No one wants to feel fear, but it isn’t actually a bad thing. It serves a purpose.

That purpose depends on the kind of fear you’re experiencing. There’s fear that serves as a survival mechanism to impending, very real danger, which causes a fight, flight or freeze response and then there’s imagined fear. The first is almost always a response to something that’s happening in the present and guides you away from danger, while the latter is without fail a response to something that might happen in the future. That’s what makes it imagined. Your brain basically takes it upon itself to take information currently available to it or that it’s gathered from past experiences and extrapolate it into future (usually worst-case) scenarios. 

But the thing is that it doesn’t always produce the most accurate or reliable predictions – in fact it usually doesn’t. Because, as humans, we have a bias for the negative. We’ve evolved to focus on it and magnify it and so it usually overrides all other possible interpretations of a scenario, regardless of whether it’s something that already happened, is happening or will happen. In other words, most of us live under the influence and in constant fear of worst-case scenarios which aren’t necessarily fully true, but which still have very real impacts on our lives and our health because of our belief in them.

And that’s when fear stops being useful.

… But small doses of fear can be extremely enlightening.

Let’s play pretend for a second: imagine you’re a kid again (or maybe you still are one) and you have a passion for a particular sport. You dream of becoming a professional athlete one day, so you spend all your free time doing different drills and going over plays and scenarios that may come up on game day. Your passion is so intense that sometimes you even let your schoolwork slip – it’s not what interests you, sports do. So, I have a question for you: do you think you’d be more nervous before your championship game or before taking the final for a class you don’t care about?

I’m guessing most, if not all of you, said before the game… The thing you care about.

And since nervousness is an expression of fear, that means that fear can act as a litmus test for whether or not we care about something and in that way it can guide us towards our true calling, our path.

Let’s apply this line of thinking to more scenarios. Which conjure up the most fear in you?

Losing touch with a partner you’re wildly in love with or someone you’ve grown apart from?

Opening up mail from your dream school or your safety net school?

Hearing back from your dream job or from the job you applied to to make your parents happy?

Traveling the world or staying in the same neighborhood, the same house where you grew up?

Notice that your answers were not only always the thing you care about most, but also the thing that was most out of your comfort zone. Because the funny thing in life is that, for better or for worse, these two things tend to go hand-in-hand. To get (or keep) something you care about, you’re eventually going to have to get out of your comfort zone and take risks. Think of it like a test. It’s the Universe seeing if you truly have the conviction to make your highest reality your lived reality.

Anything worth getting in life has its challenges along the way and is probably only worth getting because of those challenges: you can’t have glory without first experiencing adversity. Finally attaining it, whatever it is, is a testament that you lived up to those challenges, that you learned along the way, that you kept going, despite the hurdles you inevitably encountered.

It’s a sign of growth.

But the flip side is that your fears will cripple you if you don’t face them. Because, for as much good as fear can bring into our lives, it can bring just as much tribulation.

There’s no point in knowing we care about something if we’re not willing to face the risk that comes with pursuing or maintaining it.

It’s pointless knowing who your crush is, if you’re too afraid to talk to them.

Or knowing what your passions and desires are, if you’re too afraid to pursue them.

It serves no one if you know who you are – who you’re meant to be – but are too afraid to be and become those versions of yourself.

But let’s back up a second.

If you weren’t reading closely, then you might still think fear is the villain. 

I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t.

So what is?

It’s your reaction to feeling fear, never the fear itself. And that applies to all emotions.

‘Negative’ emotions themselves are never what attract negativity into our lives, it’s our reaction to them. And, despite it being an overwhelmingly popular practice, labeling something as ‘negative’ and pushing it away for the sake of maintaining “positive vibes and thoughts only” is one of the worst ways we can react to our emotions. In fact, our attachment to positivity and positive emotions can bring just as much, if not more, negativity than what we perceive as ‘negative’ emotions.

The trick is to face your emotions head on and to respond to them accordingly, without any attachment to the outcome. It’s our attachment to things – material and immaterial – that we have to work to overcome. Because the presence of any form of attachment is a sign that you’re not fully accepting what actually is. It’s a sign you aren’t Surrendering, which Stephen Beitler of FreeYogaTV defines simply as letting what is, be. Attachment is a telltale sign of ego. And ego is the root of all suffering. By the way, you should definitely check out Stephen, if you don’t know who he is. He teaches amazing yoga classes on YouTube.