Some­times, life scares me. The deci­sions I can make, or have to make. Not the ones where the risk is rea­son­ably easy to cal­cu­late. What will this cost me? How much time will it take? What hap­pens if it goes wrong, and can I deal with the fall­out? Those aren’t the deci­sions I mean. I mean the ones where get­ting it wrong could have seri­ous con­se­quences. The ones that could put rela­tion­ships at risk, or destroy them. That could affect my health for years to come. The ones I might look back on years lat­er and realise that this deci­sion got in the way of liv­ing a ful­filled life. Those are the deci­sions that scare me.

Late­ly, I keep com­ing across a par­tic­u­lar piece of advice on social media for exact­ly these sit­u­a­tions: If you have sev­er­al paths to choose from, take the one that scares you most. Sounds sim­ple. Even con­vinc­ing. After all, sure­ly the path we’re most afraid of must be the one where the most growth is wait­ing for us. But is it real­ly that simple?

It makes intu­itive sense that some­thing can be tempt­ing and threat­en­ing at the same time. Psy­chol­o­gy calls this an approach-avoid­ance con­flict. The poten­tial reward pulls us one way – and the greater the reward, the stronger the pull – while the threat cre­ates fear and pulls us the oth­er way. The impor­tant part is this: fear doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly count as an argu­ment against an option. It can also arise, and become stronger, pre­cise­ly because there’s so much at stake.

Then there’s the fact that we tend to feel par­tic­u­lar­ly torn when option A is famil­iar, while option B is new and unknown. The unknown cre­ates uncer­tain­ty, which can turn into fear or ampli­fy the fear that’s already there. And our minds have a neat lit­tle trick for sit­u­a­tions like this: choose option A, and those uncom­fort­able feel­ings imme­di­ate­ly start to fade. Researchers call this »expe­ri­en­tial avoid­ance« – the ten­den­cy to shape our behav­iour around avoid­ing uncom­fort­able thoughts and feelings.

Fear and risk are not the same thing

Look­ing at the mech­a­nisms that dri­ve our behav­iour puts that piece of advice from the begin­ning in a dif­fer­ent light. So let’s rewrite it. Some­thing like this: »If the main rea­son you’re reject­ing an option is that it scares you, it’s worth ask­ing whether you’re avoid­ing a risky choice – or sim­ply an uncom­fort­able feeling.«

There’s anoth­er prob­lem with that well-mean­ing advice: it seems to treat two com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent things as if they were the same. Fear and risk. If I’m afraid of speak­ing in front of a large crowd, over­com­ing that fear might gen­uine­ly help me grow. But if I’m con­sid­er­ing putting my entire life sav­ings into a project, that scares me too – except here, the poten­tial con­se­quences are much eas­i­er to cal­cu­late. I still don’t know whether the project will fail, but I know pret­ty damn well what I stand to lose. So it always mat­ters what pur­pose the fear is serving.

Let’s come back to some­thing I men­tioned ear­li­er: my fear of look­ing back and regret­ting a deci­sion. This is where some of the most inter­est­ing find­ings from the research come in. »Antic­i­pat­ed regret«, as psy­chol­o­gy calls it, turns out to be any­thing but straight­for­ward. In one 2016 study, researchers looked at the deci­sions of 108 peo­ple. For around 70 per­cent of upcom­ing deci­sions, par­tic­i­pants antic­i­pat­ed that they might lat­er regret their choice. In real­i­ty, regret fol­lowed only around 30 per­cent of the deci­sions they actu­al­ly made.

And although antic­i­pat­ed regret has a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on the choic­es we make, it doesn’t – as you might expect – always make us less coura­geous. Depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion, it can increase or decrease our will­ing­ness to take risks. And things get more com­pli­cat­ed still. More recent research sug­gests that con­scious­ly antic­i­pat­ing regret can make peo­ple more risk-averse while at the same time increas­ing how sat­is­fied they are with their deci­sion after­wards.

So is the real point sim­ply to make more con­scious decisions?

Yes and no. Maybe, in the end, it’s less about choos­ing con­scious­ly rather than uncon­scious­ly – intu­ition can play an impor­tant role too. What seems to mat­ter more is that we don’t mis­take fear for infor­ma­tion with­out stop­ping to exam­ine it. If the usu­al advice is, »If you have sev­er­al paths to choose from, take the one that scares you most,« a smarter ver­sion might be: »If fear is influ­enc­ing your deci­sion, find out what that fear is actu­al­ly try­ing to tell you.«

Courage is not letting fear make the decision

And this is where con­scious deci­sion-mak­ing does come back into the pic­ture. Not because rea­son is good and emo­tion is bad. Emo­tions are an essen­tial part of good deci­sion-mak­ing. The well-known exper­i­ments by Anto­nio Dama­sio and col­leagues showed this in patients with dam­age to the ven­tro­me­di­al pre­frontal cor­tex: impaired pro­cess­ing of emo­tion­al sig­nals can go hand in hand with seri­ous dif­fi­cul­ties mak­ing deci­sions in real life.

What mat­ters instead is a kind of metacog­ni­tion: I can be afraid and, at the same time, reflect on that fear. Instead of ask­ing which option scares me more, I can ask why it scares me. And whether the rea­son for that fear should actu­al­ly mat­ter to the deci­sion I’m making.

In the end, with many of the deci­sions we make, we sim­ply don’t know how things will turn out. We can only judge the out­come in hind­sight. And when we do, it’s easy to for­get that we could only make the deci­sion from where we stood at the time – with the infor­ma­tion we had, and the resources avail­able to us. I can make a gen­uine­ly sen­si­ble, thought­ful deci­sion under uncer­tain­ty and still get unlucky. Or I can make a spec­tac­u­lar­ly bad deci­sion and get ridicu­lous­ly lucky.

Once we under­stand that, we can turn that famil­iar piece of social-media wis­dom on its head: Courage isn’t choos­ing what scares us. Courage is not let­ting fear make the choice for us.