2 Ways to Deal with Fear (Most People Never Try #2)

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Fear, am I right?

That rush of heat behind your eyes.

That sinking feeling in your throat the second things go out of your control.

A five-year-old gets it watching a lizard move across the porch. A thirty-year-old gets it staring at their bank statement at 2 in the morning. A sixty-year-old gets it lying in a hospital bed, listening to a monitor beep like it is personally counting down something.

Fear does not care who you are or how old you are. It has been with you since the day you were born and it never really leaves. An MMA fighter still flinches at something. Jeff Bezos still gets white-knuckled about something.

Nobody, no matter how rich or tough or together they look, gets to skip this part. There is no upgrade you can buy that makes fear go away for good. Trust me, if there was, someone would have sold it to you already, probably with a 12-week payment plan and a guy named John in the testimonials.

So what do we do when fear shows up and we are just standing there, blowing our own brains out trying to think what to do next?

We grab the nearest life raft. Doesn’t matter if it is a good one. Does not matter if it is made of actual wood or just held together with duct tape and a guy’s confident voice.

When you are drowning, you just grab any answer or any system that works.

Any guy in a TED Talk with a headset mic and a slide that says “Your breakthrough starts sere” works, as long as he sounds sure enough of himself.

This is the exact itch the self-help industry has built an entire empire scratching. And almost every single book in that industry is selling you the same raft to deal with fear in your life.

1. That one fix every self-help book suggests

“Just Face Your Fears,” they said

“Fear is just excitement without breath.”

So cute! Tell that to your hands the next time they are shaking.

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”

Sure. Today, that thing is making eye contact with my landlord while climbing down the balcony.

And then they give you the beautiful and laminated, four-step plan, because apparently nothing soothes a mind that is on fire quite like a checklist.

Step 1: identify the fear.

Step 2: reframe it as a “growth opportunity.” Fear is just the universe asking you to level up, you know?

Step 3: take “brave action” toward it. Worried your partner’s cheating? Well. Bravely… confront them, I guess, mid-panic, with zero proof, based on a vibe you got from how they said “good morning.”

Step 4: watch your life transform (inspirational piano playing in the background).

The problem? Nobody is standing there, mid-panic, calmly sorting their fear into a growth opportunity tab in their heads. Not the guy watching his coworker get the promotion that was supposed to be his. And definitely not the woman staring at a pregnancy test in a gas station bathroom, doing long division on her own future.

These books make fear sound like a filing system. It is not a filing system. It is a fire alarm going off in your chest and nobody stops a fire alarm to ask what it is trying to teach them.

That is not how fear works, really. The self-help books are not wrong, to be precise.

They are just incomplete.

Because they miss the most important step, which also happens to be the most uncomfortable one. They jump straight to the transformation and skip the part where you have to actually sit in the fire for a second first.

2. What actually works (this is where it gets real)

Let us think about X for a second. She really wants to tick rock climbing off her 2026 to-do list. So there she goes. But the thing is, she is terrified of it, and now she is standing at the cliff with the waiver in her hand, contemplating her life choices.

What is the one thing she could actually do here? Not face your fear in the self-help-ish, poster-on-a-dentist’s-wall way.

Just sit down for a second and ask herself what’s truly the worst that could happen. A few broken bones, maybe. A dislocated jaw that her insurance will eventually cover, right?

The point here is that the only thing to do, at the very first, is surrender to what the worst would actually be. It sounds easy but is not easy.

It is uncomfortable.

Because it makes you sit with the fear instead of looking away from it, which is the one thing every fiber of your being is begging you not to do. But if there is even a 0.01% chance of it happening, you are now at least a little prepared for it, instead of not being prepared at all. The self-help step two, three, and four can come later, if they come at all.

Nobody standing at the bottom of that climbing wall is thinking about what positive growth opportunity they can extract from a fall.

And if you skip this part, everything else is just a band-aid waiting for the worst possible moment to rip it open.

Here is a way to picture why. Think about a dog that wants to chase you. It might not actually want to hurt you but it wants the chase itself. The second you take off running, you have given it exactly what it wants. Your speed becomes its speed. The faster you go, the faster it follows, because the running is the whole game. But the moment you stop and turn around, you take the chase away. There is nothing left to chase. It usually just loses interest and wanders off.

Fear works the same way. Every time you avoid it, distract yourself from it, white-knuckle your way around it, you are running. And running is what speeds it up. So the only way through it is to actually turn around and look it in the eye.

The entire thing might not feel like a “good vibes only” concept to manifest, but this is what actually works when you are pulled into the worst-case version of your life. You would have believed that you need to chase fear like it is something you can crush under your feet.

But it is not that.

It’s something that requires dunking your head all the way under and just accepting it before it gets the chance to break you on its own terms.

The growth mindset stuff, the silver linings, the “everything happens for a reason” stuff, all of that comes later. It was never step one. It was never even step zero.

Because the ultimate fact is that, the outcome was never something you could control in the first place. The only thing you ever actually had control over was whether you would face it standing still or drowning.

Thanks for reading.

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Publication Editors:

**Henry James, [Shantanu Sharma](https://medium.com/@shantanu-sharma)**