The Next Time You Encounter Fear Consider Yourself One Of The Lucky Ones

Use your optimistic self to lean into fear and build resilience

Walter Adamson
Body Age Buster
Published in
5 min readDec 17, 2019

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Image credit: Google Labeled For Reuse

Do you run from fear? Do you sense it coming and back off?

That’s nature at work. But by backing off, you might be depriving yourself of becoming much more than your lizard instincts.

No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. No doubt, you’ve been told all your life to “be careful”.

“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We have more and more people fearful of life

Your caring parents, friends, teachers, colleagues, and psychologists have warned you of an increasing number of things to be fearful of, including yourself.

As a result, we have more and more people fearful of life.

You’ve been warned about so many things to be fearful of that you have likely have developed a fear of fear itself.

That’s when fears become phobias, like a fear of flying.

Fear of flying is cured when people face their fear, by flying. They then realise that the reality of flying holds no fear for them. This realisation dissolves their fear of the fear of flying. It’s by facing our fears that we grow beyond the lizard brain.

I came to realise this by facing my fears. When I was told I had cancer — the first time — I instantly broke out in a sweat and thought that I would faint. After surgery, months later, I started to realise that the experience had blessed me.

It taught me a lot about myself, how to face life, and brought clarity to many aspects of my life and decision-making. Having cancer had now put me ahead of the game, and without this stress, I would not have grown.

Four years later, I was told I had a different cancer, equally aggressive as the first. I felt intimate with the fear, but without the stress.

That changed when I saw a specialist surgeon who informed me that there was no cure for my new cancer if it metastasised. That sent a new wave of stress through me, but my mental outlook was very different from the first time. I viewed this as a learning experience — an attitude that I did not learn until well after the first cancer operation.

Fear nails you to the present

I’ve also been “lucky enough” to have crashed in a jumbo jet (LAX, 1979), been struck by lightning (Korea, 1994) and nearly having to bail out of my glider as it was sucked into a thunderstorm and about to be ripped apart at 14,000 feet (Australia, 1976).

Skylark4 glider in which I was sucked into a thundercloud until 14,000 feet | Image Credit: The Author

There is one common thing about every one of those experiences. They nail you to the present — your whole being is merged with the experience of living in the present.

In the midst of fear, you do not daydream about the past and become neurotic about the future. The present is about to eat you. You have no choice but to experience it, in full.

When things like this happen you find out what life is really like under extreme pressure. From that, we grow.

We also grow from less stress than facing annihilation. Muscles grow from the controlled stress of exercise, and the brain learns to control them to do hard work effortlessly. That’s strength and resilience, and it takes stress to develop it.

My generation of over-empathetic baby boomers has created so much fear in their children about being stressed and fearful that neuroticism has erupted.

This neuroticism cheats current generations of their ability to centre themselves in the present moment. They become obsessed with centring themselves on themselves — and their fears therefore amplify.

This leads them down a path of comparisons, and that leads to their pessimistic self drowning out their optimistic self.

Use your optimistic self to lean into fear

The good in your life is not the things that you want to happen but those things that need to happen to allow you to fulfil your purpose for being here.

Learn to use your optimistic self to confront your fears and not run from them. Use your optimistic self to explore and discover yourself by dissolving your fears.

The next time you encounter fear, consider yourself lucky. Don’t turn away, turn in to it, and the present. Don’t back off into the past and continue to create an imaginary future which haunts you.

Good luck.

I’m Walter Adamson. I write about life, health, exercise, life and cognitive fitness to help men and women over 50 live longer better.

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Body Age Buster
Body Age Buster

Published in Body Age Buster

Helping you make the choices to live longer better — tips, plans, action and motivation.

Walter Adamson
Walter Adamson

Written by Walter Adamson

Optimistically curious, 70+ trail runner; 2X cancer; diabetic; Click “FOLLOW” for living longer better tips | My Newsletter 👉 newsletter.walteradamson.com

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