Fear: A Necessity for Success

Photo credit: Psychology Today

Today, I do not intend to subject your busy faculty to reading a long piece but this may take about thirty minutes of your time and I am deeply sorry. It is about understanding fear and the fact that the benefits derivable from fear in the long run far outweighs its cost to our conveniences in life.

Fear is a common feeling or emotion every individual definitely experiences every now and then in life. We all have our fears. In other words, we are often afraid of the unexpected. For instance, we are concerned that we may be fired from work, lose our scholarships and relationships. We are afraid of crashing out of business, getting sick, losing our ability to meet our daily needs or even of dying. As humans, these are normal and justified fears. Unfortunately, however, our perceptions and conceptualized opinions about fears have often been tilted in favour of subjective or prejudiced pessimism to the detriment of objective optimism. Succinctly, everything about fear as an emotion has always been seen and often wrongly interpreted as negative. But is fear bad? Is everything about fear negative? What good do we stand to gain from fear as an emotion? These questions shall be tentatively answered in this piece. In attempting to answer these questions, however, I do not intend to assume the exalted title of a psychologist for I am no psychologist particularly by conventional classroom training. I am only a psychologist by practical experience in the university of life.

Fear has been defined as  “an emotion induced by perceived danger or threat, which causes physiological changes and ultimately behavioral changes, such as fleeing, hiding, or freezing from perceived traumatic events. ... An irrational fear is called a phobia.”

According to the American Psychological Association(2020), fear is “a basic, intense emotion aroused by the detection of imminent threat, involving an immediate alarm reaction that mobilizes the organism by triggering a set of physiological changes. These include rapid heartbeat, redirection of blood flow away from the periphery toward the gut, tensing of the muscles, and a general mobilization of the organism to take action. Fear differs from anxiety in that the former is considered an appropriate short-term response to a present, clearly identifiable threat, whereas the latter is a future-oriented, long-term response focused on a diffuse threat. Some theorists characterize this distinction more particularly, proposing that fear is experienced when avoiding or escaping an aversive stimuli and that anxiety is experienced when entering a potentially dangerous situation (e.g., an animal foraging in a field where there might be a predator). Whatever their precise differences in meaning, however, the terms are often used interchangeably in common parlance.

From the foregoing definitions, it can be inferred that fear is not an end in itself but a means towards an end. It is only a sign that an action, negative or positive, is required to achieve something or confront a situation that provides a motivation for fear to occur in the first place. Fear is not necessarily and absolutely bad. It is not necessarily evil as it may seem. It is rather an emotion with huge potential for motivating an individual into action or inaction. It may become bad and so undesirable when we allow it to prevent us from taking positive actions towards achieving an end.

Positive and Negative Fears

For the purpose of this context, let us hold rather tentatively that fear can be positive or negative but may not be positive and negative at the same time. It all depends on the end to which it drives us.

On the one hand, positive fears can be understood as ones that drive us into doing something affirmatively to remedy a situation we may consider unfavourable and so undesirable. Besides, positive fears may fire an individual into taking a course of positively decisive actions towards solving a problem or confronting a challenge. For instances, the fear of the danger of slipping into poverty may drive you to cultivate crops or seek unemployment in order to be able to earn a living. A student who dreads being withdrawn from a school for poor academic performance may be motivated into burning the midnight candle everyday in order to improve his or her academic performance. More so, in a country where politicians are truly afraid of the masses, but not the other way round, a politician who is privileged to be in power tends to be driven into evolving policies that address the needs of the masses in order not to lose the next election. A staff who does not want to be queried or denied promotion may chose to work harder in the best way he or she knows how and can.Examples are inexhaustible.

Positive fears make an individual to be forward-driven or progressive in behaviour. 

Negative fears, on the other hand, may be said to be those fears that can and do prevent one from facing one's problems in order to solve them. In this case, fear becomes evil because it hinders you from waking your courage into an active engagement with those sometimes unfavourable realities confronting you. Negative fears can therefore put an individual in a mental and physical position where he or she becomes predisposed or susceptible to backward-driven usually retrogressive tendencies and mentalities. In its extreme case, negative fears can lead an individual into suicide. It should therefore be avoided or converted into positive fears.

In conclusion, let me emphasize that fear was created for a purpose. It is not entirely bad or evil. Rather, it is our responses to it that can be negative or positive. In the end, our use or misuse of fearful situations or circumstances at any time can make the difference between success and failure in our endeavours. It is important to note that fear has the huge capacity to make one realize and appreciate the intrinsic value of courage, for in the absence of fear, courage is only a sleeping giant and will remain so unless it is awakened into the reality and necessity of strong positive actions by fear. 

©Ogiri John Ogiri