3469: Fear is Your Mind at its Dumbest by David Cain of Raptitude on Personal Development and Decision-Making

[00:00:19] This is Optimal Living Daily. Fear is Your Mind at Its Dumbest by David Cain of Raptitude.com. I'm your narrator Justin Malik reading you articles every single day of the year, the best ones I can find to get permission from, all to help both of us get a little more positivity, inspiration and motivation into our day. And we get right to today's post as we optimize your life.

[00:00:48] Fear is Your Mind at Its Dumbest by David Cain of Raptitude.com If you're a normal person, you probably suffer about 100 times as much from fearing bad outcomes as you do from the ones that do happen to come true. And it's unlikely that the sleepless nights spent fearing a bombed job interview served as useful experience for when it did happen. Fear is Your Mind at Its Dumbest by David Cain of Raptitude.com

[00:01:18] You probably didn't notice that the 99 other things you feared that day never became real. If you had a ledger for all the fears in your life, and on the left you wrote down what you feared would happen, and on the right you wrote down what actually happened, anybody reading it would laugh. There are no real outcomes anyway. We worry so much about ending up in a particular bad way. But even the fears that do more or less come true have no finality about them.

[00:01:48] They're just a new place from which to work for now. For all you know, this new place sits on a better path than the result you would hope for. Was sadness and disappointment the final, permanent outcome of your rejected novel? Was it the end of happiness in your life? The outcome of any particular endeavor is just another middle chapter. Just another starting point for something else. There's nothing f***ing about the middle of any story, and unless you're dead, you're in the middle.

[00:02:18] So I guess there is one true outcome, but there's no uncertainty about whether it will happen. And it has the virtue of ending all your worries anyway. Everyone has a past riddled with bombed exams, awkward job interviews, bad dates, lost wallets, and birthdays with low turnouts. And few of those fears come true continue to cripple us today. Mostly they consist of an awful few minutes followed by an ordinary bad mood,

[00:02:45] maybe an inconvenient new errand to complete, or a new parameter to work under, and some unpleasant rumination later on if you choose to bother with that. Of course, most of the unpleasant developments in life are the ones it didn't occur to you to worry about anyway. They blindside you at 4pm on an idle Tuesday, as Mary Schmeek put in her famous column-turned book. When you decide you'll walk into your moments of truth, your project launches, race days, and blind dates,

[00:03:15] with an unconditional willingness to see what happens, fear doesn't have much to do. For some reason, we interpret the presence of fear as a trustworthy reason to be tentative, to delay our arrival at a result. This gives fear time to make the unhappiest possibilities bigger in our minds, seemingly more worthy of respect. Yet fear is your mind at its dumbest and least articulate. All it knows how to do is shout, Get away!

[00:03:45] It designs endless disaster scenarios, not just of failure or setback, but of complete ruin. It understands your options only in terms of how they could bring on your annihilation, and therefore, is blind to everything else that your experience can do for you. Wisdom gained, doors opened, and particularly the possibility of success. It just doesn't see it. So it always bets on death and irreversible consequences without even reading the odds sheet.

[00:04:14] But like any idiot conspiracy theorist, when it guesses right, its confidence explodes and you can't shut it up. See? They didn't like your poem. How stupid that you tried. When you point out any of the million instances in which fear was wrong, it changes the subject to its most recent victory or it makes a brand new prediction. If you're not thinking for yourself, you'll start to parrot its paranoid convictions. It doesn't matter what I do. Things will never work out for me.

[00:04:44] Nobody can love me and other beliefs so asinine they would require a global conspiracy to be true. You might even find yourself actively looking for evidence to support fear's claims, not for any logical reason, but because you wish you were as confident as it is. And once you're confident, fear is usually right, you'll be right so often that you'll never want to bet against it. That's the great irony of fear. Give it too much respect,

[00:05:10] and it becomes the paralysis and annihilation from which it ostensibly protects you. We are smarter than fear. Walk into the thing it tells you to cower from, or feel the fear and do it anyway, as Susan Jeffers would say it, and fear dies because you ignored its only wish, which is to keep you from going certain places to see what's actually there. Unless you have a rational expectation of grievous bodily harm or financial ruin,

[00:05:39] respond to fears with curiosity about what life actually looks like beyond the moment of truth. Pass through the door and see what's there. You can take it. The sky has fallen a thousand times already. Even if you do find what fear warned you about, you'll notice it had none of the details right. It doesn't look like, feel like, or require of you what you thought. That's because fear doesn't know anything about the future. Fear only ever has old material to work with

[00:06:09] and makes its predictions out of the past. It's desperate to prevent you from getting to the future to see what's really there, because then it will quickly lose your respect. You just listened to the post titled, Fear is Your Mind at Its Dumbest, by David Cain of raptitude.com. I'll be right back with my commentary. Thank you to David. David, I've definitely had my share of fears holding me back,

[00:06:38] especially when it comes to public speaking. If you've been listening for a while, you might know that I was forced into public speaking classes twice, once in junior high school and once in college, and I always dreaded it, definitely more than the average person. And that was one of the reasons I started this podcast. But it wasn't just the speaking part. Like David said, it goes a bit out of control. My mind kept coming up with all these worst case scenarios. Like for the podcast, what if no one listens?

[00:07:09] What if authors don't give permission? What if it can't make money in the future? But like David said, most of those fears never came true, and the ones that did weren't nearly as bad as I'd imagined. I particularly liked what he said about there being no real outcomes, just new starting points. When I look back at some of my business ventures that didn't work out exactly as planned, they weren't really failures at all. They were just stepping stones that led me to where I am now, doing something I really enjoy.

[00:07:37] What's interesting is that the things we end up fearing most often aren't even the things that actually cause us trouble. Like he mentioned, it's usually something that blindsides us on a random afternoon. All that energy spent worrying about other things just goes to waste. So maybe today we can try to be a bit more curious about what's on the other side of our fears instead of letting them stop us. Like you said, we can outsmart our fear. So with that, thank you for being here every day and addressing this stuff with me. Hope you have a great rest of your day,

[00:08:08] not fearful, and I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits. there'll be very few other energy other people that énig наша cuando chopinku estas volunteers in theuais air isvellous. Luego corps está subtertourde,