Diane Dreher

In his first inaugural address in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told a nation suffering from the Great Depression that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed effort to convert retreat into advance.”

• His words ring equally true for us today. Research has shown that fear can literally make us sick. Triggering the “fight or flight” stress response to deal with an emergency, fear shuts down our immune and digestive systems, flooding the body with adrenaline and corticosteroids. But when fear becomes chronic, it sabotages our bodies with stress-related illnesses—headaches, asthma, insomnia, chronic pain, cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol, hypertension, malignancies, and autoimmune disorders. Chronic fear makes us mentally ill as we collapse in the hopeless depression that psychologist Martin Seligman has called “learned helplessness,” the feeling that nothing we can do will make any difference. Rates of depression in this country have skyrocketed in the past few years.
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  Fear not only makes us sick, it keeps us from thinking clearly. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has found that fear triggers a hard-wired survival response from the amygdala, the fear center in our brains. While walking down the street, if we hear a loud engine noise, we jump aside. Or we see a snake in front of us and jump out of the way—even if it was only a twisted branch that looked like a snake.
• This fear reaction saves our lives in emergencies, when a moment’s pause might mean being bitten by a rattlesnake or hit by a car. But it can also cause misperceptions and fatal errors. People have been awakened at night by what they thought was a burglar and ended up attacking another family member. Soldiers have been killed by “friendly fire” reactions from fearful comrades. Our automatic fear response is fast, reductive, and dualistic, reducing our choices to two extremes, the logical fallacy of the false dilemma: win or lose, life or death, us or them.
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  This fear reaction bypasses our cerebral cortex, robbing us of nuance, detail, and insight, blinding us to possibilities beyond mere survival. Unable to see clearly, listen attentively, or solve complex problems, we abandon all wisdom, becoming merely reactive.
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  Albert Einstein said, “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” Economic instability, war, poverty, social injustice, environmental devastation, climate change—the escalating problems of the past eight years have grown from the old fear paradigm. We’ve been limited by dualistic perceptions, reacting to our fears, unable to find creative solutions.
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  In this crucial time, we can either fall backward in fear or move forward into a new Renaissance of hope. I believe that our greatest natural resources are within us--our hearts and minds, our ability to learn, our innate human creativity. By embracing our inner resources, by following the call of a courageous president who led this nation to victory over fear, we can prevail.
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  This blog will offer practical strategies drawn from research in psychology, neuroscience, and contemplative practice, insights from my book, Your Personal Renaissance, and our own shared discoveries of how to overcome fear to realize our creative potential.

I invite you to join me in this blog to create new pathways of possibility for ourselves and our world.