Why do we fear, when we know that most of the fears are groundless

Our mind is not designed that way. A baby does not fear the snake, the response of the people around him makes it fear the snake. Our fears are a product of our programming. People eat things that other people shudder to look at. People have learnt responses and behaviours that are acceptable. It is the product of the environment we grew up.

The previous blog gives an idea of how this programming happens.

So what does this mean?

Every time I behave or react to a stimulus, I need to understand why I do that. If I understand what makes me do what I do, or be what I am, I can decide whether or not to change my behaviour or values. The desire to change is based on what impact the change will have in the pursuit of my goals. If I do not have a goal, there can be no change, because there is no reason, no purpose. Goals and purpose are related.

One of the ways of understanding self is to understand and accept my fears. Courage has been defined as a realisation that I am afraid, admitting that I am afraid and still go through with the action. Courage is NOT the absence of fear. As long as we have emotions and can think and imagine, we will have fears.

Sometimes fears are derivative. A fear of public speaking can be because of a fear of ridicule.

A deeper understanding comes from how the fears have been created. For this, I need to look back into my past life (the current one, not the previous reincarnations) and pick out the events where I had similar fears. For each such incident, I need to realise if my fears were groundless or not. Typically I find that most of what I feared did not happen.When we start finding the pattern, we get a sense that most fears are groundless and we have more confidence to face the future. We also find that we catastrophised(made mountains out of molehills) the outcome of each event. If we go further back, we can find out the root causes of our conditioning.

For example, the fear of ridicule could be because people laughed at me when I was performing on stage or at home when I was 5 years old.

Once we know and understand how we are conditioned, we have a choice.

We can, of course, blame our conditioning for screwing up our life, and live life like that.
We can decide to use ‘extinction’ as a method of modifying my behaviour that resulted from my fear. If I have a fear of enclosed lifts (elevators), I can shut myself in it for 1 second, see that my fear is groundless, and keep increasing my exposure to the fear under controlled situations, until I realise that the fear is groundless.
The traditional method of throwing a person into the deep water to teach him how to swim has a risk of additional trauma and the fear of water being replaced by the fear and lack of trust of the person who threw him in.
There are other therapies like CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) which could also help. The first one analyses what you think, find patterns in your negative thinking and allows you to logically argue the fallacy of the thoughts. The second one reprograms your thought process by using alternate modelling. Both require qualified professionals.