Fear is the second basic emotion. It runs through everything: the whole world is woven from fear and adorned with joy.

It’s older than thought, an alert system wired into our biology over millions of years. Even a bacterium has a built-in mechanism that steers it away from harm. No brain needed. Self-preservation comes first; everything else is built on top of it.

It’s a protection system. Little kids are afraid of the dark, and then one day the fear just goes away. Long ago, it kept them close to the fire at night.

The alarm takes a shortcut that bypasses the cortex. You jump back from a stick on the trail before you realize it isn’t a snake. The cortex catches up later and sorts it out.

Fear rises from the deepest layers of the nervous system, from the ancient brain, and on the way up it mixes with other signals and picks up new hues.

Fear takes on different forms. It becomes greed — wanting more. It becomes envy — wanting what others have. It becomes jealousy — guarding what you think is yours.

It pulls us back, limiting our options. It whispers into our ears:

— You’re not going to make it. It’s too risky. They will laugh. They will judge you. You don’t need it. Everything is fine.

And instead of creating our lives, we sit with an anxious heart, literally paralyzed by imaginary troubles of the unknown waves yet to come.

We sit suspended between what’s to come and what’s already been, wanting control over things we can’t predict or reverse.

Where else does anxiety come from? We walk into the future backwards. We don’t trust what we can’t see. And the past feels real even though it’s gone, and it keeps wrapping itself around our mood.

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

— an unnamed old man, a 1910 newspaper (usually credited to Mark Twain)

People with chronic anxiety were asked to write down every worry for ten days, then check back a month later. Ninety-one out of a hundred never came true.

In the absence of real fear, we construct more complex emotions rooted in it. Greed is the fear of loss, jealousy is the fear of not being loved, and envy is the fear of not being “enough”. In the end, we’re afraid of fear itself.

The voice of reason

Real fear is a hungry bear stepping out of the bushes. This one is made up and lives in your head: what if something goes wrong? You only notice it when it lets go. Until then it feels like the right way to live: careful, nothing too crazy. The voice of reason, supposedly.

Joy is who you are. Fear is who you became.

You’re awesome enough to be careful without the anxiety.

In May, on a course in Phuket, I finally broke through the layer of fear that had been wrapped around me. I just let go: whatever happens, happens. I didn’t fight the water, didn’t fight anything. Forty-one and a half meters, easy, and I could have gone deeper. My mind switched off and stopped sending panic signals. For the first time I could feel everything going on in my body. I was just flying down.

We cry wolf, but the wolf never comes.

But the body braces for every cry. What does that do to the brain?