I Don’t Want To Hear About “Growing From Your Fear”

Feel the fear and do it anyway — we all heard that. Self-improvement culture reinforces this a lot.

“If you are afraid, that means you are growing.”

“Everything you want is on the other side of the discomfort.”

“Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”

And so on. We find this notion throughout self-help content so often, that eventually we can’t help but believe it:

FEAR = GROWTH

Because human brain has a tendency to oversimplify concepts, the above equation — in this exact simple form — became an integral part of my belief system. Consequently, feeling the fear seemed to be something noble to me. In a strange way, fear reassured me that I was doing everything in my power to expand myself.

Today I say: screw this kind of vision of “growth”. And screw the notion that I have to “grow” in each and every moment of my life.

Since a few weeks, I am coming to appreciate the value of comfort. Actually, I wrote an article about growing and thriving inside the comfort zone a year ago — but it is only these days that the true meaning of this hits me.

Why? Because recently I have experienced the most intense and long-lasting fear of my life. It happened during my solo trip to India & Nepal (you can read the complete story here if you are interested), which was another one of my attempts to “grow”.

Grow through fear — of course. I was fucking scared before, as well as during this trip.

And I pushed through it because I believed it to be in my own interest. In the end, everything I wanted was on the other side of this fear. I was “growing”.

Except for, I was not. At some point I realised how exhausting it was to remain in the constant state of being afraid. It exploited me emotionally, mentally and physically.

I got to a point when nothing else existed in my awareness — only the fear. I think this kind of state is called a panic attack. I didn’t see how this was going to help me.

So I decided to honour my fear, in the sense of treating it as a valid biological mechanism that tells you: run. Run back to a safe place. Do what you need to do to survive. In the end — survival is way more basic than growth.

Only once your survival is granted can you even start thinking about growth.

There is not much you can consciously do when in the survival mode. And it doesn’t matter whether it is a real, “objective” threat that chases you into this state — or whether it is “all just in your head”. If you feel threatened, you feel threatened.

What I am saying is: don’t do this to yourself. As much as you can, don’t corner yourself in the survival mode. It doesn’t make you grow.

I am not saying don’t confront your fears. By all means — try new things, leave your comfort zone, challenge yourself. But be aware that there is a limit. And each of us has their own.

The limit beyond which the feeling of fear starts taking over. This is very primal, but at the same time very real. From this place, you start acting upon your survival instincts — not your conscious intentions.

And to me, it doesn’t feel like growth at all.

It is more like going back to the basic functioning of the reptilian brain and desperately trying to act human from there.