The good side of fear and anxiety

Let's take a closer look at fear and anxiety. They get a lot of bad press, but both serve important functions. They're also different. Fear is normal and useful. It's what you experience when you smell smoke, see a bear in the woods or spot a bus bearing down on you while crossing the street. It comes with a menu of physical signals: sweaty palms, racing pulse, trembling. Fear in this context is a life-preserving reaction to a recognizable danger. Optimally, it will help you get out of a jam.

At its worst, anxiety makes you feel straitjacketed by the idea of the bear or that oncoming bus. You experience an astringent emotional state in anticipation of possible danger, not as the result of an immediate threat. Then maybe you focus on everything but where you're going - or you never even leave the house. But transient or episodic anxiety (such as those nerves you might notice before the big pitch meeting with a prospective client) can also be harnessed for creative productivity.

Some entrepreneurs freeze up in those situations, like the proverbial deer in the headlights; others develop more productive reflexes. Consider Mark Robin, owner of the Hungry Moose Market & Deli in Big Sky, Mont.

"I make hundreds of quick decisions all day," Robin told me. "There's no time for fear and anxiety in the daily running of a grocery store. If I stood there debating or floundering, everything would come to a standstill."

I asked Robin how the current economic downturn was affecting him. "Luckily for us, people always need to eat," he replied. "Business is definitely down, and the upcoming winter season looks a bit iffy, but Christmas week should be crazy-busy as always. It's probably time to do some belt-tightening, but in the end we should be fine. I really take it day by day."

Robin's grocery store and Sherman's advertising agency have little in common from a business perspective, but it's not about comparing apples and ad campaigns. The real issue is that they display different emotional responses to similar types of stress. Why is that?

Sherman tends to project difficult childhood memories onto his business relationships. Robin's formative memories involve working in his parents' retail business, where he often watched his mom and dad take crises in stride. Those experiences helped him develop effective strategies to cope with stress.

Even so, he is hardly a nerveless robo-grocer. "Anxiety comes into play with bigger decisions," he admitted.

Still, his childhood prepared him to manage his natural anxieties without letting them get in the way of his decision-making. That's harder for Sherman. Despite his outward composure, I've learned to recognize (mostly from his voice) how little confidence or optimism he feels. Today's economic crisis is his worst nightmare come to life. The world is objectively threatening for him in ways that match his most dreaded anxieties: doing well, then teetering on the edge of ruin and feeling unable to step away from the brink. Disaster. Cut to black.

Sherman and I looked to his childhood for the origins and composition of his internal strife. Sherman's family lived comfortably, but to his father, a senior executive with a national mortgage lender, nothing was more important than financial security. Deeply pessimistic by nature, his father saved because he was always worried about losing everything. Although the family never ran short of cash, money was doled out sparingly and ungenerously, except toward his mother's home-decorating projects.

His mother was a merciless perfectionist. "I was always scrutinized and under surveillance," Sherman recalled in one of our sessions. He remembered working constantly as a child. Chores weren't done until every shred of lint or speck of dust was gone. A bed wasn't made unless it could pass a Marine sergeant's muster. And his hard work earned him no praise, only escape from punishment.

Although he now runs a successful business, Sherman unconsciously relives these painful early experiences in his client relationships. He feels incessantly scrutinized and imagines that punishment is just around the corner. And he's unable to enjoy his success because he fundamentally believes that good things don't last.

He told me that, as a boy, he concocted "schemes." Under his compliant façade lived a little rebel. He'd postpone chores until just before his mother's inspection, clocking how fast - and flawlessly, of course - he could get everything done. He'd deliberately break rules and then fastidiously cover the evidence, trying to get away with more and more without getting caught. While the tasks were mundane, the emotional risks were great.

As a group, entrepreneurs are more likely than not to feel comfortable in crisis situations. So Sherman's youthful machinations may have contributed to his career choice. That's fine, as long as being an adrenaline junkie works for you. Problems arise, however, when you become disabled by panic, fixated on the idea of cataclysm or stuck in dangerous behavior patterns because you need that adrenaline high.

What's not working for Sherman is his unconscious confusion of the past and the present. Emotionally, he's convinced that his business isn't temporarily faltering in a recession environment but failing altogether because he didn't heed his father's dire warnings about financial overextension. He identifies late-paying clients with his domineering, unappreciative mother. Frustrating business transactions become recurrences of traumatic rejection. No wonder he's anxious.

So would the anxiety go away if Sherman's balance sheet improved? Not necessarily. It's certainly true that a cash infusion would reduce his situational panic. But it wouldn't change the underlying risk-anxiety paradigm, which needs only the next incident to become activated.

Sherman's work with me continues, so I can't say how the story ends. On the bright side, he has developed a better understanding of his anxieties - where they come from, what triggers them and how they affect his life and business. Recently he's been picking up the phone and calling some of those deadbeat clients. He was pleasantly surprised when nothing bad happened. On the contrary, money started to come in.

Dr. Alexander Stein is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City and a principal in the Boswell Group, a consulting firm. 

1 2