Fear and Fantasy

I have stated many times the concept that our emotions act as a guidance system that measure the difference between our desires about ourselves and the world and the actual results that we ourselves create and that the real world gives us. With fear and fantasy this difference mechanism still works to generate emotions only we compare imagined results against our desires. They both have very powerful motivational influences upon us because we can imagine almost anything. We can imagine the worst of calamities and we can imagine the most exquisite of ecstasies and we can actually experience those emotions for real. Some people take their imagined fears to such an extreme that they start to feel physiological responses such as increased heart rate, shallow breathing, trembling and shaking and yet no actual physical threat exists. The reverse can also occur and people can imagine events so fantastic that they experience deep joy, deep relaxation, deep breathing and other results of ecstasy even though no event in reality happened to cause that. Most of us don’t experience such extremes. Instead we avoid situations and events that might give rise to imagined fears and we procrastinate on the actions that would give us the money, the prestige, the possessions and the people we want to have in our lives.

As with our other emotions, if we don’t understand the mechanism of this guidance system the feedback from false signals can cause things to spiral out of control. The negative imaginings can get worse and worse until they bear little relationship to probable real world events and the positive imaginings can get better and better until they too bear little relationship to probable real world events. Too much fear causes immobilisation and too much fantasizing sets up a host of desires too impossible to reach. We end up procrastinating rather than be reminded of our inadequacies and the bad feelings that they trigger, which also leads to immobilisation.

Carefully managed fantasizing can provide continuous motivation as long as afterwards we immediately ‘get real’ again and focus strongly on the next possible steps that give us progress. Too indulge overly long in fantasizing and to conceive of no process for fulfilling our desires will eventually cause despair The continued impossibility and improbability will drag us down if left unchecked.

Both mechanisms of fear and fantasy can provide valuable benefits. Fear protects us from danger and causes us to consider risks and to spur preparations against them. Fantasy gives us reasons for excelling and engaging in highly productive activities and it causes us to think through how we might get such results and to spur preparations for them. I advocate creating a healthy attitude to fear and fantasy by scaling them down to caution and anticipation.

Caution

Recognise that you feel fear and understand the message that you need to prepare for the anticipated risks that trigger the fear. We often feel fear because we know that we might encounter situations that we don’t have the competence, experience or understanding to come to terms with. We need to build the competencies to eradicate risks and to prove capable of adapting to the difficult results that might occur. Finally, if we must do something and cannot prepare ourselves as thoroughly as we would like then we must act with courage, which means an acceptance of possible defeat and all of its consequences. By rationalising the fears and considering their likelihood, how unwanted outcomes can be dealt with and what their immediate and lasting impact would really be we can come to better terms with what we set out to face. We prepare, take care, appraise things wisely and act with caution.

Anticipation

With fantasies recognise that you feel ecstasy, excitement, and joy and that the fulfilment of the fantasy will give some real measure of those emotions as well as gaining the real world benefits of the results that you obtain. Understand that to obtain these benefits that you have to prepare yourself with forethought, patience, accumulation of the necessary resources and skills. In other words, feel anticipation for a good outcome but remain detached as you cannot guarantee the outcome each and every time.

Essentially the same approach of careful thought, preparation and a level of healthy detachment work effectively for each of these opposite concerns.

Retain Control of Your Desires

Whilst our minds can imagine great fears and great ecstasies, we remain responsible for our emotional states by controlling the desires that we choose to fix upon and that consequently control our emotional guidance system. If we fix upon grand desires way beyond our current levels of ability and seek to implement them without going through all of the necessary and possible steps in between then we will overreach ourselves. We will end up putting ourselves into situations where we don’t have the competence to deal with those things assuredly and effectively. Our fear mechanism informs us of this. This makes sense because we do not fear things about which we have either a full understanding of, or full competence, or full experience to deal with successfully each and every time.

In your younger days, you might have experienced many fears, such as crossing a busy street, taking a trip alone, speaking to someone that you don’t know and other things that you overcame by developing competence and experience. Likewise, our disappointment mechanism informs us that we seek desires that we cannot achieve; a common result if we hold onto grand fantasies and do nothing other than wish, hope, and pray that somehow such a thing will fall into our lap. If we hold onto impossible desires we forever feel disappointment and a lack of fulfilment unless we accept that and throw them out. For possible desires we need to recognise that, for now, we have overreached ourselves and that we need to step back and develop more competence in order to reach our desired outcome.

If you have enjoyed this article then please comment or recommend it to one of the social bookmarking sites below. To ensure that you receive all future posts please subscribe to the RSS feed (use the button in the header bar above)