Fear as Intuition

How the emotion helps with our survival

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme. This month we’re exploring fear.

This Week at a Glance:

So far this month, we’ve covered ways on how to overcome fear or work with it. But today we look at how fear can in fact save our lives.

By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:

🍭 How fear acts as an intuition device;
🍬 How we often try and deny fear when it arises in certain situations;
🍫 How we can trust in the fear we feel and allow it to protect us.

Much of our emotional state in the 21st century is still working with legacy hardware from hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The emotion of fear is no different.

Fear is an emotion that originally evolved in order to protect us. Yet as we’ve progressed to modern day, we’ve allowed fear to be compromised.

Today we fear speaking in public or taking a test, yet can’t seem to allow our fears to dissipate when trying to use reason. But when it comes to the emotion actually protecting us, we often allow reason to interject.

This is one of the great paradoxes of our existence: we feel fear constantly but use reason to ignore it when it is trying to protect us from real threats. We feel the emotion but too often disregard it.

This is because we like to think of ourselves as evolved. We allow our reasoning abilities to tell us we’re going crazy, that the fear we feel is irrational, that we’re being illogical.

We, in other words, deny its existence.

“Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract written entirely in small print,” writes security specialist Gavin de Becker, “for in the long run, the denying person knows the truth on some level, and it causes a constant low-grade anxiety.”

But by outright ignoring fear, by denying its existence, we leave ourselves vulnerable to misjudgment, or worse, attacks.

While we need to rely upon reason, we need to also be in tune with our own fear and understand whether it is warranted or not. This means understanding the context in which fear arises within us.

Are we feeling fear because we have to give a speech or are we feeling fear because we just stepped into an elevator with a man in a hooded sweatshirt with his hands hidden?

Standing in front of say a classroom of individuals is not the same as stepping into a locked box with a stranger we do not know with no way out.

Fear is context dependent and this is why we need to speak with our internal monologue to get a better sense of our fear.

Are we feeling this fear because we think we are in some type of physical danger or because we’re not used to the thing before us?

Our intuition, the thing that gives rise to our fear, is constantly working in the background picking up on signals of our environment that our conscious self is not even aware of.

“Intuition connects us to the natural world and to our nature. Freed from the bonds of judgment, married only to perception, it carries us to predications we will later marvel at,” writes de Becker.

de Becker opens his book, The Gift of Fear, with an example of a woman who was sexually assaulted. She was alone in a hallway of her apartment building with a stranger. He offered to help her, she declined, he made excuse after excuse for why he was safe, why she could trust him, why she couldn’t take no for an answer.

Reflecting back on it, she knew something was wrong. The way he kept pushing, the way he tried to disarm her with jokes and smiles, the way he kept telling her he posed no harm.

But she rationalized away these feelings. However, after he sexually assaulted her, her fear sprang into action again. Her assaulter said he wasn’t going to hurt her, that he was just going to the kitchen for water. But something in her spoke, it directed her on what to do.

She heard the music be turned up from the kitchen, a way to silence her. She stood and quickly slipped out of the apartment, saving her life.

He had gone to the kitchen for a knife in order to kill her as he had done with his other victims.

Our body speaks to us for a reason we may not immediately see. It reads the environment and picks up the cues we’re not focused on. It tries to protect us. Yet we often rationalize these feelings away when we feel them, always looking for reasons for why we shouldn’t feel them.

• Oh, this man looks nice, and smiled, he wouldn’t hurt me

• The Uber drive took a wrong turn and stopped following the GPS because he’s lost

• The bartender said he was watching my drink and promised to keep it safe, I can trust him

We need to rely on our fear factors that speak to us in moments like this, the voice that is screaming to see the truth and signs before us:

• We can take into account that the man who looks nice is also concealing his hands and wearing a hat low on his head

• The Uber driver makes an excuse when we ask him why he stopped following the GPS

• We can order a fresh drink rather than trust ours wasn’t touched

Relying on our fear is there for survival. It what has protected us for thousands of years. Reason is useful but can sometimes get in the way of our intuitions. Fear is context dependent and we need our intuition to guide us in these scenarios. It is these intuitions, after all, that have kept us alive for so long and will continue to.

We need to listen to the voice within us and not try to silence it.

3-Bullet Summary:

• Fear evolved as an intuition device, a way for us to recognize when we were in harms way and what to avoid;

• But the emotion has become compromised in the modern world we allow fear to run wild when we have to present in front of people but yet rationalize it away when we are in physical danger;

• Fear is itself context dependent and cannot rely solely on reason to talk us out of it. At the same time, we cannot deny its existence. Fear is there for a reason and it is up to us to learn when and where to use it properly.

Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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