mrpink essays

Fear of Fear

Emotions protect us, but they sometimes entangle us. Far from being irrational, they are an efficient biological process we can understand and learn to regulate.

The Evolution of Emotion

Emotions have an evolutionary purpose. They didn’t emerge to make us happy, but to increase our chances of survival and reproduction. They are automatic systems that learned to react to the environment long before language or reason existed.

The dopaminergic system, for example, overestimates anticipated pleasure to motivate action. It promises more than it delivers. That illusion—though it sometimes leads to disappointment—was essential to keep us moving.Fear works in a similar way. It’s a protective emotion that triggers a physiological cascade — adrenaline, pupil dilation, muscle tension, redistribution of blood flow — all preparing the body for danger. But this mechanism is tuned to err on the side of caution: it’s better to overreact than to overlook a threat. That’s why evolution left us with a natural bias toward hyper-alertness and overreaction, which in the modern world often manifests as anxiety—or as fear of fear itself.

Emotions Are Not Irrational

We tend to think of emotions as irrational, but they’re not. They’re complex computational processes, deeply rational in their own logic, just not expressed through language. Instead of operating with rules like if this, then that, emotions compute through the body: through breathing, muscle tension, and heartbeat. In that sense, they are more like biological neural networks—the same architecture that inspired modern large language models (LLMs).

We can’t easily explain why a neural network reaches a certain conclusion, but that doesn’t make it irrational; its logic is simply distributed across billions of connections.

The same applies to intuition. When someone gives us a “bad feeling,” it isn’t magic or mysticism—it’s a silent probabilistic estimation, trained by years of experience, micro-expressions, and subtle patterns. The body is calculating, just not with words.

The Inner Metaverse

The problem arises when these emotions stop responding to reality and start feeding on themselves.That’s where fear of fear begins. When we imagine something that might scare us in the future, the thought itself triggers fear now—and that fear reinforces the thought.

Most of the worries that cross our minds never actually happen, yet our biology prefers exaggerating risks to ignoring them. We live anticipating dangers that don’t exist, trapped in inner metaverses of anxiety. Studies on negativity bias suggest that a large portion of our thoughts lean negative: some estimates claim that around 80% of daily thoughts are negative and 95% are repetitive (Leahy, R. L. “Are We Hardwired for Negativity?”, Psychology Today, 2021). Regardless of the exact number, it’s clear that the mind is designed to detect threats before opportunities. When this cycle loops too often, fear ceases to protect us—it becomes an obstacle that disconnects us from the present.

The Trip to the Forest

A few years ago, I traveled to California for work and arrived a few days early, planning to camp alone in the forest for four days.While preparing the trip and packing my gear, I started to feel fear of fear itself. I asked myself: What if I’m out there, miles away from anyone, and a wild animal shows up? What if I get hurt or something happens and I have no way to ask for help?

There was no cell signal where I was going, so I had to download all the maps and trails in advance. I never considered canceling the trip, but the concern stayed with me.

And yet, when I arrived, reality was completely different. That first night, instead of fear, I felt deep calm. The silence, the air, the fire. No danger, no tension. It was a trip of enjoyment, introspection, and rest, where I understood how absurd it had been to spend so much energy worrying about something that never happened.Sometimes fear helps us prepare; other times, it only distracts us from the present and drains our energy.

Training the Mind

In the West, we talk very little about emotions—and not much about thoughts either.They’re two sides of the same mind: the rational and the emotional.And just as we can learn to manage destructive or distracting thoughts, we can also learn to manage emotions.

It doesn’t mean becoming robotic, but understanding that emotions are complex responses to the environment, and that the environment includes our own mental states.To some extent, we can replace one emotion with another, just as we can replace one thought with another. Meditation teaches this clearly: in any given moment, only one emotion or one thought can exist—and we can’t push them away by force; we can only replace them.

If we feel discouraged, we can cultivate optimism by changing what we do, what we watch, what we consume.
Learning to do this not only makes us more effective—it makes us freer.

Emotion and Leadership

For entrepreneurs, managing emotions—both our own and those of others—is essential.Understanding how our emotions influence our team, investors, and customers can make the difference between moving forward or freezing.

If we’re talking to a new client about a product that isn’t ready yet, we need to project confidence, because humans are experts at reading emotional cues.When hiring someone new or motivating a sales team, we need to generate optimism, because no one is inspired by a leader who doubts the future.And if we have to speak at an all-hands meeting on a day when we’re feeling sad, we can try to replace that emotion with one more centered or grounded, reconnecting with the purpose that brought us here.

We can’t always control what we feel, but we can train our relationship with emotions.Otherwise, we’re at their mercy—like a leaf carried by the wind—rather than using them as the wind that moves us forward.And in the life of a startup, where everything changes, learning to manage fear is as important as learning to manage capital.