The Power of Fear

The launch of The Glass Room™ and my unexpected, full-speed dive into social media (which I’ll talk about in a future blog) have given me the chance to reconnect with former colleagues and friends. Many have filled me in about recent changes to their employment status, and I’ve started to notice some common themes: I’ve been with the company 20+ years, I’m middle aged and my children will be in college soon; the economy is sluggish; it’s a crazy election year and I don’t know what will happen. Something palpable is affecting the fabric of life as they knew it.

When change is on the horizon, so many feelings surface. We are fearful of the unknown, which makes us anxious. Our fear and anxiety create more stress, which only gets worse when we start asking ourselves questions that are natural but seem to have no answers: Why did this happen to me? What do I do now? Where to I go from here?  In the meantime, we struggle to find a way forward while balancing our fear with the everyday realities of paying our bills and caring for our families.

In 2008, Gregory Berns, M.D., Ph.D., who directs the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University, studied how fear affects our decision-making process, and described a situation that seems all-too-familiar to most of us today:

Everyone I know is scared. Workers’ fear has generalized to their workplace and everything associated with work and money. We are caught in a spiral in which we are so scared of losing our jobs, or our savings, that fear overtakes our brains. And while fear is a deep-seated and adaptive evolutionary drive for self-preservation, it makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but saving our skin.

In his brain scan research on decision-making, Dr. Berns found that when given a choice between waiting for a painful (but bearable) shock or getting the shock sooner, almost a third of his participants “feared waiting so much that, when given the chance, they preferred getting a bigger shock right away to waiting for a smaller shock later. It sounds illogical, but fear — whether of pain or of losing a job — does strange things to decision-making.”

This fear noticeably affected participants’ brains: activity in the pain processing areas of the brain “rose well in advance of receiving the shock….[meaning that] all of this worrying took energy...these extreme responders had less available neural processing power to deal with other tasks.”

That’s how all consuming fear can be: not only does fear rob us of feeling safe, but it also impairs our ability to make sound decisions or take safe actions. The result? Stagnation or action in the wrong direction.

Whenever we find ourselves turning to fear, it’s so important to take a step back and attend to our physical, mental and emotional well being, especially since we know that fear’s effects reach into all of those spheres. Exercise, meditation, and relaxation will help give us respite from our day-to-day concerns. More importantly, these activities can help give us the mental space we need to find new ideas and opportunities about how to face our fears and manage the unexpected.

One of the biggest benefits of Living Life, in the Meantime™ is that it can be a powerful antidote to fear, which is something many of us seem to need right now. LLM is not about creating more certainty in life or removing the unexpected — nothing or no one can do that. LLM is about creating confidence in your ability to handle whatever comes your way. It’s about creating a personalized roadmap and getting in touch with the tools you can rely on when you find yourself on the precipice of something new.

For people who have never worked with glass before, creating a piece of glass art is daunting and often brings up feelings of fear and anxiety. LLM gives everyone a safe space to explore where the fear comes from in relation to a challenge they may be experiencing, and discover how to move through the fear productively. The “payoff” of getting in touch with the fears that come up during LLM is a beautiful, one-of-a-kind piece of art — a tangible reminder that it is possible to break through our fears and emerge stronger.

Fear may be powerful, but our ability to conquer it through knowledge and self discovery is just as fierce. I invite you to explore how LLM can help you get to know your many skills and strengths.