Your Fear is Obsessed with Giving You What You Want

How to relate to fear as a necessary dimension of motivation.

Fear is a funky, often unpleasant sensation. But it’s just that — a sensation, and you can relate to it however you choose.

You know this conceptually. But your fear has quite the ax to grind…

It changes the dynamics of your breathing, triggers your heart into rapid-fire pounding, and beyond.

And since the days you sat on your mother’s knee, you got subtle or overt conditioning to view fear as a signal that something is wrong, either with you, the world, or the work you’re doing.

But what if your habitual responses to fear are mistranslations of its true message?

Why fear is a messenger of impending gratification

If you’re like me, you grew up against gross phrases like “Pursue what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

Sure, meaningful work feels better than dull, pointless work. Yet this phrase also carries the haunting message that if you feel bored or fearful as you pursue something, you’re focusing on the wrong thing.

But what if fear is simply a stage motivation must go through if it is to be fully expressed?

In a recent podcast, neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman articulated the links between fear and motivation like this:

“Motivation and fear are in the same chemical pathway. The interesting thing is that dopamine is the molecule from which adrenaline is made. Essentially, craving and desire are the foundations of stress and fear…

When we’re afraid, we can either remain still, retreat or move forward. All three require an increase in our activation. Adrenaline is what gets us moving, and it’s also responsible for our sense of fear.

Dopamine is about a craving for pleasure, not pleasure itself. And fear comes from this pathway of dopamine and adrenaline. [In other words], fear is just another dimension of motivation.

I’m not usually one to reduce human experience to impersonal neurochemical signaling.

But I find this description fascinating. In this way, fear is like a salience alert. It lets you know, ‘Hey if you place your focus here, you might eventually end up really, really satisfied by your decision to do so.’

How most people transform potential into fear (and how to break the habit)

The problem is that you, me, and the masses have been conditioned for short-term gratification.

As a result, perceptions of challenging, yet exciting possibilities rapidly transform into fear-based calculations: as you do your work, you’re bombarded with all the reasons it’s silly, why you’re a fake who doesn’t deserve praise or compensation, and so on.

To minimize these anxieties and stay motivated despite fear, boredom, or other resistances, classic wisdom will tell you to reward yourself after doing the hard things you know you must.

This can work, but as Huberman later noted, a more robust way to stay motivated is to train yourself to crave the sensations of moving through challenges. There are countless ways to do this, but they all come down to the simple, yet demanding ability to delay gratification.

But as many personal development haters have pointed out, training yourself to delay gratification can lead you down a monk-like path of self-denial and judgment, forced 4 a.m. leaps out of bed, shaved heads, and other ascetic plot twists. All of this can be fine.

Yet it’s not as fun as playfully noticing a strange quirk of human nature: we all seem to relish the experience of feeling and then releasing fear (after much tension, strain, and fanfare).

Play with your delight in the drama of fear

You can train yourself to crave the experience of challenge (and other “negative” emotions) by getting curious about their emotional payoffs.

On the Primal Happiness Show, the legendary Dr. Carolyn Elliott described our collective fascination with having to prove ourselves worthy of support and attention in a harsh world:

We humans are story-loving creatures. The feeling of being opposed, of having something working against you, is the essence of drama. There’s no story without an antagonist.

If you search deeply enough, you’ll find that a quiet part of you finds pleasure in having to push against challenging odds to get what you want.

There’s a delight in feeling like you must prevail against oppressive antagonists (whether they’re your clients, your readers, your listeners, whoever).

Not you? Fine. Experiment with the alternative scenario: Imagine you were born knowing that with everything you’d do, you’d find endless streams of praise, success, and financial reward.

That would be cool. But would it get dull? Maybe…

Ever worked for something, felt the sickening drama of not knowing if you’d succeed, followed by the thrill of out-pacing your wildest expectations?

If so, you’re in touch with the gratification that comes along with proving yourself against scary odds.

So, what if we humans crave fear, struggle, and the torment of others’ expectations because we recognize them as precursors to the gratification we want most?

When you’re working and facing anxiety and self-criticism, it’s not just because you want to create impactful work and know you need a sharp, critical eye to get there. That dynamic is present, but let’s not forget about your attachment to what fear brings you.

Part of your attachment to fear is knowing that when you overcome it, you get the joy of celebrating yourself as powerful. If you never felt fear, struggle, or challenge, you wouldn’t get to rejoice in your triumphs as meaningful. Hmmm.

Philosophical entertainer Alan Watts expressed this strange human pattern in the following way:

“Let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have.

And naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say “Well, that was pretty great.”

But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control. Where something is gonna happen to me and I don’t know what it’s going to be. And you would dig that and come out of it and say “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”

And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream … where you are now.

You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”

The truth is this: if you could do anything, you might initially go find your favorite authors/musicians and talk soul-to-soul against candlelight, then take a magic carpet into your favorite era in history, and beyond.

But eventually, your curiosity would return to the circumstances that currently define your life. Why?

Because you’d recognize that what you thought was a heated struggle was really just a game of hide-and-seek you were playing with yourself.

Your fear isn’t a problem: It’s your excuse to play the game of having a problem

As a human, you find quiet enjoyment in the tug-of-war of not knowing if your work will succeed or leave you two scathing reviews from the street.

But if you know intellectually that craving is the foundation of fear, and if you accept your human inheritance as a challenge-and-drama-adoring creature, you’ll develop a different relationship with the sensations of challenge and strain.

From this day on, experiment with viewing fear as your faithful, watchful servant. It’s the part of you that’s flagging the possibility for real transformation, real impact, and real gratification.

Instead of thinking your fear will go away when you do everything “right,” realize it’s working to show you a path toward a deeper form of satisfaction than you currently know.

When you train yourself to see fear as a messenger of future delight, then it will no longer obstruct your path. Instead, it will be an earnest, yet slightly over-zealous foam finger that tells you “You’re doing it! Keep going.”

Looking for mindset shifts and lifestyle optimizations to create authentic, slow-burning motivation that isn’t rooted in weird forms of self-denial? Read on, my friend..