Fear – Achilles & Aristotle

The fear of fear itself

From multiple sources and stimuli this week, a penny has dropped… as Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said one of the biggest things we fear is fear itself;

There’s a name and a proper medical definition for it: phobophobia. But there’s also a bit of chicken and egg about all this: which comes first – the feeling or the thought?

As a person who spends a lot of time in my own head, I’d concluded it was often the ‘thought’ that comes first. I’d assumed for a lot of things it’s thoughts which gets the fear cycle going; thinking of something going wrong or that could be painful, embarrassing, poverty-inducing or lethal for example. But now I’m not so sure…

A combo of a bit of mindfulness, and some very helpful prompting from someone posing the question – “Where do thoughts come from?” has had me pondering.

On one level it seems easy; thanks to our old friend Descartes. With ‘I think therefore I am’, Descartes has firmly planted in our minds that it’s the thinking that defines us; so it’s easy to assume it’s the thinking that comes first. But is it?

Lots of great thinkers suggest otherwise. Aristotle and Aquinas had us down as composites of flesh and blood and mind – and far closer to animals than pure ‘spirit’.

Mineral, Vegetable, Animal, Human, and Divine

So back to the question I’ve been asked: “Where are the thoughts coming from?”

The short answer is I’m not entirely sure; but what is increasingly clear is they are not all coming from my Cartesian ‘conscious’ mind. Lots of them come unbidden. They ‘well up’ from the subconscious. And today I caught one ‘popping up’ from a place of pure feelings…

You have to be soooo fast to catch the mind. It’s like running a precision scientific experiment, it’s all in the milliseconds… But, while cheffing up a beetroot curry this lunchtime – from nowhere I had a vague generalised sense of anxiety – and a millisecond later a thought popped up to help me explain it. And immediately the two become one and the thought becomes the ‘source’ of the anxiety.

But it wasn’t. I simply concentrated on the feeling – and both went away. There is no reason to believe the specific ‘thought’ I had was anything to do with the general feeling of anxiety. I was ‘feeling’ anxious that my precious Sunday was half over – but the ‘thought’ was about a specific work-related problem I’ll be back to facing on Monday. Related but independent. Correlated but not causally connected…

What if the arrow of causation is the other way around… what if most or all of my thoughts are triggered by feelings… two books I’m reading suggest there’s something in this.

The first, ‘Why Buddhism is true’ by Robert Wright, points out that our emotions and perceptions were shaped by natural selection – not to be accurate, but to spread our genes.

All emotions and feelings, Wright points out, basically come from the same thing an amoeba has – a primordial urge to ‘approach’ or ‘avoid’. Our fancy mental apparatus can post-hoc rationalise it all, and give them more subtle and sophisticated names; but they are just differently packaged composites of approach/avoid.

The second ingredient comes from ‘The Power of Negative Emotion’ by Robert Biswas-Diener and Todd Kashdan.

Their argument is we need negative emotions not least to spur us into action.

Richard Wright’s point is that natural selection deliberately keeps us anxious; Biswas-Diener and Kashdan advise us to embrace and use that.

So today I slightly changed a mantra I have in one of my many lists of ‘things to remember’. It was:

Avoid fear as a motivator

And now I’ve changed it to:

Accept fear is a motivator

And why? Simply because it is; fear is a motivator, and avoiding it means avoiding pretty much everything.

The limbic system is way more powerful than conscious thought as a motivator – it has been keeping ‘all creatures great and small’ safe for hundreds of millions of years.

There’s no point trying to avoid fear, you just have to feel it; and then do something about it.

Achilles, Ethics, Life, Odysseus, Work

Beyond Treachery

An old friend sent me this card for my birthday last week; he asked me what I thought of it…

Here’s what I said:

Age and kindness will triumph over youth and ambition old friend.

I’m up to my neck in my new job, but strangely have come to realise I have lost my fear.

Many years ago you helped me; with an exercise which taught me I had treachery in me but also had compassion, care and kindness. You helped me tip over the right way (and I’ve seen so many who haven’t) and for that I owe you everything.

And I do.

Life

Listening

Having spent some quality time with several good people in their late fifties and sixties this last week; I think I’ve noticed something…

1) They were each either fearing or dealing with the end of their working lives.

2) They were each ostensibly ok about it, but seemed subtly troubled none the less.

3) They all hoped in one way or another that either dramatically changing their lives or throwing themselves into their relationships would make it ok…

I’m not so sure. I think what they were wrestling was irrelevance, loss of status and fear of terminal decline. Who can blame them?

For my part, I just wanted to be where they are – so I could imagine a life without work as the constant metronome.

A few weeks off seems to tell me I’ll cope just fine with a life of leisure; but I’m sure when my time comes I’ll be wrestling my demons as they are.

Hope however springs from something each of these encounters (and several others with younger folk) have reinforced… Everyone wants just two things in the end: to be noticed, and to be listened to.

I reckon if you can stop and properly listen to people, you’ll always be in demand.

Time will tell; but I think a couple of my older friends were fearing people wouldn’t be so interested in what they have to say any more. I think they’re right.

All people want is for you to listen to them.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Philosophy

Courage II

I spoke to two different people this week about ‘red energy’ and ‘blue energy’; and I couldn’t remember when I’d first noted the difference. So I had a look back in time… turns out it was in this very month in 2011…

Funny when you look back how themes recur, because in one of those conversations I was talking about Josef Pieper – and the balance between the four cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Courage and Temperance.

As it was yesterday, so it was in 2011 – sometimes it’s good to look back; but not in anger.

Courage

I’ve been working in the USA this week – same language, quite different working cultures. Still Brits talking to Americans is easy enough. But add Germans, South Africans, Sudanese, Cameroonians, Central African Republicans, French, Colombians, Turks, Japanese and Koreans – and an age range from 18 to 70 and you have plenty of difference to accommodate.

The very different people I was working with cared about very different things. They wanted to talk about different things and wanted to do different things. My job was to facilitate and find a collective conclusion. Enough to give me a thumping headache. But not this time. Why?

Usually on overseas work trips the combination of travel, missed sleep, wall-to-wall meetings, some sort of set piece event to speak at and produce an outcome from – plus lunch meetings and formal dinners – gives me a throbbing headache by 3pm on day one. It then goes on to throb the whole time I’m away. But this time, no headache. Why? Mainly thanks to an Aristotelian virtue – drawing my courage a little more from confidence than fear.

When I first read: “Courage is the mean between confidence and fear” it didn’t seem a particularly significant insight. My first thought was Aristotle was on about ‘courage’ in the sense of ‘fight or flight’ – there was after all a lot of fighting in ancient Greece. Given the clank of metal and the clash of swords is rarer these days, I didn’t think much about Aristotelian courage – one for the battlefield I thought. Who knows whether I’d stand and fight or run into a hail of bullets. Hopefully I’ll never find out. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I see Aristotle’s point with ‘courage’ is as much about motivation as action.

I’ve come to realise that from school to university to the bigger world of work, I’ve used fear of failure as my prime motivation to perform. And it has always worked. Fear failure, worry the detail, think of what might go wrong, fire up the adrenaline, run flat out on intellectual broadband and the job gets done – and well. But at what cost? Stress, tiredness, raggedness, fraught, strung out and brittle.

So, thanks to Aristotle, once, a few months ago, when I started to feel the rising tide of anxiety and the throb of the vein in my head – the feeling of spotting and galvanising myself for another tough challenge – I stopped myself. I stopped myself from firing up my fear generator: what might go wrong, might I fail, what will people say, will I look like a duffer – and the killer: will someone say I did a bad job?

Instead I fumbled in my kitbag for something else – confidence. This could go well, I know how to do this sort of thing, I’ll be fine, who’s better than me to do this – and if someone says I did a bad job, so what, I’ll learn from it. The first few times I tried to do it I’d readily flip back to fear. I’d have to concentrate hard to find the courageous ‘golden mean’ with confidence. But with practice I’m learning how to plug in and stay more connected to confidence. And the courage to do new things with a smile flows from there.

As Aristotle said:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence [arete in his words], then, is not an act, but a habit.”

To help me form the habit, I’ve started to think of Aristotle’s courage as a choice between two different forms of energy. One is red, electrical, crackling and spitting like lightning or charge sparking from a Tesla coil – fear. The other is blue, pure, unwavering like a beam of laser light – confidence.

Both work. Both help me get the job done. But the red form is hot, sparky, volatile and the toxic by-products pollute my environment. The blue form is cool, reliable and powers me with clean reusable, renewable and sustainable energy.

In the USA I was running on ‘blue energy’ – better mastering myself, enjoying the experience more, enjoying the different people, performing and getting the job done. No headaches, heartaches, worries or lost sleep. I came home quietly pleased, quietly satisfied and with a spot more confidence to draw on.

Day to day courage, like the battlefield kind, is the mean between confidence and fear. Developing Aristotelian virtue and excellence is simply developing good habits. And, I’ve come to realise, what is at stake, is developing the courage to live a confident happy life – not one haunted by the spectre of constant fears, real or imagined.

Hobbies, Life, Psychology

Fear factored

A book I’m currently reading urges us to think of ‘fear’ as the mental equivalent of physical ‘pain’.

On one level they’re the things we want to most avoid; but looked at another way they are just simple signalling mechanisms. Pain is the body’s only way to draw our attention to a problem. Fear is the mind’s.

This opens up the possibility of a different approach to fear. Not do everything to avoid it; but objectively acknowledge it, accept it and maybe sometimes push through it…

The idea is that fear is just the psyche’s way of signalling boundaries to us – which is very much the same role pain plays in the body. They are both acutely and finely tuned signalling mechanisms.

Just like a burnt finger keeps us off hot kettles; so fear keeps us away from scary situations. But as a very experienced sports coach told me at work – strength is built by how you recover.

So the idea is to recognise when fear is signalling a boundary and just feel it – don’t fear it. And if it still seems like a good thing to do, push through that fear a bit.

I can’t say I’m quite there on this one yet. Stuff you don’t know how to do, can’t control or which could go very wrong still seems pretty scary to me. But if you accept it’s always going to feel scary, that calms the troubled waters a good deal.

And then what?

Well if you accept fear is often just a signal of the new and the unknown – and that variety is the spice of life – then trying new things and meeting new people are indeed things one might fear; but they’re not things to avoid…

To test my thesis I’m going paddle boarding this week on holidays: a thing I don’t know how to do, with the risk of humiliation and getting wet, for the first time, all on my own, with a lesson from someone I’ve never met.

Exactly what I’d generally avoid – so here’s to giving it go!