Reality Check: Irrational Fears or Real Risks?

You may have heard that an increasing number of people are affected by anxiety, fears, worries of all kinds.
If you’re not one of those people, count yourself fortunate! Some people are not worriers. Whether it’s a personality type or learned behaviour, whether it comes from faith, family or your environment, freedom from worry is a gift.
Being tormented by fear is a worrying state. And worrying about your fear just makes it worse, right? One source of fear is imagining “what could happen.”
Despite (or perhaps because of) our ability to get news and information from many people, places, and viewpoints, it can be difficult to distinguish between real risks and irrational fears.
Real risks deserve our attention. For example, if I build my house on a sandy cliff overlooking a wild ocean, there’s a risk. If I stay out late, party, and ignore my studies, there’s a risk. If I insult my boss, there’s a risk!
In any of those cases, worrying isn’t very helpful. However, paying attention and taking appropriate action can have a real, positive effect.
However, it’s possible to get caught up in worries that either aren’t real risks, or that realistically, you cannot affect. Perhaps they are extremely unlikely to happen, or they are based on faulty information, or they’re just the products of a wildly creative imagination.
Not only does this worry steal joy from the life of the worrier, it’s also distracting. We don’t take action where we could be effective because we’re caught up in issues where we can’t be effective.
To survive, businesses recognize that it’s important to detect risks, evaluate them, and assess whether action is warranted. If your worries are creating difficulties and you want to change that, then you might consider trying similar “risk management.”
A business-like approach could start by accepting that risk exists. Put yourself in the position of a manager. Risks are all around you! There are competitors trying to take your customers, employees who don’t perform as needed, supply chains that are unreliable, environments that are unpredictable. It just goes on and on!
However, not all of those risks are equal. To figure out where you can most effectively put your energy, you could try this approach.
Write down a few of the risks that contribute to your worries. Then, for each one, ask yourself these questions:
If this worry did, in fact, happen, what are the possible results? How serious are those results? Would it be devastating to your or someone else’s life, health, well-being? Or would it simply be unpleasant? Inconvenient? Embarrassing?
How likely is this to happen? Has it happened before? Often? Sometimes? Never?
What are possible causes that could contribute to this risk? Are any of those causes within my control?
Realistically, are there actions that I can take that would prevent this from happening or that could reduce the seriousness if it did?
If you enjoy working with numbers, you can even assign values to your answers. For example, very serious could be 10, mildly embarrassing could be 1. If there are actions you can take, give that a 10. If there’s not much you can do, give it a 1.
Whether you use numbers or not, going through this exercise could help you get a clearer picture of whether a particular worry is a real risk or an irrational fear, and perhaps most importantly, whether there’s anything you can do.
How do you handle risks in your life?