DoctorOz: Jordan Peterson on Overcoming Your Biggest Fears

Money for many people is a fear-inducing problem. And it seems in the world today, fear is crippling us for a myriad of reasons. Part of it is we don't have a structure to try to cope with it. How do we address the fact that there are landmines all around us, but if those landmines keep us locked indoors, that's not life either. How do you become brave enough to challenge the demons that you fear most? You do it incrementally, you know, like if you're afraid of something. I had a client who was afraid of using a telephone. He had really crippling social anxiety. A telephone? Yeah, he couldn't talk on the telephone. He had crippling social anxiety. And he was an outcast, I mean, people had bullied him his whole life. He had a low IQ, so he was intellectually impaired. He had some sensory deficits. He had a rough time, but he couldn't use the phone. He was afraid of it. Well, so what did we start doing? Put your hand on the receiver and just wait till you're bored of that, right? Because that means you calm down. Pick up the receiver. Wait till you're bored of that. Put it by your ear. Wait till you're bored of that. Step by step. No, so if you have a big problem, you kind of have to figure out a map that allows you to differentiate it into smaller and smaller problems until the problem is small enough so that you could address it. And you have a conversation with yourself about that. Oh my God, I can't handle that. It's like, okay, is there some tiny piece of that that would help a little bit that you could handle? And it might be something so trivial that you're afraid, ashamed to admit to yourself that you had to pick something so small to have enough courage to face it. But like, join the club. You know, everybody has these things they're afraid of arbitrarily. What a good behavioral psychologist can do is break that into tiny pieces. And it's a good mode of problem solving, break it into tiny pieces. So for example, I'm trying to sort my office out because things keep flooding into it. I noticed all the books are these. Yeah. These walkway outside the house. Yeah, so I'm going through my bookshelf and we did a bunch of renovations and people send me stuff all the time. And my office tends to be like the landing place of a lot of stuff constantly. And it's daunting to me and has been part and part because of ill health. It's like, can I clean up that office? There's mail in there that hasn't been open for like two years. And no, but I could go through one bookshelf and probably take out four books today and that's enough. But if I do that every day, it will be clean. Part of the challenge I find is that people aren't even thinking of changing. They have accepted the status quo. The self-preservation benefit of not going outside the door, metaphorically, into the world. The natural need I think we should all have to expand ourselves beyond the normal boundaries, which is I think what we're called to do, get stifled and suffocated so that we'd rather just stay inside this little space. And we build these walls to protect ourselves, not realizing you're actually building it. You're caging yourself in. Yeah, well, and the outside tends to come inside too, right? There's a snake in every garden. Anyway, right, this is the deeper biblical symbolism. So once you've decided to change, you're actually probably 80% of the way there. The tactics you're describing are beneficial. Well, there's even a precondition to that and that's the decision that you're insufficient in your current form, which is of course always true and a terrible burden and a terrible reality and no wonder people want to avoid it. But there's also hope in that, right? Because if things aren't good enough, probably you could be better. And so thank God for that, that you could actually be better. And not only that, you probably know some manner in which you could be better that would work if you would just do it. So that's a pathway, man. As I look at so many people today, they actually, they almost like the anger. Oh, yeah. Well, anger is a positive emotion, actually. It's a weird emotion. It is? Yes, yes, it's a mixture of positive and negative emotion. Positive emotion makes you move forward, right? That's how it's tied to your body. And anger is a forward movement, and it suppresses fear, right? And so would you rather be angry or afraid? Well, angry is hard. It's really stressful physiologically, but it has a positive emotion. That's the self-righteousness. That kind of comes out in self-righteousness and self-aggrandizement, you know? But so, and so it's attractive for that reason and because it suppresses fear. You know, like if you chase a cat around with a broom, which you shouldn't do, but you know, this is just an example. And it'll run away because it's afraid, but if you corner it and then it can't escape, the cat will attack eventually because fear isn't working. It can't run away, apparently. So then anger comes up, suppresses fear, and the cat will attack. Now, you know, the cat might get killed, you know, in a natural circumstance, but anger definitely suppresses fear biologically. So the fact that many people revel in their anger shouldn't surprise me or anybody. No, no. It's very stressful, anger, because anger makes you hyper-prepare, right? Because you have to prepare for everything when you're angry. You're ready for combat. It's extraordinarily demanding psychophysiologically and that can really do in your health across time. My goodness. Well, now this is all coming together for me a little bit because we have a lot of people who are very angry and I guess it's because it suppresses their fear and it's a positive movement. Then we have people who are in fear, sort of stuck in that same axis. Some people are realizing that they're inadequate and their inadequacy is making the world inadequate. But that doesn't, those parties don't always talk to each other. No, well, one of the problems with anger is that anger generally means you've identified the problem in someone else and that's also comforting. But the problem with that is that, well, you know, what are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna go to war? Well, maybe. But, you know, my sense, and this is partly because I'm a psychologist, I suppose, is like, look to yourself, fix yourself up. You've got, that'll occupy you forever. It's much better. And whatever you see out there in some other person that you think is terrible is also in here, that's for sure. If you can quell that in here and really do that, then you can understand what it is that you're hating and you'd have a better time. You'd be better able to address it anyways. It's also in line with the idea of humility. So, yeah, anger is dreadfully attractive, but it's really hard on people.