Understanding The Gift of Fear

I first came across security specialist Gavin de Becker on Sam Harris’ podcast back in 2017. De Becker is an authority on predicting violence, particularly to celebrities and high-profile people who are at higher risk. I did not take the time to read the book back then, but more recently I came across de Becker again on Joe Rogan’s podcast and it led me to queue The Gift of Fear in my Audible account. I am now a psychotherapist and thus I have a particular interest in understanding different perspectives on the purpose of fear, anxiety, and worry, so I decided to give it a shot and I am happy to share that it was well worth the listen.

The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, was first published in 1997, but it now has a newer 2021 version, with a foreword by De Becker which acknowledges that the world has many obvious technological changes but the fundamental message is just as relevant as it was then. What particularly stoked my interest was the title, The Gift of Fear, since as a psychotherapist specializing in anxiety disorders, I am usually trying to help people reduce their fear. The thesis is essentially that we ought to embrace our intuition when assessing dangerous situations, and that our (socially reinforced) tendency to minimize or deny our intuition can lead us to remain in dangerous situations that can and will cause us harm. His defense of intuition is grounded in the idea that our unconscious is processing far more information with greater speed than our conscious mind could ever handle. Thus, our fear response can be used as a kind of superpower when it is decoupled from anxiety/worry and when we are taught to look for what he calls pre-incident indicators, such as someone who gives us too many details, makes unsolicited promises, or discounts our use of the word “no”. De Becker usefully defines fear, anxiety, and worry, as they are frequently used interchangeably in common vernacular. True fear, he explains, is involuntary, almost always linked to pain and or death, and only occurs in the face of present danger. Alternatively, he describes anxiety as always resulting from uncertainty (thus it is never about the present moment) and that a remedy is to reduce our uncertainty. Lastly, he distinguishes worry as voluntary and something that we do because it has a secondary gain, such as a way to avoid change, a way to avoid admitting our powerlessness in a situation, or a way to show how much we love someone. He puts it most succinctly here:

The relationship between real fear and worry is analogous to the relationship between pain and suffering. Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life. Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary components of life. (p. 330)

This is a useful way to set things up, my only pushback is that attempts to respond to anxiety by reducing uncertainty can at times be an ineffective and even counterproductive strategy, and doing this in excess is an underlying driver and symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It makes sense that de Becker recommends this strategy since he has made a career out of using it to save people’s lives, but I would have liked a little more discussion of the limits of prediction and the importance of accepting uncertainty to live a fulfilling life. Nonetheless, some of his advice on combating worry is quite helpful: de Becker recommends exploring the themes underlying the worry more deeply so we can take any necessary action and determine how to spend our time most wisely. For example, his analysis of the fear of public speaking is quite interesting:

Surveys have shown that ranking very close to the fear of death is the fear of public speaking. Why would someone feel profound fear, deep in his or her stomach, about public speaking, which is so far from death? Because it isn’t so far from death when we link it. Those who fear public speaking actually fear the loss of identity that attaches to performing badly, and that is firmly rooted in our survival needs. For all social animals, from ants to antelopes, identity is the pass card to inclusion, and inclusion is the key to survival. If a baby loses its identity as the child of his or her parents, a possible outcome is abandonment. For a human infant, that means death. As adults, without our identity as a member of the tribe or village, community or culture, a likely outcome is banishment and death. (p. 324).

This seems accurate, as it makes sense of why people experience the fear of public speaking so strongly. I could see how unpacking the fear this way could be helpful to people, as it provides validation that the scenario does pose some risk (damage to our reputation) while also allowing us to consider if we may be overestimating that risk while underestimating the potential gains (improved reputation, increased social cohesion, etc…). When we do this, we can consider whether this fear is actually serving us or whether our time and energy would be better spent on other matters.

As it applies to therapy, what I found most interesting is his assertion that people who are chronically anxious (stuck in a fight/flight response) are actually less able to detect genuine threats since they do not experience a shift from a baseline of calm. In other words, we are the most safe when we have a baseline of calm since we then find the experience of fear unmistakeable and listen to it appropriately. I find this clinically useful, as often client resistance to reducing anxiety is that they worry it will result in being more vulnerable to harm and unsafe activities. 

De Becker does a nice job of striking a balanced perspective in assessing the state of the world and an answer to the question, how afraid should we be? He claims that the world is neither an unsafe or safe place, but that we should find ways to work through chronic worry/anxiety so that we can better tune in to when our body is genuinely in a state of fear. He makes the unassailable point that if we watch the local news, we will be led to believe the world is much more dangerous than it actually is, since news reflecting the actual safety of the world would get poor ratings. He gives a very useful reminder that genuine fear is actually a very short-lasting signal that we should absolutely listen to. As an example, he describes a man who used his fear to successfully respond to a shark attack, in that fear is what allowed him to drop everything and attack the shark’s eye, which led to his escape. De Becker makes the point that worry would have done no good in this situation, and likely would have even prevented the fear response that saved his life. 

Given his multi-decades long work in predicting and preventing violence for major celebrities and political figures, de Becker has a valuable perspective. I found the book useful as a psychotherapist, as I can use it to remind clients that their fear response does have some purpose, but that worry and anxiety often lead to distorted thinking and fundamentally make life less enjoyable without truly protecting us. It also serves as a helpful expression that different people have different problems, and that often psychopathology results not merely from the presence of something, but from too much or too little of it. Many of the clients I work with suffer from excessive fear, while we can all think of people in our lives who would be well-served by listening more closely to it. 

P.S. I consumed most of his book on Audible, and I recommend this method if you are short on time, as de Becker not only writes well but has an engaging voice that makes for easy listening.