What’s the Worst That Can Happen
You will have heard that we are born with only two fears. Loud noises and falling. Everything else, the story goes, is learned.
I have repeated that line myself. I want to be straighter about it than I was.
What newborns definitely arrive with is a startle reflex. Make a sudden loud noise, or let a baby feel itself drop backwards, and the arms and legs fly out. That is the Moro reflex, and it is there from birth. The falling half of the story leans on a study from 1960, where babies of six to fourteen months were coaxed across a glass surface laid over a drop and mostly would not go.
Six months is not newborn. And a reflex is not the same thing as a fear.
So the honest version is messier than the slogan. We seem to be primed for some fears more than others, and much of what frightens us day to day arrived later.
The psychologist Stanley Rachman set out three routes for that in 1977, and they have held up reasonably well since. Something happens to you. You watch it happen to somebody else. Or you are told the thing is dangerous.
That third one gets forgotten, and it is probably the busiest of the three.
Which, for our purposes, changes nothing. Because whatever its origin, fear turns up.
Not sabre tooth tigers. Mine tend to be emails, invoices, and the question of whether anyone will come on Thursday.
There is a kind of advice that tells you to let go of your fear, that fear is not real, that fear is the only thing holding you back. I do not find that helpful and I do not think it is true. The fight, flight and freeze response exists because it kept our ancestors alive. My first response to it is closer to thank you. Thank you for being the thing that keeps me safe.
The question is what to do once you have thanked it.
Here are the two things that work for me.
Let it pass
Simple to say. It takes a lifetime to get anywhere with it.
A thought is a thought. It has no substance until you hand it some. Unless there is an actual tiger, you very probably do not need to act on it at all. So be still, and let it go by.
That is the practice. That is the whole of it. I am not going to pretend I manage it reliably.
Ask the question, then ask it again
This is the one I use when I have already engaged with the thought and it has started to grow. You will know the feeling. The more attention you give it, the larger it gets.
I ask myself: so what is the worst that can happen?
Then I take whatever answer I get, and I ask it again. If that happened, what is the worst that can happen?
And again. And again.
Eventually I reach an answer with nothing underneath it, because I am looking directly at the worst that can happen. And nearly every time, it turns out to be something I could survive. Not pleasant. Not what I wanted. But not the end of anything.
From there I can make a decision rather than a reaction. Including the decision to do nothing, which is a real choice and one I miss entirely when I am in the grip of the thing.
It helps to write it down. There is something about getting it onto paper that stops the ladder going in circles.
One more thing, and it took me a long time to notice it.
We are not only afraid of the bad outcome. Sometimes we are afraid of the good one. If I catch that happening, I run the same ladder the other way. What is the best that could happen? And if that happened, what then?
You end up somewhere calm in that direction too. It is a nicer light to sit in.
A word before you try either of these. This is a thinking tool, and it is one I use on ordinary anxiety, the kind that passes. If what you are carrying does not pass, or it is sitting on your chest most days, that is not a sign the tool is wrong or that you used it badly. It is a sign to talk to your GP or someone qualified to help. Breath practices and thought practices sit alongside that. They are not a replacement for it.
We are complicated creatures, built to explore and to feel the whole range of it. Deciding that one part of that range is bad or unnecessary just makes the range smaller.
So take the fear with you. Then ask it what it actually wants.
