Stress . . . or Fear?
While the modern medical name for the feeling produced by a new challenge or large goal is
stress,
for
countless
generations it went by the old, familiar name of
fear.
Even now, I’ve found that the most
successful people are the ones who gaze at fear unblinkingly. Instead
of relying on terms like
anxiety,
stress,
or
nervousness,
they speak openly of being frightened by their responsibilities and challenges.
Here’s Jack Welch, the past CEO of General Electric: “Everyone who is running something goes home at
night and wrestles with the same fear: Am I going to be the one who blows this place up?” Chuck Jones,
the creator of Pepé Le Pew and Wile E. Coyote, emphasized that “fear is an important factor in any
creative work.” And Sally Ride,
the astronaut, is unafraid to talk plainly of fear: “All adventures,
especially into new territory, are scary.”
I was puzzled why so many remarkable people preferred the word
fear
to
stress
or
anxiety.
The
answer came to me one day while I was working at the UCLA School of Medicine, observing physicians
in the course of their training. I was again following one of our family-practice
resident physicians
through the course of her day in the health center, seeing children and adults for the wide variety of
maladies that bring people to a primary-care physician. I noticed that when adults came to see a physician
and talked about their emotional pain, they chose words such as
stress, anxiety, depression, nervous,
and
tense.
But when I observed children talking about their feelings, they talked about being
scared, sad,
or
afraid.
It’s my conclusion that the reason for the difference in word choice had less to do with the symptoms
and more to do with expectations. The children assumed their feelings were normal. Children know they
live in a world they cannot control. They have no say in whether their parents are in a good mood or bad,
or whether their teachers are nice or mean. They understand that fear is part of their lives.
Adults, I believe, assume that if they are living correctly, they can control the events around them. When
fear does appear, it seems all wrong—so adults prefer to call it by the names for psychiatric disease. Fear
becomes a disorder, something to put in a box with a tidy label of “stress” or “anxiety.”
This approach to fear is unproductive. If your expectation is that a well-run
life should always be
orderly, you are setting yourself up for panic and defeat. If you assume that a new job or relationship or
health goal is supposed to be easy, you will feel angry and confused when fear arises—and you’ll do
anything to make it disappear. We may not even be aware of the exaggerated, desperate measures we take
to get rid of fear. This common but counterproductive phenomenon is captured in a familiar joke: A drunk
is on his hands and knees looking for his keys under a streetlight. A policeman approaches him and asks,
“What are you doing?” The drunk replies in a slurred voice, “I’m looking for my keys.” The policeman
further inquires, “Where did you drop them?” The drunk says, “Over there,” pointing to the end of the city
block. The policeman scratches his head and says, “If you
dropped the keys over there, why are you
looking for them over here?” And the drunk replies, “Because the light is better over here.”
When life gets scary and difficult, we tend to look for solutions in places where it is easy or at least
familiar to do so, and not in the dark, uncomfortable places where real solutions might lie. So the single
person who fears intimacy might change jobs or cities, working to improve an already-good career rather
than venture into the deep end of the pool close to home, where intimacy might be experienced. People
who are not taking care of their health or who are ignoring an unsatisfying marriage might purchase a new
home or a second home and focus on that venture instead. People with low self-esteem might leap into
cosmetic surgery or a crash diet and exercise regimen, focusing on caloric intake and food groups rather
than facing themselves and their self-critical natures.
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