ecoTrain Question Of The Week 8.7 BONUS QUESTION! What Do We Fear, Why Do We Fear?

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What Do We Fear, Why Do We Fear?

This is my response to the ecoTrain Bonus question.

There are so many things to fear, and this is at the root of many people’s inaction. Fear is the basis of anxiety, which for many of us can be paralyzing at times.

Experiencing fear is a normal part of being human. There are probably some individuals who don’t experience fear, and they probably don’t live very long. After all, there are people who don’t experience physical pain, and they don’t live long. It sounds like it would be wonderful, but it is actually a terrible thing. Pain gives us information, from the little things such as when we should shift position while sitting to big things like moving our hand out of a fire. Important information!

Fear is Valuable Information

Similarly, fear is important information. If we were in a dangerous situation and we felt no fear, we might not act correctly to save ourselves. On the other hand, it is important not to be ruled by fear, and it is easy to get overwhelmed by it because it is such a powerful emotion.

When I was younger, I felt like I could take on most situations, and I did not feel much fear. Now, I feel more fear than I probably should. For example, I am afraid of mail. Yes. Postal mail. It is an embarrassing fear to admit, but I have been afraid of the mail for more than a decade. I am getting better at pushing past this fear and actually opening my mail on a semi-regular basis. However, I am still extremely delinquent in opening my mail.

There was once a time when I was excited to get any mail. I was actually happy about it, even if it was just bills. I try to think of when the shift happened. When did I become afraid of it?

I think at a certain point, I started to realize that the mail brought Problems. Some of these Problems were small, and some were extremely large. It’s not the bills. I can handle bills. It was things like getting sued repeatedly by my abusive ex-husband. That tended to come by mail. Also, pretty much every nuisance comes by mail. Trouble with taxes? Mail. Money issues? Mail. Traffic violations and speeding tickets? Mail.

Similarly, I have gone from being someone who loved talking on the phone to someone who loathes phone calls. I literally feel the skin crawling on the back of my neck when my phone rings. I have set it so that someone has to call twice in a row in order to get through. In other words, don’t call unless it is an emergency. All notifications on my phone other than phone calls are set to silent.

Why do I fear someone contacting me? Well, it’s rarely if ever a good thing. In fact, I cannot actually think of the last time it was a good thing. I am lucky if it is neutral. Very few people contact me. Other than my partner, they pretty much only get in touch if they have a problem they want me to resolve. A few people text me cute videos of their cats, which is okay. I do not feel fearful about that.

However, for example, when my daughter contacts me, it is usually because she is having some sort of mental health episode. Either she is extremely depressed, with which I can empathize, but I cannot really help or, because she is bipolar, she is sometimes extremely excited about some new and unpractical idea. I have two options: 1. blindly support an idea that is untenable or 2. face her wrath. I try to be very gently supportive, asking her questions that might cause her to question her own plan. However, the problem is that, regardless, when she realizes her plan is not practical, she crashes and gets angry.

Is Life More Challenging Than it Used to Be?

I think life is in some strange ways more challenging than it used to be. Maybe I am mistaken. However, it is normal to have some problems. It is getting more challenging to resolve those problems.

Here is an example: I bought socks and some other items online from Walmart a few weeks ago. I regret this terribly now. For reasons I do not understand, Walmart shipped my items via Fedex. The reason I do not like Fedex is because they are hit and miss about actually delivering my parcels.

I received an email from Walmart saying that Fedex was unable to deliver my parcel because I am not home or my business is closed. Well, I am not a business, and I have psychological problems that make it challenging for me to leave my home although I still do it sometimes. This, however, was not one of those times. I had been home for at least two days.

I have encountered this with Fedex several times before. I wonder if their delivery driver sometimes just wants to go home and claims that everyone left on his list is not home. Since this happens repeatedly, either we have a particularly lazy driver or Fedex just doesn’t hire enough drivers for the route. At any rate, it is irritating.

I wanted to reply to my email from Walmart to explain the situation, but it is a “do not reply” email. I looked on the Walmart website for a customer service email. There isn’t one. There is an online chat. I hate online chat because they chat to more than one person at once and it is hard to get much sense out of them in my experience. I hope your experience is better.

So, there was nothing left to do but call the Walmart toll free number. I really don’t like doing this because I always have a bad feeling it will go poorly. I try not to go into it with that attitude because it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but, let’s face it – it goes poorly.

After I got old waiting on hold, someone took my call and he explained to me that I had not been home or my business was closed when Fedex came. I repeated my position that I was home actually. He said they would deliver the parcel tomorrow. I asked if that was just optimism or if it was based on something concrete. For example, I might have found it reassuring if he had, say, verified my shipping address.

After a long conversation during which he repeatedly informed me about how not home I was, I finally asked to speak to his supervisor. He told me he did not have one. Since I worked in a call centre for many years, I knew that was complete insanity. They don’t run call centres with bunches of agents that have no supervisors. Maybe that’s a new thing, but I really doubt it. I told him this, and he hung up on me. Unfortunately for him, I did not hang up, and the quality assurance bot asked me for my feedback, which was not overwhelmingly positive.

What’s my point? I often wonder that myself. However, in this case, my point is that getting socks should be easy. Why am I even ordering them online anyhow? What’s the matter with me? I feel fearful/anxious about leaving the apartment, so I order socks online. Fedex ends up lying, so then I have to talk to some jerk at Walmart who hangs up on me. I didn’t want to phone Walmart in the first place because I thought it would go poorly based on my recent experience calling anywhere.

Result: the next time I have to call anywhere, I will be that much more reluctant to do it! What happened with my socks, I hear you asking? Well, I found a customer service email address for disabled customers. Why do only disabled customers get to email Walmart? What’s up with that?

I don’t like to think of myself as disabled, but I have disabilities and I qualify for disabled status according to the Canadian government. So, since the email address did not say exactly what type of disability one had to have to use it, I emailed Walmart to explain about the socks, Fedex, and the mean agent who hung up on me. To make a short story long, my socks showed up a couple of days later and not one individual from Walmart seemed remotely upset by their insanely shabby treatment of me. I boycotted them for a decade previously, and I am starting a new boycott. There are other stores.

This sounds utterly trivial, and it is. However, this is the type of everyday occurrence that I think happens to most of us and it cripples us. We might not feel crippled by it. When it happens once or twice, it is nothing. However, it systematically wears us down.

I know that things are not as easy as they once were. Simply calling a business to let them know an error was made is not simple at all. I end up purchasing most goods on Amazon. Why? Because Amazon knows how to remove the fear factor from shopping online. Knock on wood, but I have yet to encounter an issue that Amazon customer service did not resolve well.

It bothers me, though, because, while I definitely don’t feel sorry for Walmart, this edges out smaller online stores. I notice a lot of sellers on Amazon have found a way to game the review system, so you really have to drill down and read the reviews to know if something actually is any good.

Again, these things sound trivial. However, I believe it is the trivia of life that cause fear, anxiety, and the paralysis that keep us from taking action on our own behalf and to help others.

Also, while we are in some ways more connected than ever because of the internet, texting, etc., in other ways, we have never been more isolated. I was watching an old episode of Seinfeld the other day. In his opening monologue, he was observing that people often call each other, hoping that the answering machine will pick up. That was 20+ years ago. Of course, now, we hardly even call each other. We practically make an appointment to text one another.

This disconnection from one another is not healthy, and I think it furthers the sense of fear and anxiety in a few ways. One is that we are less used to simply being around other people.

The concept of ghosting did not exist before texting. Did some people organically just disappear from our lives? I suppose they did. However, I don’t think we deliberately “ghosted” people. Somewhat similarly, people were not “canceled” before.

While these might not generate an acute sense of fear, I think they raise our overall level of anxiety. You can invest in someone emotionally only to have them easily give up on you. Was that always the case? I feel like it wasn’t. Maybe that is idealistic of me.

How can we counteract fear?

There is a book by Susan Jeffers that is a little dated now called, “Feel the Fear and Do it Anyhow.” I like the concept behind it.

We can’t control that we feel fear. We can’t control when we feel fear. However, we can choose to be aware that we are feeling fear rather than simply hiding from our feelings. We can choose to respond to our fear rather than just reacting to it.

The best example of this, for me, is when I am driving. When you are driving, unless you are magical, you will make a terrifying driving error at some point, and when you do, you feel panic and terror. However, if you give in to those feelings of panic and terror, you will probably have a terrible car accident. On the other hand, if you can just take a deep breath, steel your nerves, and just commit to your driving mistake, you have a reasonable chance of coming out of things unscathed. The other cars might beep at you, but they will probably see what you are doing and they will likely correct for it compared to if you hesitated, panicked, or responded erratically.

It is very challenging to bring fear to conscious awareness, accept the fear, and make the choice to continue with the course of action that is bringing us fear. Of course, we have to decide if the fear is rational or not. For example, my fear of opening my mail, while it has some rational basis, is clearly irrational. However, a fear of hugging a grizzly bear is reasonable.

Ultimately, I think this is the problem with modern life. There are so many small things that cause us little fears and self-doubts that many of us become bundles of anxiety. It becomes difficult to know why we feel fearful. We just know that we feel a strong aversion to doing something (such as opening mail).

Conclusion

Recognizing and overcoming fear is one more reason to meditate or find some other way to become aware of our own mental state. So many people are afraid and/or anxious and don’t know why.

We need to help people to build themselves up so that they experience less fear and are able to act. We need to build ourselves up. We cannot stop feeling fear, but we can learn to recognize it and to become more comfortable in the face of it. We can learn to distinguish between fears that are reasonable and fears that are neurotic.

Additionally, we can learn coping skills to deal with situations that cause fear. For example, I have a system for opening my mail (yeah, I know being afraid of mail is lame… I know…) Another example is having a sense of humour. It’s not always easy, but when someone from a call centre is insisting that you were not home when you are quite sure you were, laughter is probably the best possible response.

I think it is difficult to overcome the inertia that fear generates. However, I think we owe it to ourselves to make the effort. It might seem shallow to discuss fear in terms of mail and phone calls, but I think it is these small fears that are most paralyzing and that are the biggest barriers to action for most of us.