By William C. Shelton

The world seems scarier now than when I was young. For many job security and the health insurance that came with it are a thing of the past. Citizens are increasingly divided into hostile political and cultural camps. There is greater fear of crime and terrorism. We are more isolated.

The world that we live in is changing rapidly in ways that we can’t anticipate or seemingly influence. And it may be my imagination, but there seem to be more frightening things in people’s personal lives.

How we manage fear can save our lives, enrich them, or make them less livable.

Our species survived to become what we are because we have the capacity to feel fear. It alerts us to danger, focuses our attention, and prepares us to take action.

Imagine a deer grazing in the woods. It hears a sound, feels afraid, and becomes totally aware of its environment. If there is no threat, the deer relaxes completely and goes back to grazing. If the threat is real, the awareness created by fear can save its life.

Paying attention to fear tells us what we need to do to change the conditions that are making us afraid. Doing so makes our lives better and enables us to enjoy them with some sense of peace.

If there is little that we can to do to change our circumstances, acknowledging our fear enables us to identify means of enduring the situation as best we can. We can stop worrying about what we can’t control.

If we ignore any strong and recurring emotion—fear, grief, anger—it runs us. We make unconscious choices that are not in our best interest and may hurt others. We do not recognize better options. Most folks I know, including me, seem to be doing a lot of this. I can think of several reasons why.

Societal changes have made us more isolated. Being more alone obligates us to push down our fear in two ways.

When we had institutions that nurtured community, we talked and listened to each other more. Doing so enabled us to put our circumstances in perspective, understanding what really wasn’t a threat and what we could do to mange what really was.

And being more isolated makes us feel more vulnerable. We face threats as individuals or nuclear families rather than as a community. In turn, fear separates us from others because we don’t know what to expect from them.

Another reason why we repress our fear is that as we were coming of age, we—particularly men—were often ridiculed when we showed fear. Or worse, others used our fear to take advantage of us. So pushing down fear became an automatic and unconscious protective habit.

This is ironic because one cannot be courageous without being afraid. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is doing the right thing despite one’s fear.

In combat, fear makes one aware of threats and more accurate in calculating their true risks. Repressing fear can make one inattentive, stupid, and dead.

Ignoring fear means that to some extent we are stressed all the time. Humans evolved physical responses to fear to enable us to take immediate action and then relax after the threat is past. But when we live with chronic stress, those physical responses—increased blood pressure and muscle tension, shallower breathing, elevated cortisol levels, and so on—are at work all the time. They do long-term damage to our bodies and shorten our lives.

Being constantly stressed is miserable. One way to manage it is to give up. We may feel taken-for-granted, often unconscious, hopelessness, but it is familiar. Yet that very hopelessness makes us believe that successfully confronting the challenges that frighten us is impossible.

Another way to manage fear is through drugs, alcohol, or some other form of addiction, so that when we feel fear, we numb it out. But again, we never deal with what is making us afraid, and we can do serious damage to ourselves and to those we love.

Perhaps the best way to manage fear is to talk about it, or at least about the conditions that are producing it. Get listened to and listen to others in turn. Put the fear in perspective and identify options. Do what you can do, and stop worrying about what you can’t.

When we try this, we can discover that others share our fears. And there are often scary things that we can do nothing about as individuals, but we can change if we work together. In the end, our best security is each other.