you hurting other people? Are you disrespectful? Perhaps you’re a strict parent. You order your children around and discourage them from asserting themselves. You may not even realize how discouraging you are. As a result, your children grow up hating you and probably everybody else. They take on your worst characteristics.

Start looking at your patterns of behavior. Until you do, nothing will change. But once you can clearly see your own behavior patterns, you can then find the courage to change them.

Will You Choose Loss of Control or Positive Change?

Nothing changes on its own. You have to be the architect of your life in order to direct the change. Otherwise, you lose control and land in fear-provoking situations. If you neglect your health then the doctors and the hospital are in charge. Better to process wellness and maintain your autonomy.

If you become angry at someone for jumping ahead of you in a movie line and start a fist fight, you also lose control. Now the police, the insurance company, the lawyers, and the judge control your fate.

Think of the times you lost control because you chose not to be the architect of positive change.

Doubting Wastes Time

Think of a time you wanted to do something but were held back by your doubts and fears. You may be fixated on that scenario and replay it over and over in your mind. You think about what you could have done and how your life would be different. Were your doubts justified?

Doubting can be avoided when you let your intuition guide you. I base every major life decision on intuition. I find that following my feelings helps me to make a right decision, while relying only on my brain often leads me to a wrong one.

Science has caught up with intuition from two directions, and both are worth knowing. The neurologist Antonio Damasio ran an experiment in which players drew cards from decks, some of which were secretly rigged to ruin them. Long before the players could say which decks were dangerous, their palms began to sweat when they reached for the bad ones. The body knew first. Damasio’s conclusion — that feelings are not the enemy of good decisions but a component of them, and that people whose emotional circuitry is damaged make disastrous choices despite intact logic — is as strong a vindication of gut feeling as I could ask for. But Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, after years of debating when intuition can be trusted, added the fine print, and I pass it along because it is honest: intuition is reliable where you have deep experience in a world regular enough to have patterns, with fast feedback on your judgments — reading people, your own body, a craft you have practiced for decades. In domains that are mostly noise, the gut is just noise with confidence. The rule that reconciles them: trust your intuition where you have paid your tuition.

Everyone has intuition, but most people in our objectivity-oriented society need to pay more attention to it. When you are involved in a relationship, you know when someone is about to undermine you. You feel it. You know where you fit in. You travel to a country or a town and you just feel right being there. You also know when you don’t feel right in a specific place. You know when you’re with someone if you feel comfortable or not.

Learn to trust your intuition. Let it be your guide. Pay attention to it and use it. It’s an important asset. Once you know what is right for you and act on it, you erase doubts and fears. Then you can go after what you want in life.

Do You Validate the Positive and Invalidate the Negative?

Life involves making choices. Each morning, you decide whether your day will be guided by fear or love. If you choose fear, you will be interfering with your happiness and growth. If you choose love, you re-empower yourself. Your health, for example, is dependent upon your state of mind. Health and disease are processes — not static entities. Your daily thoughts, feelings, and actions affirm well-being or sickness.

You need to get beyond blaming other people, such as your parents, and take responsibility for your life. You can spend your entire life justifying being unfulfilled, or take charge and make your life work. When part of your life is dysfunctional, recognize that you created the pattern and that only you can change it. People play games when they say, I can’t do that. They really can. If your life is working in one area, it can be equally positive in another.

Notice negative thoughts and actions and weed them out. It is the weak link in any situation that causes failure. It is what you don’t pay attention to that brings you down.

Reclaim your values and emphasize what is important. Identify your real needs. Write down what you need to be happy in your career, at home, and with friends. If you need loyalty then be with people who are loyal friends. If you need honesty in your relationship, don’t accept anything less. Break old, destructive patterns of behavior. If others can’t honor your needs, they shouldn’t be in your life.

An example of someone who validated the positive is Dr. Martin Feldman. He graduated from Yale Medical School, magna cum laude. He is a professor of neurology at Mt. Sinai. After all his education he saw that he was not helping his patients and decided to incorporate nutrition into his protocol. As a result, he shifted his practice. But he made a choice. He saw that his methods were not constructive and he changed them so that now they are. He gave up making rationalizations and excuses about why patients weren’t getting better. Now he doesn’t have to make those rationalizations or excuses.

Don’t Filter Reality

Let reality be what it is. We’re always trying to filter what we see and hear to make it into something else. But by seeing reality for what it is, we can deal with it. If there is corruption, we should see it for what it is. Then we can respond to it instead of pretending it isn’t there.

Cognitive therapy, incidentally, lists “filtering” by name in its catalog of the distortions that manufacture misery — seeing only the evidence that fits the fear, deleting the rest. The clinicians and I are in full agreement on this one: the unfiltered view is not the harsher one. It is the kinder one, because it is the only view you can actually act on.

Of course it’s hard to change the world around us. Sometimes it’s impossible. But I’ve learned that even if I can’t change the world, I can change my response to it. I don’t have to get crazy, fearful, and angry because other people act that way. I can maintain balance even if others are imbalanced. I can remain peaceful even if others are belligerent. It takes two clashing egos to fight.

The old Stoic we met in the last essay would recognize that paragraph as his own first lesson: some things are up to us and some are not, and every ounce of energy spent on the second category is subtracted from the first. Our opinions, aims, and responses are ours; other people’s behavior never was.

I have learned how to remain free of someone else’s negativity. I can have negative people around me, but I don’t need to be a part of the negativity.

You can learn all these things, too.

One last word before you set this essay down. C. S. Lewis observed that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at its testing point. Honesty that has never faced a frightening moment to stay honest in is just a mood; so is love, so is integrity. That is why fear, of all the subjects in this essay, may be the one that decides the rest. The last essay asked you to let go of old pain; this one asks you to let go of the fear that stands guard over the life you haven’t started yet. The pain lives in the past and the fear claims to live in the future — but you have seen the audit: nine times out of ten the future it predicts never comes. Let it go. Then go find out, one brave act at a time, who you were behind it.

 

IPAK-EDU is grateful to Meryl’s CHAOS letter (Critical Health Analysis and OpinionS) as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More