What does it really mean that there is a thin line between fear and excitement

I had a conversation the other day with someone who is going through a career change. 

As the conversation was ending, the person revisited an earlier statement I had made. He said I stated change is exciting. I stepped in and said, I think you may have misunderstood me. Typically, when I talk about change, I speak to people about overcoming fear and anxiety, not running towards the excitement of possibility. Due to personal experiences, I typically go glass half empty on change, but I know I need to change that perspective.  If you were to visualize how I typically think about emotional reactions to change it would look like this and implies you make a choice between two emotional reactions that sit at the extreme ends of a spectrum. Picking the right one or perishing is implied in this view.

He quipped back that fear and excitement are adjacent emotions. And that there is a thin line between them. 

The conversation came to a natural end with no further talk about fear versus excitement during times of change. Later that evening, however, when I had some downtime, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said. 

Upon further review

During my reflections, I got caught up on the second part of his statement “Fear and excitement are adjacent, and there is a thin line between them”, focusing on this caused me to change my view a bit. It would now look like this.

I conceded that you could remove the distance between the emotions, but you still make a choice to either be on the side of fear or the side of excitement. It’s still a one-time choice between opposite sides of a coin, even though they are closer they still sit in opposition with a barrier between.

I dug further. I don’t know that adjacent emotions are a real thing, but if you do a Google search, you can find articles about how fear and excitement produce the same physical reactions in our bodies. 

• Your heart races faster,

• you feel butterflies in your stomach,

• your breathing intensifies,

• you feel a sense of heightened sensitivity as your eyes get wider and your limbs shake with anticipation. 

These physical effects are the same for either fear or excitement. 

The difference on if we experience excitement or fear is in how we interpret the physical effects. Our body produces a standard response to the stimulus of change, and it is our interpretation of the physical effects that determines if we are excited or afraid. We control if we are experiencing excitement or fear. 

Revisiting the visual. 

This means my visual was really wrong. It is more accurate to visualize choosing between fear and excitement, especially during times of change, like this.

You will move between excitement and fear based on how you interpret the physical sensations related to the change each time you experience them. It isn’t a one-time choice; instead, you have a series of opportunities to choose between fear or excitement. 

In other words, excitedly moving towards change isn’t the result of a one-time choice to pick excitement over fear at the beginning; it is achieved (or not achieved) at multiple points along the journey. You will ultimately feel overall excitement about the change when you consistently choose to embrace the reasons to be excited. But you don’t have to get it right from the beginning in fear of missing out on getting excited along the journey. Because each time you experience the physical sensations you get to choose how to interpret them.

So what

This matters because choosing excitement makes it easier to embrace the change and will energize you toward taking the steps necessary to achieve success during the shift. Here are things you can do to land on the side of excitement more often and ultimately succeed during times of change. 

• Find the WIIFM. What are the benefits to you of the change? Why are those benefits important to you? 

• Use your personalized benefit statements to motivate you to educate and train yourself on the new behaviors you should adopt so you can achieve those benefits. 

• Celebrate incremental success (small wins) as you grow through the change.  Focusing on what you can do instead of what you can’t do yet. 

• Engage in a healthy internal dialogue where you allow yourself to process how you feel. 

Whether you are excitedly running towards the change or fearfully running away from it, change creates loss. Loss creates grief. Grief creates emotions. Emotions Will surface and can derail your progress. More on that in this article. You must learn to experience your emotions in healthy ways. 

Conclusion

Our bodies will experience the same physical reactions to any change. Still, we get to choose the mindset that will dictate how we interpret those physical sensations, either as fear or excitement. This isn’t a one-time choice. It is a continuous process of choosing to interpret the physical sensations as an indication we are moving toward something exciting instead of indicating we should run away in fear.