President Franklin D. Roosevelt gifted us with one of the most renowned quotes in American history in his 1933 inaugural address, saying: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR’s speech came just a few years after the great depression began, when many were paralyzed by uncertainty and hopelessness. It was a warning that the anxiety from fear can lead to paralysis instead of action, and that the hopelessness from fear can lead to depression instead of optimistic engagement. In addition to fear having negative behavioral, social, and political consequences, there are also adverse health consequences.
Fear leads to stress in response to even everyday events. In modest amounts, stress motivates us, for example, to get to the airport on time. Chronic stress over decades, however, can lead to hypertension and cardiovascular disease. In ancestral environments, our lifespan was only 30 years. Even with daily stressors, that’s likely not enough time to develop cardiovascular disease. Now, in 2024, the median age is over 70 years. Increased longevity has led to diseases of age such as hypertension, which leads to some of the highest morbidity rates on the planet. The stress associated with fears and anxieties has been found to contribute to hypertension and cardiovascular disease, which, according to the CDC, contribute to nearly a million deaths annually in the U.S. alone, with an estimated cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Given the high costs of fear, we have to wonder, why does it exist? Fear and anxiety in response to physical and psychological threats were adaptive in our evolutionary history. Evolutionarily, fear measures the danger of different types of perceived threats and motivates adaptive responses, increasing survival by avoiding or overcoming that perceived threat.
When I stand on the roof of a building or a bridge and look down, I feel a queasy anxiety. That unpleasant feeling can be reduced by stepping away from the edge. That’s how it’s supposed to work, motivating you to reduce the threat. Having the modules that produce fear and anxiety when we perceive something as a threat is something we have in common with all mammals. Distant ancestors who did not feel much fear looking down a cliff, or felt nothing but peaceful bliss when hearing a roaring tiger, did not survive long enough to have offspring and pass a blissful response to the next generation. We are the progeny of those who felt fear—and survived. That’s why you often hear people say “fear and anxiety are natural.” The sense that it is natural, however, seems to lead people to think it is inevitable. This article pushes back on that and posits that the development of wisdom leads to the reduction and elimination of most fears.
People all tend to be fearful about similar issues. That’s neither random nor coincidental. Three fundamental domains of evolution are precaution, mate selection, and coalitional affiliation. There is a direct mapping from the things we tend to be anxious about to these fundamental domains. It is not surprising that much of the anxiety we experience has to do with fears regarding threats to our safety (precaution), thinking we’re not good enough or attractive enough to attract a partner (mate selection), and conflicts vs. cooperation with those around us (coalition).
However, as you’ve been reading on Living Fossils, just because an adaptation helped our survival—and might still intermittently be serving an adaptive function—it doesn’t mean the adaptation is still doing you favors. Fear might be part of our nature, but it can change. It is not determined—nothing is.
The clients I see in counseling who are grappling with fears and anxieties suffer not only from those emotions in themselves but also from considering those emotions to be unusual, something that is wrong with them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Feeling even intense stress and anxiety is not unusual or surprising from an evolutionary perspective. Understanding where fear and anxiety come from can normalize the experience of feeling them and inform the methods likely to reduce them. Fear and anxiety may be natural, but so are bliss, well-being and wisdom. With a little work, wisdom and well-being can become the dominant responses.
An ‘abnormal’ amount of fear is normal
I remember the first time I gave a public speech. It wasn’t pretty. I was in high school, and it was a 3-minute speech on democracy. My sixteen-year-old body was sweating through my shirt, my heart was pounding out of my chest, and my hands were shaking, as were the 5x7 inch cards they were holding onto for dear life. My mind was racing with thoughts: “I’m going to look foolish,” “I’m going to sound stupid,” “I’m going to get a poor grade.” The more I was aware of these symptoms and thoughts, the more anxious I got, and the harder my heart pounded. I thought, “they can see me sweat,” which added to my anxiety as I spiraled down.
Jerry Seinfeld, in his standup comedy routine, observed that “many people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death, so if someone were to attend a funeral, they would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.” Fear of public speaking is quite common and can significantly interfere with school and professional functioning. I see many clients in my counseling practice that have a debilitating fear of public speaking. One such example was an executive I’ll call Joe.
Joe was successful professionally in every objective sense. He led teams of hundreds of employees and had accumulated a net worth in the millions of dollars. He was an acknowledged expert in his field and was confident in nearly all areas of his work, except for one: giving public presentations. When he stood in front of an audience he froze like a deer in headlights, leading to profuse sweating, a pounding heart, and escalating panic attacks. Moreover, in the weeks leading up to presentations, he experienced even more intense anticipatory anxiety which caused sleepless nights.
I worked with Joe using Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), gold standard treatments for fear and anxiety. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps identify and shift from so-called cognitive distortions such as “fortune telling” and “catastrophizing.” Despite considerable success and positive feedback regarding many previous presentations, Joe’s “catastrophizing” regarding his next presentation led him to believe that it would be awful and that his colleagues would judge him incompetent. Those unrealistic thoughts activated all the evolved threat mechanisms discussed above. Those pessimistic thoughts convinced Joe’s brain that his survival was at risk - that his life was on the line, which explains why his anxiety reactions were so intense. In reality, the talk was not a matter of life and death. His performance in his talk would only affect his reputation at work. And even in this one domain of work, the presentation was only one of many pieces influencing his reputation. Moreover, even in the worst case scenario of a bad presentation, it is likely that he would have the opportunity to bounce back with future efforts.
By using his success of dozens of past presentations as evidence, Joe was able to update his beliefs about public speaking, becoming more realistic. The past evidence enabled him to acknowledge the realistic likelihood that the upcoming presentation will likely also be successful, or at least decent.
Other sources of Joe’s fear and anxiety were the common cognitive distortions called “perfectionism” and “all-or-nothing” thinking. “If the presentation is not perfect,” he thought, “it’ll be awful.” Imposing the need for perfection sets ourselves up for tremendous anxiety. Not only is perfection not achievable, but for most goals in everyday life, perfection is too ambiguous to define. What is the perfect presentation? What is the perfect baked cake? What is the perfect blog post? If we require perfection, no matter how well we do, the goal post will always get pushed further down and we’ll always feel like we’re not good enough.
To take another example, I had another client who spent over 100 hours preparing what she hoped would be the perfect birthday party for her sister. Not only was she stressed that it was never good enough, but spending all that time on the birthday party detracted from other important aspects of her life such as her marriage and parenting.
Joe came to continually remind himself that the presentation does not have to be perfect, that “pretty good is pretty good.” It’s important that such self-talk not be mere affirmations, like those of the comedic Saturday Night Live character Steward Smalley’s “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gonnit, people like me.” Changes in our thinking will only get traction if they are based on evidence. For Joe, the evidence came from prior presentations, none of which were perfect, but all pretty good, or even better. Reflecting on that evidence led to an alternative thought that “the upcoming presentation will likely also be well received or might even be excellent.” Practicing that alternative thought was accompanied by deep relaxation breathing and meditation to address the physiological dimensions of fear and anxiety.
By shifting from cognitively distorted thinking, Joe communicated to his mind that he was safe. By practicing deep breathing, Joe communicated to his body that he was safe. The deep breathing relaxed him by reducing his heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension. He was no longer experiencing a fight/flight response. By first practicing these skills while visualizing himself giving presentations, and eventually just prior to and during his presentations, Joe was able to reduce his public speaking fears and anxieties significantly in a matter of months.
Reframing fear from “something is wrong with me” to “I’m experiencing an evolved response that’s overactive” was useful for Joe. This reframing normalized his fear experiences regarding public presentations, eliminated self-judgments, and also eliminated the fear about experiencing fears. Joe understood that, as unpleasant as the anxiety felt, fear of public speaking was simply the result of his threshold for being scared being set too low. Other examples of fears resulting from activation thresholds set too low include some folks feeling anxiety every time they step into an elevator or other small spaces, see needles or spiders, or fly on planes. People’s fear systems turn from lifesaving to a phobia that interferes with healthy functioning, making life unnecessarily challenging.
I myself have experienced the challenges that come with too much fear and anxiety. But through the practices discussed here and the ones I’ll introduce in future articles, I have been able to give hundreds of fear-free presentations since high school. The same skill sets apply to reducing fears or asking someone out on a date, changing jobs, or moving. My goal in this series of articles will be to communicate the useful tools from psychological science that I, and the millions who have suffered from anxiety, have used to get over their fears in life, to let you know that you can do the same, and encourage you to do so.
While reducing fear and anxiety through counseling is important, my goal is to teach patients—and readers—about the immense value of developing wisdom. Ego transcendence, an aspect of wisdom, can enable a speaker to engage more empathically with the audience by framing the presentation not as a chance to appear impressive, but rather as on opportunity to give a gift. We’re generally more excited than anxious when giving gifts. Acquiring wisdom and changing our perspective can significantly reshape our perceptions of ourselves, of others, and of events. Wisdom not only reduces fear and anxiety to near zero levels, but also significantly increases our well-being in everyday life.
Conclusion
Fear, anxiety, and stress are normal, common emotions to experience as we navigate the challenges of everyday life. If we perceive something as a physical or social threat, we’ll likely experience those emotions. Understanding the evolutionary origins of those emotions enables us to appreciate their adaptive value, which normalizes them, reducing judgments about feeling them. Clinical interventions such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy have proven successful in reducing fear, anxiety, and stress. The second article in this series will discuss those interventions in some detail. The third article in this series will discuss how developing wisdom can even more significantly reduce fear and anxiety, as well as promote well-being and positive relationships.
Bravo mammoth topic, looking forward to parts 2 and 3