Analysis: The Gift of Fear, Chapter 1

I wanted to overcome fear.

That’s what I was hoping to get out of this book. But that’s not what this book is about.

This book is about how to use fear as a reliable tool.

I was looking for pointers on how to have more courage to pursue my dreams or talk to girls. This book was more concerned with protecting ourselves from violence. So naturally, when I read this some years ago, I was concerned that this wasn’t the right book for me.

But I think it does offer me a different perspective on fear, one that I often ignore. Fear isn’t just that thing that keeps me from following my dreams or talking to girls. Fear has a purpose. Fear exists to keep us alive.

But in order for fear to be useful to us, we must be able to accurately read situations and signals that might pose a threat to us. One thing that can prevent a clear reading of situations is anxiety.

Anxiety, as I see it, comes from misinterpreting the stakes of a situation. Any situation, no matter how insignificant, can feel like a life or death situation. In many of these situations, where our lives are not actually, literally on the line, fear is not the ally it is designed to be. Anxiety is fear without purpose.

The book, however, makes it clear why we need fear and how to use it. It is a tool and an ally.

Perhaps as I read this book for the second time, I can try to understand the situations where fear is required, and therefore better understand the situations where fear is not. Sort of like getting a sense of my own life by filling in all the space around it.

Each of the examples in this book is terrifying in one way or another. Feelings of helplessness. Feelings of shame because we failed to read the situation correctly. Feelings of being reduced to animal instincts and not knowing whether those instincts will save us or get us killed. But the book posits that we actually have all the skills we need. We are always receiving signals. We just have to learn how to listen to them and to trust our instincts.

I don’t know how this will help me pursue my dreams or talk to girls. But there is knowledge and insight here, and it can’t hurt to have some more knowledge and insight.