In life and as outdoor explorers we can move further towards our inspirations and towards developing into the people we want to be when we learn to upgrade our thinking and behavior in response to fear.
We struggle a lot to process and manage our fears based on the ways we learn to think and behave in this civilization. Even though we’re actually more pampered and safer than any humans in history, we experience a great deal of fear in our modern lives. Conventional modern thinking does not give us a functional mindset for engaging with nature as athletes (or pursuing some other out of the box challenge). We have become very removed from the natural role of fear and our natural ways to process it.
How do we often approach fear in our culture? Let’s break this down a bit:
We are scared of nature and we largely avoid it.
We try to establish control over our lives and put a lot of focus into “security” for the future. This can become the dominant preoccupation of life.
We attach fear to all sorts of artificial concepts that don’t actually pose a survival threat.
We often do not pursue our biggest dreams due to fear.
We generally feel safe when we do what everyone else is doing even if we don’t like it and it makes no sense to us.
We often avoid fear and fail to process it. We give it euphemisms like “stress” and it contributes to many health problems.
We tolerate many things in life that we believe are unfair or misguided without taking a stand for ourselves. Sometimes in our frustration we look for other people to blame or we become aggressive, and much of this behavior seems fear based too.
Fear is ruling us in many ways rather than just serving and protecting us. Clearly, this type of thinking and behavior when it comes to fear isn’t going to work for us to undertake outdoor challenges so we’re going to have to learn a different way. Thankfully, experience in nature allows us to relearn more natural pathways to perceive and process fear. This is clearly something essential to practice if we are going to be the strongest outdoor athletes we can be, but it will also help us work with our new modern fears in more practical ways. Practicing this pathway is just like training a muscle. As we relearn our natural survival-based fear pathways, we can also get better at spotting when we are being dysfunctional about fear and we’ll gain practice in immediately accepting our fear, processing it, and responding however we feel is appropriate to our objectives. As helpful as it may be to read about it and frame it in our minds, this can only be learned through experience. When we gain experience with how fear works for us in nature we can become better at avoiding the charge of unprocessed fear which seems to be a basic characteristic of modern life. This helps us confront reality, avoid anxiety and become less manipulable.
Some of our fears are innate (dangerous animals, darkness, separation for infants, etc.) but most of them have been learned. Either way, it causes the same fight or flight response. However, the fact that so much of it has been learned highlights the potential that we have to rewire it. In nature, fear is a survival cue that alerts us to possible threats and helps us respond. We often tend to treat fear with all sorts of judgment but that only adds to its charge and makes it harder to deal with. Fear is not a “good” thing or a “bad” thing. It’s a powerful protective instinct that saves our lives and helps us survive and be alert. It’s also a difficult emotion for us that creates a lot of challenges and blockages. When we just keep reminding ourselves that fear just IS without judging ourselves for experiencing it we become more effective in dealing with it. When we experience fear, we go into a heightened state of alertness that in the state of nature generally helped us either run or fight. The choice to run or fight just depends on our survival calculation; nature doesn’t judge that either.
As we train towards our outdoor athletic goals, we’ll generally experience fear along the way, particularly if we are drawn to adrenaline filled sports or challenging environments. Although we may be working towards some athletic goal and not towards primitive survival, the basic pathway (fear, acknowledgment of fear, risk assessment, decision, action) remains fairly clear and we get to practice this thousands of times and become habituated to it. This is not nearly as bad as it may sound. Part of modern paralysis appears to be fear of feeling fear. When we are in nature, a lot of this negative charge just goes away. Nature is a place of freedom and action and movement and our mindsets naturally shift. With practice we continue to improve and work through more intimidating challenges at whatever pace works for us. It helps not to add extra emotional charge or judgment. Once we know what we want to do and have made our risk assessment we can essentially feel our fear and reframe it as excitement. Fear and excitement are basically just different perspectives on the same physiological response. This is exemplified by the feeling of butterflies in our stomachs (or the more unfortunate reaction of throwing up) before a performance. It’s also important not to compare what we do to what other people dare to do. Some of us just experience more fear than others and this really doesn’t matter. It’s about gaining practice in freeing ourselves from being ruled by fear. In a lot of ways being really fear prone is an advantage for us because we can actually do safer things and still work on our fear pathways.
Practicing this pathway helps us become better at avoiding dysfunctional fear behaviors that plague us in modern life. We have been taught many fears that are associated with all sorts of non-survival circumstances and we often don’t know what to do as these fears are activated. The more we know and practice working with fear in a manner that better simulates its role in the state of nature the better we get at sensing and acknowledging fear, processing it, and, if appropriate, taking action. There are often no actions to take when we experience modern non-survival based fears but it’s healthy to just allow ourselves to experience them and let them pass through our systems. It seems that if we don’t do this they just rattle around and contribute to all sorts of unhealthy behaviors. There’s no need to feel shame about our fears either; we’re modern humans and we’ve been raised in a fear-centric world so it’s quite normal. Processing fear takes a bit of training and we don't learn it in school.
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