Realising that fear is good will change your life for the better.

Most of us don’t like fear. We don’t want to fear doing certain things. We don’t like having to fight our fears to do the things we need to do. That’s hard work.

Fear isn’t evil though. It’s completely normal.

Don’t wish that your fears didn’t exist since you’d be lost without them.

The best way to make decisions is to use your fears. I like to think of fear as a natural decision compass. If you fear doing something and if it makes you feel uncomfortable, you should do it. It will likely benefit your life and help you grow.

Think about some of the things you fear doing.

You might fear going to the gym. You might fear telling that harsh truth to your friend. You might fear sitting down to finally start revising for your exams. You might fear standing up for what only you believe in.

All these actions would help you.

Fear guides you to the things that are worth doing. It keeps you moving in the right direction. Without it, you would be lost. Don’t try to eliminate your fears. Constantly use them to make the right decisions in your life.

If you didn’t fear doing hard things, they wouldn’t feel rewarding anyways. The challenge of doing them is what makes them feel satisfying at all. So would you actually want to have no fears?

As well as fearing certain actions, you can also fear living a certain life.

You might fear a life where you’re lonely, depressed, overweight, and overworked. If you didn’t strongly fear living that life, you wouldn’t know the best daily actions to take to stay far away from it. Again, you would be lost.

The actions you fear are the exact ones your future self wants you to choose, to avoid living that horrible life you can only imagine. Doing the hard things you fear saves you from living the hard life you fear even more.

I used to fear taking cold showers.

I had read about all their benefits like improving your alertness, immune system, and blood circulation, but the thought of getting into cold water was terrifying. I couldn’t imagine myself taking cold showers so I told myself in defence they were just another useless hack that online gurus loved preaching about.

Until I took one, and it taught me another important lesson about fear:

The things you fear doing aren’t as bad as you think they are.

The thing you’re scared of doing feels terrifying when you’re thinking about it and imagining how horrible it will be. The moment you start it, you’ll realise it’s fine. For me, the cold shower was quite hard but it wasn’t horrible. I survived it in the end.

There’s a great quote from Naval Ravikant…

Most of our suffering comes from avoidance.

The thing you’re scared of doing won’t feel less horrible until you just start it and escape the train of crazy thoughts running in your head. You don’t need to instantly take down the thing you fear. Just acknowledge and confront it. Trying to avoid its existence will only make things worse.

Stop seeing your fears as evil. The fact that you fear them so much means there’s not much you can do about it. You have no other option but to do the thing.

It’s less draining to stop fighting your fear of doing something and to start following it instead.