Another Look At Fear

Awhile ago I wrote a blog on Fear and referenced the whole idea that Fear is really False Expectations Appearing Real. Today I want to approach fear from another perspective.

There are many things we are afraid of that are often quite irrational and difficult to overcome. My friend Dave, was extremely afraid of heights. Part of his job was to climb 90 feet into the air, over a large river and then do mechanical repairs to the broken equipment. I could always tell when he’d had to do that as he would be white and shaky for hours.  

One night after he’s been out over the water I told him the following true story. A group of researchers decided to see what the difference was between fear and excitement. They brought volunteers in to the lab and hooked them up to all sorts of machines: respiration, pulse, brain waves to name a few. Then the volunteers were shown pictures of things they had identified as being fearful.

A month later, the same volunteers came back, were hooked up again and shown pictures of things that made them excited. After the volunteers left the researchers discovered that the read outs form the machines were identical. Which lead them to speculate that it was what you labeled the emotion that caused the effect in your mind. You could call it fear or you could call it excitement.

A couple of weeks after telling this story, Dave and I were out for dinner with some friends. At one point I heard him tell the other man, “So there I was up there and I realized I needed to invent a new tool to do the job. He then began to scrawl the tool design on the place mat. I leaned over and said: Were you up over the river today?” “Yes”, he said, “what of it?” I replied “Oh nothing” and left him to his drawing. It was obvious to me that he had re-framed his fear into excitement.

So I guess the question is: What fear could you call excitement and what fun could you then have?