What Really is Fear and Courage? Unveiling the Depths of Fear: Strategies to Confront, Conquer, and Cultivate Courage

What is the true nature of fear and how does it impact our lives? How can we navigate the path to self-discovery, positioning ourselves to overcome fear? What effective methods can be employed to identify and diminish fear, paving the way for personal courage? In what ways can we nurture and build upon the innate courage within ourselves?

Join me as we unravel the enigma surrounding fear and its counterpart of courage. Delving into the true nature of fear, I aim to discern its essence, explore methods of tending to its nuances, and extricate ourselves from its grip.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
What really is fear?

(00:05):
How can we find ourselves in a place to be able to defeat it?
And what are the methods to culling this fear and building upon the courage we hold inside
of ourselves?
Hello and welcome back to Stoic Spirituality, a podcast where I look through, analyze, and
dissect various quotes, books, and experiences I've had throughout the last few years.

(00:30):
My name is Jugan and I'm a student of the human experience trying to spread some knowledge
out to the rest of the world.
And so this episode is going to be dedicated to uncovering a bit more about fear and its
counterpart, courage.
Identifying what fear is, how we can take care of it, and what it requires from us to

(00:52):
be able to cull.
So first of all, as a kind of recap from previous episodes, what fear can stand for is false
evidence appearing real.
F-E-A-R.
So, fear, more often than not, is based on a projection of the future.

(01:15):
Is based on a what if.
Is based on a judgment or something that another person can level toward us or a result that
may or may not happen.
And while fear, biologically, is a good thing, for example, if your hand touches a hot stove
pot, the next time you'll be a little more inclined to be careful around fear of burning

(01:43):
yourself from the stove pot.
However, a lot of the times that we find ourselves in this realm of fear, it's more irrational
than rational.
It's based on many things that will not occur, but our brain projects as a very likely reality.

(02:06):
So how can we address, attack, and deal with this fear that we face on a daily basis?
First is to explore our impressions.
So a lot of how fear comes through is we take an impression, a projection, a scenario we
generate in our heads, and we make it seem very, very real.

(02:29):
And we try to the best of our ability to predict what the future holds.
So in order to first address this part of fear, we need to acknowledge two things.
One, our first impressions, or our impressions of a scenario or a situation where a person
can be wrong, have been wrong before, and will continue to be wrong over time.

(02:57):
By acknowledging this and by allowing yourself to see the potential wrong that you hold in
your head, in your what if scenario, you allow yourself to dig into your impressions, dig
into your first thoughts about a situation, and figure out more of the inner fear, the

(03:18):
inner thoughts, or the rationale behind what caused this fear to come up in the first place.
And the second thing to do is to simply understand that life is unpredictable.
So a lot of us have this desire, this goal, to know what's going to happen, to be able
to control the variables in this chess game that is life.

(03:41):
However, in terms of control versus non-control, the odds are stacked heavily on the side of
non-control, meaning that a lot of things in our life we cannot control, almost everything
in our life we cannot control, from where we were born to who we meet driving on the
freeway.

(04:02):
So by understanding and accepting the unpredictability of life as a concept, we allow ourselves to
step into the idea of fear, knowing that a lot of what we want to project as reality
or not cannot be generated or controlled in the long term.

(04:24):
And so by being able to explore your impressions and understand the unpredictability of life,
you make a switch from allowing your emotions and your raw feeling to dictate your overall
thought process and replace it instead with logic and clarity.
Because by addressing and butting heads with your fear head on, as opposed to pushing it

(04:49):
away or shoving it in a subconscious box, you allow yourselves to show it for what it
is.
A shadow, a projected major, massive shadow of the actual real situation.
And so while biologically we have the amygdala, which is a part of our brain dedicated to
feeling emotions like fear, we have to understand and use the much larger portion of our brain,

(05:16):
the prefrontal cortex, to kill the part that has irrational fears that will never manifest.
Just think about the last time you had an inordinate fear of something happening, of
a situation occurring, or a person doing something to you that you projected as what was going

(05:37):
to happen.
And more often than not, it didn't end up happening.
It ended up happening on a much better scale than you expected.
The person was much kinder than you expected.
By being able to not allow our emotions to control our fear, rather logic and clarity,

(05:59):
not only can we tone down the massive shadow that fear projects, but allow ourselves to
fear what is truly worth fearing and take the courage to push past those fears even
to build ourselves up to become much better individuals than you were yesterday.

(06:21):
Remember, there are two ways to look at a situation, objectively and subjectively.
Two broad ways, rather.
Not necessarily specific ways, but two broad methods of looking at a situation.
You can take a look at the facts of a situation and what it tells you as right or wrong based
on the logic and clarity of your own prefrontal cortex, or you can look at it subjectively,

(06:46):
allowing your amygdala and other automatic parts of your brain to dictate what is right
or wrong, good or bad, fearful worthy or non-feelful worthy.
So by using your prefrontal cortex, your logic brain, you cull the fear, you see the facts

(07:07):
that you like to see, not what your enemy hopes you do, and you build up a better sense
of fear and what it really is and what we can use our courage to cull in the future.