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What Fear Is and Isn’t
You can’t be rid of fear — but you can control it, rather than be controlled by it.
Fear is part of human nature.
At its core, fear is a message. It’s an instinct designed to protect you from harm. Fear is an early-warning system meant to help you avoid situations that could lead to irreparable harm or death.
In this form, fear is a good thing. When humankind was primitive — and still prey to predators — fear told people to run, escape, act to avoid being killed.
As humankind evolved, fear evolved. When the threats to life and limb shifted from the tangible to the intangible, so too did the fears people would feel.
A large part of this is built on the human need for connection. Introverts or extroverts, people need connections. Introverts need few, where extroverts need many. Ambiverts — those of us both introverted and extroverted — need more connections than introverts but less than extroverts. Happy medium.
As humans moved up the evolutionary ladder and became the predators more often than the prey — the number of tangibles we had to fear lessened. Fear, overall, didn’t, however. But it changed and became focused on intangibles instead.
