Where Fear Lives
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
“Last summer, I had my worst ever relapse. It left me completely numb below the waist, and ever since then, I’ve been in uninterrupted pain and discomfort.”
That was the reality shared by a social media influencer living with multiple sclerosis — a video I came across one rainy Sunday morning, lying in bed shortly after my MS diagnosis.
And once Instagram sees that you’ve watched a reel, it quickly starts showing you more like it. As I keep scrolling, I’m hit with a stream of stories outlining symptom after symptom in brutal detail.
“I woke up and I couldn’t walk”
“I went blind in one eye”
“I lost the use of my right arm”
Relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis is highly unpredictable. Sudden immune attacks on the brain and spinal cord can strike without warning, causing symptoms that range from mildly inconvenient to devastating.
The thought comes quickly:
The worst could happen to me.
I felt like a ticking bomb, never knowing when the next relapse would come or what it would take with it.
I closed down the app, tossed my phone away, and spent the next hour staring up at the ceiling.
The truth is, I was scared.
We all experience fear about what could happen in the future. If it’s not an MS relapse, then it’s any one of the infinite scenarios that can play out in our minds. It’s the uncertainty of getting older. It’s the sudden diagnosis. A career collapsing. A relationship ending. A global crisis. Or simply the dread that something might go wrong.
The mind is remarkably good at generating catastrophic scenarios.
And it doesn’t take social media for this to happen. Fear could flood in at any moment, bringing uninvited images, narratives, and “what ifs”, leaving us spiralling down into imagined futures. We run the risk of spending so much of our lives fearing what could happen, only to look back and realise we weren’t fully present in the life unfolding right in front of us.
How does fear grip our hearts so fiercely, and how can we loosen its hold?
The Nature of Fear
“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is—fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
The notorious shower scene from the 1960 film Psycho profoundly affected viewers, leaving many afraid to shower when alone in their homes for years after watching it.
Marion Crane walks into the bathroom, takes off her robe, and steps into the shower. There’s no music, only the sound of running water, as the camera pulls back, framing her in the foreground against the translucent shower curtain behind her.
Through the curtain, you see the bathroom door open, as the outline of an unknown figure slowly emerges, watching Marion from the other side. The suspense is slowly built to an unbearable intensity until, suddenly, piercing music begins to play, the curtain is ripped open, revealing the masked intruder, who murders Marion viciously with a knife.
The director of Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock, is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential figures in cinematic history, and, as a result of the techniques he used successfully in his films, is often referred to as the ‘Master of Suspense’. He perfected the art of instilling fear in others.
The thing is, the actual murder sequence in the shower scene isn’t particularly frightening, especially by today’s cinematic standards.
But what is truly unsettling is the build-up to it. The audience knows something could happen, but what drives fear into their hearts is the uncertainty surrounding the if, what, and when.
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” — Alfred Hitchcock
The true nature of this was shown by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Participants were connected to a device that could deliver a painful electric shock and asked to watch a countdown timer on a screen. One group were told they would definitely receive a shock when the timer hit zero. The other group were told they had a 50% chance of receiving one.
Everything else was identical — the length of the countdown, the intensity of the shock.
Remarkably, the group facing a 50% chance of shock reported significantly higher anxiety as the timer ticked down compared to the group who knew for certain they would be shocked. Not knowing if it would happen proved more distressing than knowing it would.
In psychology, this is often called intolerance of uncertainty — a tendency to experience heightened distress when situations are ambiguous or unpredictable.
The difference was in the anticipation. The uncertainty itself intensified the stress, surpassing even the certainty of pain.
The fear was in the anticipation of the unknown.
The Mind’s Default Defences
When faced with uncertainty, we tend to gravitate toward one of two mindsets: optimism or pessimism. Optimists trust that things will be fine, choosing hope over worry. Pessimists, on the other hand, brace for what might go wrong, believing it’s safer to anticipate the worst.
Both approaches, in their own way, are attempts to create a sense of control in situations that feel unpredictable, but which mindset ultimately serves us best?
Vice Admiral James Stockdale was a US Navy pilot and commanded a fighter squadron during the Vietnam War. He became one of the most highly decorated officers in U.S. Navy history, earning 26 personal combat decorations, including four Silver Star medals and the Medal of Honour.
On 9th September 1965, Stockdale led a mission into North Vietnam, and while returning from the target area, he was shot down by anti-aircraft fire. He managed to eject from the aircraft and parachute down into enemy territory, shattering a vertebra in his back, breaking his leg, and dislocating his shoulder in the process.
He was soon captured and imprisoned in the infamous Hoa Lo Prison, where prisoners were notoriously subjected to horrific conditions, including severe torture methods and extreme deprivation. He would spend the next seven years imprisoned there.
Since then, Stockdale has described how prisoners tried to cope with the relentless hardship, unaware of what lay in store for them. In a later interview with Jim Collins, he was asked which of the prisoners fared worst, and his response was:
“Oh, that’s easy. The optimists. The ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
They clung onto hope for a good outcome, even though it was entirely beyond their control, and exposed themselves to profound disappointment when reality failed to meet their expectations.
Over time, the repeated cycle of rising expectation followed by a sudden collapse compounded into a growing, corrosive despair that steadily eroded morale, resilience, and the will to endure.
Blind optimism isn’t the answer.
So if hoping for the best doesn’t work, maybe pessimism starts to look appealing.
Expect the worst, and we’re never caught off guard. Brace for every setback, repeatedly live through every relapse in our minds, and disappointment loses its sting, because nothing bad will ever arrive unexpectedly.
As Thomas Hardy puts it, “Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed.”
But this also falls short, as the worst might not happen. Pessimism doesn’t just prepare us for pain; it asks us to experience it in advance, over and over again, even when reality never catches up. Instead of protecting us, it taxes us with fear of a future that may never arrive.
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” — Mark Twain
And the data doesn’t rescue pessimism either. In a large 18-year longitudinal study, people who consistently expected things to turn out worse than they actually did had the lowest long-term well-being, worse than optimists and far worse than those with accurate expectations.
Chronic pessimism brought sustained psychological distress and lower life satisfaction, suggesting that the burden of dread outweighs the occasional relief of being “pleasantly surprised.” Preparing for the worst, it turns out, can become a way of living in it.
So, when facing events we cannot control, whether it’s a sudden relapse or any other uncertain turn, neither clinging to reassuring predictions nor constantly rehearsing catastrophe in advance truly serves us. Blind hope sets us up for repeated heartbreak when reality defies our expectations. Habitual pessimism burdens us with suffering that may never materialise.
They are unevidenced opinions on what might happen.
They are anticipation, just through different lenses.
Just like the Hoa Lo prisoners predicting their release date, the audience waiting for the reveal behind the curtain, and the participants bracing for the possibility of a shock. The distress builds not from what is happening, but from what we imagine might happen.
Blind optimism and pessimism don’t resolve what we fear; they simply paint it with different colours. Neither diminishes it. Instead, they keep fear at the centre of our attention, feeding it, rehearsing it, allowing it to expand. They are the release that may never come, the knife waiting in the shadows, the uncertainty of pain. They are the rumination of imagined futures, constantly being turned over and over in our present minds.
There must be a better way to cope with fear than just reshaping our expectations of the events we cannot control.
The Last of the Human Freedoms
Stockdale refused to indulge in wishful thinking about a quick release — he rejected the false comfort of blind optimism. Instead, he focused entirely on his true reality and, importantly, on what he could control.
He couldn’t change the duration of his captivity, the severity of punishment, or the uncertainty of the future. But he could control whether he met each moment with panic or principle, despair or defiance, bitterness or bravery.
He established a code of conduct for himself and his fellow prisoners, forming unity and a collective resistance. He implemented a covert communication system, tapping messages through the prison walls, allowing prisoners to exchange information and encouragement despite being kept in solitary confinement. In the face of torture and interrogation, he chose to show strength, resilience, and discipline in the ways that remained available to him.
And that’s what made all the difference.
If the fear is in the unknown, and if that fear is inflated through anticipation of events we have no control over, then the antidote to that fear and anticipation must lie in regaining control of what we do know.
No matter how devastating or unexpected an event is, no matter how severe the relapse, or how unfair the setback that might happen to us, and no matter how that event might make us feel, there will always be one domain that remains in our control.
Our response.
Viktor Frankl, reflecting on the horrors he endured in Auschwitz during the Second World War, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
How we conduct ourselves in the aftermath of any event is, and always will be, in our control.
It’s choosing not to lash out after someone has hurt us, but walking away instead.
It’s not wallowing in self-pity after being fired, but picking ourselves up and looking for the next opportunity.
It’s meeting the twists and turns of getting older with resilience and positivity.
It’s not giving up after a relapse, but living fully within our new reality.
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” — Epictetus
And because our reaction is in our control, then, if something bad happens, we can always know the nature of our response. Studies have shown that when people establish a clear if–then plan in advance (e.g. If something bad happens, then my response will be ‘X’), they report lower levels of anxiety about future negative experiences compared to those who do not.
Psychologists call this implementation-intention — the if-then framework. It allows people to take fear away from what might happen by focusing on what their response will be.
And that is how fear of the unknown is met.
Not in seeing uncertain futures through the lenses of blind hope or pessimism, but in knowing that while events may lie beyond our control, our response to them never does.
Instead of fixating on what might happen, regardless of what it is, it shifts our focus to the confidence that we will meet it with strength, courage, and positivity. It takes the power of fear, fueled by uncertainty, and puts it back in our hands through the certainty of our response. It cuts through the anticipation and grounds us in knowing we will rise to the moment.
It’s not focusing on the weakness we think the relapse might bring, but on the strength we know we have inside of us to prevail regardless.
Naturally, the question follows:
How do I know that, if the thing I fear happens, my response will be enough?
Because you’ve done it before, time and time again.
Each of our lives is marked by countless moments of genuine hardship, which we have then met with resilience and pulled through. We may never have met, but I know for certain that you have encountered difficult times in the past and that you have shown up afterwards.
How do I know? Because you’re still here, reading these words. You’ve persevered through everything life has thrown at you, and you’re still going.
If fear lives in the uncertainty of what lies ahead, then courage is rooted in the proof of what you have overcome before.
So when fear begins to spiral into what-ifs and worst-case scenarios, you don’t need to predict the future to calm it. You only have to trust your response.
You’ve faced hard times before. You’ve adapted. You’ve endured. You’ve carried on. The unknown hasn’t stopped you yet.
It’s knowing that, where fear may live in what might happen, strength lives in how you’ll meet it.
It’s looking fear in the eye and saying:
“Whatever happens, I’ll be ready.”