The Plane vs Car Dilemma
Take a moment to consider what I call the Plane vs Car Dilemma: people are more afraid of flying than they are of travelling by car, and yet flying is statistically much safer. Even people who are aware of these statistics and believe them still feel anxious during turbulence, yet they’ll experience no anxiety driving on a bumpy road.
If you read Daniel Kahnemann’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, or study cognitive biases and logical fallacies, you’ll quickly learn that people are – according to Kahnemann – “bad at statistical thinking”.
This is why casinos stay in business. The games clearly favour the house, and so if you play long enough you’ll lose it all, and yet people flock to these money-traps every second of the day. People buy lottery tickets despite knowing you’re more likely to be hit by lightning multiple times than you are to take home the big prize.
I see this bad-thinking dilemma happen with my clients all the time. In thousands of different ways, they consider themselves to be at high risk when statistically they’re safe (e.g. fear of rejection), and conversely consider themselves safe when they put their lives at risk (e.g. drinking alcohol).
But I think Kahnemann may have been mistaken…
Your brain isn’t stupid, just confused
I don’t think it’s a problem with not understanding how statistics works, i.e. it’s not that we’re irrational. It’s more that we are working with bad data.
What we must always remember is that the mind has difficulty knowing the difference between something it witnessed (real) and something it imagined (fiction). It doesn’t really know the difference between a bad outcome that actually happened vs the one you imagined happening, so it counts both of them as equal evidence.
When someone is afraid of flying, it’s not because they’ve crashed in real life, but because they’ve crashed in their mind many hundreds of times. So their fear of flying actually makes sense when they believe they’ve only had a 1% success rate when it comes to flying. The real flights were fine, but for every real flight they also imagined 100 bad flying experiences. That’s a terrible ratio. They feel relieved and lucky when the plane lands safely because it actually seems to be a rare event.
Clients tell me they “always” get rejected by girls, but in real life don’t even ask women out! How can they get rejected without asking? It’s because they’re imagining rejections every time they have an opportunity. These men actually believe women are constantly shutting them down, when in real life they aren’t even taking the risk.
You feel like certain ventures are high risk – flying, asking someone out, starting a business – and yet you’ll struggle to back these claims with hard evidence. Most flights land safely, most rejections cause zero injuries, most business start ups don’t end in bankruptcy. You react to these mostly harmless ideas as if you’re jumping off a cliff without a parachute. They often go wrong in your mind, but in the real world they’re safer than eating a chicken sandwich.
Radical Rationality
I can’t say this works for everyone, but for me the solution is in radically rationality.
By this I mean I attack my bullshit data like a ruthless pitbull lawyer defending their client. Rather than automatically trusting the assumptions and fears that pop into my mind, I turn against them as if they’re an enemy, debating and arguing with them, and most importantly: demanding they prove their case with evidence.
This is all about choosing which neural pathways will be reinforced: fictional, or rational? Do I succumb to the temptation to just believe the horseshit stories my mind says about likelihood of harm, or do I challenge all claims with skepticism, and rudely dismiss anything that is clearly a lie?
When your mind says, “Don’t do it, it’s dangerous”, your first response should be, “Oh really? Prove it!”
Your mind says: “The plane will crash”. Dive on this with a barrage of questions: Which plane, exactly? We don’t even know yet. Where’s the evidence our specific plane is faulty? How many flights have you been on that didn’t land safely? How many times have you flown without crashing? What’s your success rate when it comes to surviving plane crashes? 100% successful? That’s better than our car driving history. Why are we walking about this?
The rule of 100
You can also demand respect for scientific methods, particularly sample sizes.
When your mind says, “Don’t ask that girl out, she’ll just reject you”, you can respond with, “OK assuming only 1% of girls find me attractive, how do I know for sure she isn’t the exception until I ask? I need to ask out at least 100 girls before I can be sure that no one likes me, so how many have I asked out lately? ” If the answer is less than 100, then you tell your brain, “We need more evidence, the test hasn’t been completed”.
I hear people say, “There are no jobs available.” In nearly every case, they’ve sent out less than 10 applications. Come back when you’ve sent out at least 100, and you’ve tried a range of approaches, like different resume formats, cover letter ideas, calling the hiring director personally, etc.
Repetition is key
Challenging your thoughts once or twice won’t make much of a difference. You have years of reinforcing bullshit beliefs to undo. You need to constantly challenge your thoughts until this becomes your default response.
Think of it like a scale. Every time you entertain an imagined catastrophe, you add a pessimistic stone to the delusional side of the scale. Every time you challenge a thought and weigh up the factual evidence, you add a stone to the rational side of the scale. To achieve a tipping point, you need to challenge yourself more than 50% of the time. Much more, in fact, because your brain gives more weight to pain than to neutral facts.
Reality vs imagination
To escape this trap of imagined disaster, you must accept a hard but undeniable fact: your mind lies to you.
It lies to you a lot.
A thought is not true. You can imagine a plane crashing, but the likelihood of it actually happening is nearly 0%. Each plane has 3-4 redundancies for every system, meaning that even when there’s a fault somewhere, there’s always a back up. Planes can fly with only a single engine functioning. Pilots never fly into storms or dangerous weather unless forced to by emergency – the plane autopilot won’t even let them do something stupid.
Your mind says people won’t like you, but you’ve never surveyed these people to find out. And your mind doesn’t acknowledge the truth: it doesn’t matter if people don’t like you, you don’t need them to! 99.999999% of the world’s population don’t even know you exist and yet you’re completely unharmed by this massive “rejection”.
Lions and earthquakes and ebola viruses are objectively harmful, yet you spend almost no time at all worrying about them. Planes and rejections and male pattern baldness cause no measurable harm, yet you repeatedly imagine these things as life-threatening risks.
Your imagination is great for creativity, but absolutely useless when it comes to measuring risk. You don’t need imagination to plan ahead when you have access to real life data and stats.
Empirical faith
Try to apply what I call empirical faith – trust in facts more than imagination. If the stats say the plane is safe, get on the plane. If the evidence shows that getting ‘rejected’ just means someone saying “No thanks” and walking away, then go tell that person you think they’re cute. Act according to the evidence, even when it feels like a leap of faith.
And always, always, always treat your mind like a manipulative liar who doesn’t know shit. Argue with it like you’re in the comments section of an obnoxious YouTube video. Pull out studies, statistics and proof, and counter your mind’s claims by pointing out that it’s using hypotheticals, making stuff up, overreacting to a clickbait news article, and basically talking out of its ass.
Do this consistently enough, and you’ll eventually feel the scales tip. Distrusting your mind will become your first default reaction, and feel compelled to find out the truth through bold, curious experimentation.
This, my friends, is the formula to fearlessness.