10 Surprising Signs You May Be Living In Fear
You Can’t Confront Your Fears When You Don’t Recognize Them
One summer, I took swimming lessons when I was six or seven years old. Our final assignment was to jump off the diving board into the deep end of the pool. I desperately wanted to make the dive, but I was utterly terrified to do so — even with the instructor and two lifeguards right there to save me.
The water looked 100-feet deep, and I had no idea what would happen once I plunged beneath the surface, even though I knew I could swim. In my mind, I would begin to bend my legs to spring from the board, but my body remained rooted firmly in place. I was caught in a loop of inaction, propelled by my desire but frozen by my fear.
All the instructor’s coaxing and assurances that I would be okay did nothing to relieve my fear. I was still terrified when I finally jumped off the diving board and into the deep end. It was a thrilling experience, but the fear remained the next several times I stepped onto the diving board and saw the deep water below me.
My sensation of fear on that diving board was palpable and easily recognizable. My heart was beating rapidly, and all my mind could focus on was the danger of the action I was contemplating.
Fear is not always so easy to detect, and it frequently does not feel like we are afraid, when deep down, we actually are.
The mind is a cagey thing; it knows that subtlety is often more effective than the brute force of fear. Fear’s misdirections can cause us to spend our time attempting to fix the symptoms of our anxiety instead of confronting the fear itself. We will find ourselves dealing with reoccurring roadblocks to our happiness and success as long as we fail to recognize and address the underlying anxieties that keep us stuck.
Fortunately, proverbial canaries in the coal mine can point out where fear may be lurking in our lives. Here are the top ten signs that fear is holding you back from the life you deserve:
1. Your schedule is full, and there are never enough hours in the day.
Being busy is a badge of honor amongst many people. Having a full calendar makes us feel important, valued, and in demand. Being overworked is a socially acceptable narrative that can lull us into believing we are living life to the fullest.
However, living a busy lifestyle may actually be a sign of procrastination. Busyness can be a narcotic that dulls your mind. It can prevent you from addressing certain realities in life, such as your impending mortality and the dreams you are postponing.
Suppose an average human lifespan is around 80 years. In that case, we have 960 months to accomplish everything we will achieve and in life. And there is no guarantee we will be alive a day from now, much less that we will live to see a full 960 months or beyond.
Some of the most happy, free, and grateful people are those who have had a close brush with death and thus faced their fear of their mortality head-on. They understand the preciousness of each moment and focus on the things that matter to them the most.
Expiration dates are good. They provide a sense of urgency. But most people are unwilling to grapple with the fact that we have a limited time to live and experience life. They use busyness to run from their fear that time is running out, while doing little or nothing to pursue their desires.
2. Your life is full of distractions, and you don’t regularly spend time meditating, reviewing, reflecting, or planning.
Distractions are the playmates of busyness. The iPhone transformed the cell phone into a pocket computer. Today, Apple and Android devices give us unprecedented access to games, news, and social media platforms wherever we may be.
Most people with 30 seconds or more to kill will pull out their cell phone and check messages, emails, or browse one of many social media platforms.
We unconsciously employ distractions to avoid taking actions outside of our comfort zone, where we may possibly fail. The best way to evade failure is to avoid taking action in the first place. Distractions are a convenient way to entertain ourselves instead of taking steps to enrich our lives.
If you feel uncomfortable spending time in silence or self-reflection, you may be using distractions to stave off the anxiety about the facts that you are not pursuing your dreams and time is not on your side.
3. You frequently doubt that you can achieve your goals or become the person you aspire to be.
Self-doubt is potentially the most straightforward fear to pick out of this list. Engaging with thoughts of doubt prepares us for the possibility of failure and insulates us from the accompanying disappointment. Doubting ourselves sets us up to quit before we can fail or as soon as things get tricky, thereby avoiding failure.
Being able to tell ourselves, “I already knew this would not work out,” prevents us from feeling like a sucker fooled by the hope of a better life.
4. You know for a “fact” that you probably will not achieve the life you want.
Gathering evidence that we are incapable of ultimate success is another tier of self-doubt. Maybe you took some action but did not generate the results you desired. Now you have proof that your doubts about yourself were well-founded.
The thing about certainty is that we often believe we have taken every available action and put forth the maximum effort, but objective reality says otherwise. We took some steps and made some effort, but we didn’t have the immediate success we believed we deserve. We fear that we will always struggle as hard as we have up until this point, and continue to get little in return.
We think that if failure takes this much effort, success must take more exertion than we can give. We fear that the price of success is too great or that we are insufficient for the task. We take action, but fear constrains us from going all-in with the passion and commitment that allows our genuine self-expression to shine through.
You will continue to get mediocre results as long as you hold onto the certainty that you are not enough, and that the price of success is too great to commit fully. These lackluster results confirm and solidify your “knowledge” that you can not have the life you deserve and gives you an out to quit before you succeed.
5. You have resigned yourself to accepting the life you have.
Resignation that you will never shift some aspect of your life is nothing less than submitting to your fears. You have raised the white flag because you are convinced that you are stuck with the life that you have now. Trying to work on this area would be futile, so there is no need to try.
We manifest our fears into our reality when we feel constrained in an area of our life, and we believe that all avenues for action are closed to us. You are not stuck with the life you have, but you must address your fears if you ever want to get unstuck.
6. You haven’t given up on your dreams; they are just on hold for the moment.
Pursuing our passions some time in the future instead of now gives us the benefits of the dream without the need to do the work or the risk of failure. We mistakenly believe that a dream unfulfilled is better than a failed attempt.
“I’m going to start someday” is one of the most harmful lies we can tell ourselves about our ambitions and desires. People on their deathbed cite their failure to pursue the things that were important to them as one of their top regrets, not that they tried something and failed.
It’s hard to admit to yourself that you are never going to pursue your dreams. Unless you have activities scheduled in your calendar and an alarm set for you to take action when the time comes, your “someday” is never going to arrive. You’ll have fear to thank for that.
7. You have a list of legitimate reasons and circumstances for why you do not already have the life you want.
Playing the blame game is one way we avoid responsibility for our inaction or resignation. We do not want to look bad. Listing reasons and giving excuses is how we tell ourselves and others that it’s not our fault that we do not have the life we want. We would already be living our dreams if this thing, that circumstance, or this other person in our life was not preventing us from succeeding.
Everyone has circumstances and the same twenty-four hours in the day. There will always be some legitimate reason you can not have the life you want. The worst part is when you begin to believe your own lies. You can never address the fear that obstructs you if you believe the rationale is real.
8. You spend all your time, attention, and energy getting yourself ready to pursue your dreams.
Over-preparation is the equivalent of standing on the diving board trying to talk yourself into jumping. You will never master diving into the deep end of the pool until you take the plunge. No number of books, online courses, swimming accessories, or mastermind sessions will fully prepare you to leap from the diving board.
There may be an appropriate amount of prep work to engage in before writing your novel, launching your product, or pursuing your dreams. It feels good to prepare and train continuously. You can believe that you are doing the work and making progress. However, over-preparation is a safety blanket that also protects us from failure. If you never release your art to the public, no one can criticize you or judge you. That same safety blanket is also smothering your success.
You must take the actions that produce public results, even if those results might be a failure. You can get helpful coaching from your failures, but you can not be coached if you are sitting on the sidelines. We fear failure when we believe that failing means we are a failure, instead of recognizing that failure is not personal. Failures are something we experience, not something we are.
9. You wish that you were living a different life than your current one.
Wishing you had a different life than the one you are living may be a sign that you are not on the path to achieving your dreams.
What is it that you long for? Who do you wish to be? What do you dream of doing with your time, and what kind of results do you wish you had for yourself?
If you want something, why are you not chasing after it, being the kind of person you desire to be? You will discover the answer is fear once you eliminate the reasons and excuses that immediately leap into your mind.
10. You experience any level of jealousy or envy of successful and happy people.
Beware any time you are envious or jealous of someone instead of being inspired by them. Jealousy is a clear sign you may have mistakenly attributed their success to some trait or circumstance you believe explains their success. You are afraid that you cannot have the same success that they have because you lack those traits or do not have the same circumstances in your life.
The reality is that there is no one formula for success, but there are some common themes. A very few people are born into wealth or have success handed to them. For the remaining 99.9% of us, we have to show up and consistently do the work, fail, rinse, and repeat.
I have interacted with dozens of successful millionaires, some famous, and most of them get offended when people believe success was easy for them. Their path has mirrored my own experience in life — success may look easy on the outside, but it takes enormous work, sacrifice, and effort.
Call a spade a spade.
Some people are afraid to admit they are ever afraid. They would rather live with a life of reasons and excuses than concede their fears. Acknowledging your fears and facing them is a sign of strength, not weakness.
I wish I could tell you that there is a way to overcome fear without facing it. Talking through the concerns with others can help you see the way you are awfulizing the possible failures. But in the end, you must make the leap on your own.
With enough jumps, I discovered that I enjoyed diving into the deep end of the pool. I had to face my fear and take action while my heart pounded, and my brain had no idea how things would turn out.
Most of the potential failures we face in life will not result in a possible drowning, but they are just as frightening. You will have to take action before you are ready, and you will likely experience the body sensations of fear the first few times you are in motion.
Success requires that you take action while you are afraid, not that you overcome your fears and then take action. Only when you recognize the many ways that fear masks itself can you begin to address it.
