We’re hardwired to avoid pain. That manifests in a few different ways: one of the most notable is how we tend to magnify failure and minimise accomplishment.
The sting of an unsuccessful attempt lasts longer than the afterglow of a quest which reaches a successful conclusion.
One piece of criticism can persist in our minds when a dozen points of praise have already faded away into the background.
A single negative review sticks out like a sore thumb, even when it’s buried among countless positive endorsements.
When we’re considering the path ahead, failures rise to the surface quicker – warnings & all their latent fear in tow – faster than past success.
In many ways, this is a self-defence mechanism. Something we’ve been imbued with through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Put another way:
Fortune might favour the bold, but natural selection favours the paranoid.
Far from being a bug, fear that ensures ongoing survival is a critical feature. An inbuilt aspect of our psyche which has kept humans safe since time immemorial – legacy programming which still plays a part in our decisions today.
But the stakes we face in our modern context are far, far less threatening than they were for our ancestors.
Few things are life and death. Even when they feel that way.
Leaving aside physical threats to our wellbeing & circumstances which have a genuine risk of wiping us out, most of our challenges are mental, social, and emotional in nature.
While experience these threats in our body, the harm they pose to inflict is to our ego. The part of our self we identify with – the “I” in “I think”, “I feel”, and “I fear”.
The trouble isn’t that we feel fear, that our mind conjures up images of all the ways things go wrong, or that we lie awake in bed at night, dreading what’s yet to come.
The trouble is that we identify too strongly with these feelings.
We think that, because they’re arising from our mind, they’re correct.
Because we feel bad, we think things are bad.
That’s not the case.
Fear and negative thinking are tools wielded by the mind in an effort to keep us safe.
For this, we should thank them. Because fearlessness and unchecked optimism pose as much danger to the undiscerning mind as anything.
However, as useful as our capacity to envision and predict failure is, the fruits it bears are not intended to reflect reality.
They’re merely datapoints to consider. Something for us to hold in our minds without fully immersing ourselves in them.
We might be biased to expect the worst.
Our brains might present us with a laundry list of ways it could all go wrong.
But whether we buy into that vision – whether we take it at face value, or choose to treat it as helpful perspective, nothing more – is a decision we each make for ourselves.