Fear is good. It keeps us safe, keeps us from harm, and keeps us from making terrible mistakes. Fear is healthy, right?

Teach a young child to be afraid to touch the stove because he will get burned and he doesn’t go near the stove. He is safe.

As he grows older he realizes that the stove isn’t something that needs to be feared, but respected. It is a useful tool for cooking yet it is still dangerous.

He moved past the fear with knowledge and action and is now more powerful and more equipped to face the world. We don’t want him to stay in a state of fear and we don’t want to live in fear because it brings along with it too much baggage.

Let’s take of look at some of the downsides of fear so that we can examine our lives for them.

Avoidance

Fear causes us to avoid situations were we can fail, get hurt, be humiliated, be rejected, cause confrontation, or make mistakes, so we actively run in the opposite direction.

Paralyzes

Similar to avoidance, but here you don’t retreat in the opposite ‘safe’ direction, you sit and stare. Your fear cripples, consumes, and haunts you. This is the dear in the headlight syndrome.

Removes Rationality

Fear is almost always from lack of knowledge or love. When we are afraid, we can only act out of a limited set of behaviors rather than being able to rationally accept the truth and make the best decision. Picture a person who is afraid their 401k is going to disappear in a recession and withdrawals all their money. They get hit with a 40% penalty and miss out on the recovery period. Fear can end up making decisions for you.

Short-term and Negative Motivator

Since fear is such a heavy and taxing way to live, people often give up or get fed up. Imagine two people who want to take care of the homeless in their local city. One is motivated out love and compassion and the other is motivated out of fear they will lose their job as director of a homeless mission. Who is going to do a better job? Who is going to be happier? Who is going to make others around them happier? Positive motivators are a much rewarding.

Desensitizes You

A heavy or long enough dose of fear and people begin to block out the emotion. If you want an example, just watch or read the news. Most of us sit almost emotionless through horrendous stories of murder, abuse, and violence. We just can’t process the negative events and the fear it produces all the time, so we end up processing it none of the time.

Viral

Fear spreads. It infects other areas of your life with more fear or more negative attitudes. My fear of being inferior often causes me to be caustic and degrading to those people that are close in order to maintain an imaginary superiority. This in turn tends to close me off to otherwise great and uplifting relationships which further fuels my fear.

Miss Out on the Good Stuff

Fear just isn’t a good way to live. It erodes the truly wonderful things in life like love, giving, trust, and relationships. My fear of rejection and inferiority has destroyed a lot of relationship in the past. My fear of spending money or being broke causes me to hoard. I don’t often give when there are great opportunities and I am often more worried about how much something costs than the relationships that are involved. The negativity breeds more negativity.

Do any of these connect with you? I know I live in fear. None of mine are overt fears like spiders and heights, but they are more subtle and psychological in nature.

Here are four steps to overcoming fear :

1. Admitting that you don’t want to live in fear.
2. Identifying your fears. This article was designed to help in this regard.
3. The next step is arming yourself with knowledge. If you are afraid of spiders, read a book on spiders so that you know all about them. Or spend time with those that don’t struggle in your area of fear. More than likely it will start to erode the irrationality and give you more power.
4. The final step is action and Jeff covers this nicely in his article Cure Your Fear And Get The Most Out Of Life.

It is time to stop living in fear, I know I am ready. Are you?

This article is a guest post by The Happy Rock who runs TheHappyRock.com a personal finance and personal development site with the motto Change Yourself, Change Your Wealth.

Photo by Noël Zia Lee