Stop using Fear to Motivate Yourself

Photo by Hamed Taha on Unsplash

One of the most common problems I encounter with clients is that they’re using fear to motivate themselves. Put simply, that’s what you’re doing when you tell yourself horror stories about how catastrophic the outcome will be if you don’t work much harder and perform much better in the future.

For example, “I absolutely must pass this exam, because failing is not an option for me!” Many people are convinced that this is the only, or at least the most efficient, way to “get things done”, as they often put it. However, in some cases it can become problematic and may even backfire. Those people who tell themselves they absolutely have to achieve certain things, or must not fail in their endeavours, are often the ones most obviously struggling, and driving themselves crazy. So what’s going wrong?

The desperate need to achieve success can lead to rigid demands such as:

I must work far harder!

I should never make mistakes!

I always need to be better than everyone else!

I have to succeed!

My work has to be perfect, or at least meet an exceptionally high standard!

How are you going to force yourself to work ten times harder, though, never make mistakes, be better than everyone, and always succeed? That sounds pretty demanding, right?

“I have to be terrified of failure, if I want to be motivated enough to achieve success.”

Well, the crudest and most obvious solution would arguably be to put the fear of God in yourself by absolutely drumming it into your brain that any sort of failure would just be an unmitigated disaster! If you can convince yourself that the alternative to working like crazy would be suffering an unbearable catastrophe, then you’re going to feel terrified of failure and you’ll work your backside off to avoid it happening, right? You might even believe: I have to be terrified of failure, if I want to be motivated enough to achieve success.

You rot your life away and what do they give?
You're only killing yourself to live! — Black Sabbath, Killing Yourself to Live

Telling yourself that you must achieve some goal often goes hand-in-hand therefore with telling yourself that it would be unthinkably bad if you failed. We hype up the costs of failure for ourselves by focusing as much as possible on the worst that could possibly happen, replaying that clip in our mind, and exaggerating the probability and severity of the worst-case scenario. We can also amplify our fear of failure by downplaying our ability to cope with the consequences. “What if I fail? That would be awful! How would I cope?” Psychologists call this catastrophizing.

If we catastrophize the consequences of failure, we can sneakily motivate ourselves to try harder by, well, making ourselves petrified of failure. The fear causes our bodies to produce adrenaline and other stress hormones and that gives us a rush of nervous energy, which it’s tempting to use in order to “get things done”. It’s like constantly revving the engine of your car. Already, you might be thinking this doesn’t seem like a healthy long-term strategy to employ in life. You’d be surprised how common it is for people to do precisely this, though. We all do it to some extent.

It’s a foolproof plan, right? What could possibly go wrong? Well, perhaps beating yourself relentlessly with the stick of abject fear in order to get yourself to work could have some drawbacks further down the line. First of all, though, does it at least work in the heat of the moment? Well, yes and no. Focusing on how catastrophic failure would be will, for sure, get your heart pumping. It will release adrenaline, which will give you a surge of energy and motivation. We also tend naturally to focus our attention narrowly on perceived threats, so you’ll find it easier to concentrate at first. As the writer and wit, Dr. Samuel Johnson, notoriously put it:

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Scaring the living daylights out of yourself is certainly one way to get up and out of bed early in the morning, in order to get some work done. Focused attention, and the adrenaline rush, are the main benefits of this approach to life. You have to ask yourself, though: is it doing you more harm than good?

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The Downside

Those are typically the perceived advantages of using fear to motivate yourself. It’s worth asking whether they’re real or illusory, though. Does it really motivate you to work harder or only feel like it’s doing so? Do you actually do better work this way or get more accomplished? Are the benefits, such as the burst of adrenaline, temporary or durable — exactly how long do they last?

Well, let’s get specific… The initial surge of adrenaline following exposure to our fears normally lasts less than one hour. In reality, when it’s triggered by worrying or anticipatory fear, rather than facing our fears in reality, it’s usually much shorter, say, less than half an hour — and sometimes so fleeting it may only last a few minutes. The adrenal glands release the hormone into your bloodstream, it’s then actively broken down by your liver and kidneys, so that the body can return to homeostasis, and the remnants are excreted in your urine.

After the initial adrenaline rush, if we continue to perceive an ongoing threat, the acute response turns into the chronic stress response as adrenaline fades and cortisol starts to take over. This basically just makes you feel rough, rather than actually motivating you to work harder. In fact, fatigue, lethargy, brain fog, poor concentration, and a loss of enthusiasm tend to follow as consequences of chronic stress.

In other words, you can’t just keep triggering the anxiety response all day long. You have roughly half an hour or so of adrenaline each time, if you’re lucky, followed by its more toxic consequences. You can try focusing on the worst-case scenario later in the day but doing so will fall foul of the law of diminishing returns because your body responds by inhibiting its reaction to adrenaline. In short, if you keep trying to fire your adrenal glands, by repeatedly worrying about failure, you're asking for a surge of power from a system that has now placed itself in damage control mode.

I have some more bad news for you: your feelings aren’t entirely under your control. So the adrenaline boost you get from fear is likely to fluctuate depending on all sorts of arbitrary factors, from how well you slept, to what sort of lunch you had, and perhaps even the weather. Emotions are a notoriously fickle and unreliable source of motivation. You’ll go from being a raging workaholic one day to sulking under the bedcovers the next because to some extent your feelings come and go, well, whenever they feel like it.

Just to add to that, it’s well-established that anxiety tends to abate naturally over time through a process called emotional habituation. So the surge of energy you get from worrying about specific problems, even if it works okay at first, is likely to wear off over time if you do it too often. Normally that’s a good thing — it’s a natural and highly adaptive feature of emotional processing. But if you’re hooked on adrenaline, and believe that you need fear to avoid catastrophic failure, it’s going to feel like withdrawal, or at least as though you’re somehow vulnerable unless you relentlessly keep your guard up and keep working harder. You’re going to have to get creative in your worrying, forcing your mind to keep circling around different aspects of same problem, or jumping from one problem to another, just to keep getting your adrenaline fix. Genuinely successful people, in fact, don’t rely on their feelings, and certainly not anxiety, to get work done. They use their goals and values to provide a more stable and consistent source of motivation.

One of the difficulties with using anxiety as a source of motivation is that, apart from the fact that it fluctuates naturally, anxiety can be alleviated in many different ways. So we are provided with endless shortcuts that allow us to relieve our anxiety without accomplishing our goal. These range from drinking whisky to reassurance seeking, from distraction to taking a nap, from sex to rationalizing the problem. There are countless opportunities for us to “cheat” by temporarily damping down or neutralizing our anxious arousal. The more you rely on fear, in other words, the more appealing procrastination become, over time, and the more compulsively you may find yourself avoiding work.

Next, it’s worth asking yourself what the costs or disadvantages of using fear to motivate yourself might be.

What effect does it have on your mental and physical health?

How might it interfere with or impair your performance at work?

What impact could it have on your relationships — with friends, family, colleagues, and even strangers?

How does it affect your self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-image?

What effect does living this way have on your daily routine and overall quality of life?

Crucially, you should consider not only the short-term consequences of using anxiety to motivate yourself but also the longer-term. How is it likely to work out for you in the long-run? Weeks, months, and even years from now, where is this strategy probably going to lead you?

Finally, and most importantly in my experience, you should ask yourself whether motivating yourself in this way might, ironically, backfire on you by achieving the complete opposite of what you want. Like throwing gasoline on a fire in order to put it out, could it be that your solution is actually just making your problem even worse?

Could it be that using anxiety to motivate yourself backfires by interfering with your ability to focus on certain ideas and perform certain tasks? For example, does it make you distracted or physically and mentally tense in ways that harm your performance?

Could the stress make it harder for you to handle complex tasks or find more nuanced solutions to problems? Does it make your thinking and behaviour become more rigid and inflexible in ways that undermine your ability to think clearly and adapt to the challenges you face?

Might this strategy backfire increasingly if you rely on it too much and for too long? Could an extreme aversion to failure cause you to worry, procrastinate, avoid thinking about problems, and put off important tasks? What if all that adrenaline leads to fatigue over time and, eventually, to burnout?

One of the most powerful ways to challenge this type of pattern is to focus your attention on the insight that your fear of failure may actually be the very thing that’s preventing you from succeeding. Trying too hard to succeed, is a sure road to failure. It’s the opposite of what you want. The more you want to succeed, the more you should be challenging your rigid demands and fear of failure because, ironically, they’re precisely what’s standing in your way.

Photo by Sean Benesh on UnsplashThe Alternative

How do other people manage to succeed without using fear to motivate themselves? Stop and really think about that for a while. Some of the most successful people in the world are able to do without this strategy. Not everyone is driven by anxiety. The main advantages of a non-anxious attitude are that you’ll be more flexible and adaptive. Someone who is unafraid of failure will be able to accept what initially feels like a setback or looks like failure, and take it in their stride. They’re willing and able to go one step back, if it allows them to take two steps forward. What if that is precisely the secret of their success?

Imagine a great writer or musician who is able to endure criticism because they know that it’s inevitable when you create something truly original. What about a great general who is willing to sacrifice positions, and make tactical retreats from some battles, in order to win the war. Boxers may take some punches in order to win the fight. In chess, you have to be willing to sacrifice some pieces to win the game. To get through a maze, you might have to be willing to backtrack sometimes in order to find the way to the exit. A successful businessman may be one who is willing to take certain risks and accept certain losses, in order to secure bigger goals. How will a student ever learn if they’re not willing to make mistakes? If you are rigidly perfectionistic and terrified of losing, you will be unable to accept temporary defeats, or the appearance of failure, in order to achieve longer-term success.

A better philosophy would be one that says “I really love doing well and succeeding, it’s really important to me, but setbacks aren’t the end of the world, I can cope with them, and they can even be a positive thing if I can learn from them.” Ask yourself whether you could get all the benefits of using anxiety to motivate yourself, with none of the costs. Rewarding yourself for progress and taking pride in your work is a much healthier and more flexible way of motivating yourself in the long-run.

Perhaps most importantly, look deeply into your heart and ask yourself what your core values are. What sort of person do you want to be? What do you want your life to stand for? Perhaps you value wisdom, kindness, fairness, courage, or self-discipline. Then ask yourself whether using anxiety to get things done is consistent with your own values — is this the type of person I want to be in life? What would you do instead, then, if you were acting more consistently in accord with your true values?

Decatastrophizing

Finally, it’s worth asking yourself whether “failure” would necessarily be as awful as you like to assume. Are you just frightening yourself unnecessarily by catastrophizing failure?

Could you be exaggerating the severity of the problem?

Might you be exaggerating the probability of the worst happening?

Are you underestimating your ability to cope, survive, and even learn from your failures?

How many of the things you’ve worried about over the years actually happened and were as bad as you assumed they would be? Learn to view problems as opportunities. How else would you become stronger and more resilient if not by experiencing setbacks and learning to get through them?

Ask yourself bluntly, “So what if I fail? Would it really be the end of the world?” How bad would it really be on a scale from 0-100, where 100 is, say, global nuclear apocalypse, genocide, or maybe suffering the most extreme form of medieval torture? On the scale of worst things imaginable, where is failing an exam, or failing to deliver on time for a contract at work? Probably nowhere near the top, right? And “this too shall pass” — it won’t last forever…

But you can go even further. You could make an effort to counteract your catastrophizing bias by focusing on the positive aspects of failure. You may quickly be surprised to realize something — they’re usually easy to spot. If you approach failures in the right way, as temporary setbacks, not as problems but as challenges or opportunities, you will cope well, and may even grow wiser and stronger as a result. In fact, how else do you think people become resilient? By living in luxury and always succeeding at everything they do? You need some problems, otherwise, frankly, you would die of boredom. See them for what they are, though. Not “catastrophes” but the sort of obstacles that countless other people have also faced, coped with, and survived, throughout their lives.

Conclusion

It’s very common for people to use fear to motivate themselves. It just doesn’t work very well, though, especially in the long run. So why do we do it? Probably because we learn this bad habit from our parents and teachers as children, when they try to frighten us into trying harder at school, and so on. Sometimes it happens because we experience a traumatic setback, and we use the memory to try to scare ourselves into working extra-hard so that it never happens again. Mostly, though, we use the fear of failure to make ourselves do things because it’s so easy. In the art of motivation, it’s the quick and dirty solution. It’s basically the crudest and most simplistic coping strategy at our disposal.

It’s also a bit addictive. We become hooked on the short-term relief that comes from working harder when it temporarily alleviates the pain of anxiety, which we inflicted on ourselves in the first place. It’s sticking a bandaid on a self-inflicted wound. There are better ways of building motivation, such as positive reinforcement and connecting our actions with our core values. They start from the realization, though, that coming to rely on fear actually does us more harm than good.

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