Fear Comparison - Part II

So in the last fear comparison blog, the focus was comparing physical risk to social risk. Taking some sort of physical risk to put into perspective the social risk and make it easier to deal with. But what about the physical risk? Is there a better way to deal with that?

If we imagine the things we fear are ranked from most to least on a spectrum, you can use comparison to deal with most of them, except the top few things. Depending on the trick or competition, freeride mountain biking can fall into this category for me. But in two different ways.

The first is the acute risk of riding. The risk of injury, the risk of not landing the run. Even the risk of judgement from other riders or the crowd. These can all potentially be things that fall into the most feared end of the spectrum.

The second is the chronic risk of riding not working how I want it to. This means the risk I am taking to pursue riding as a career, the money I'm investing into this dream and the experiences I am saying no to, too keep focusing on the task at hand. If it ends up not working, then am I behind?

The problem with both of these is that the fear of the negative outcomes actually makes them more likely, so there needs to be strategies other than real direct comparison to deal with them.

This is where I came across something called prokatalepsis.

The concept is basically visualising things that you fear happening, so that your mind creates some familiarity with them. Once you have visualised the situation, you look at what is still true in the situation, and what you still have available to you, despite the failure.

So I might visualise crashing a trick and getting all cut up. A bad situation on the surface, but I would point out that I might still be able to try again, my bike is still working and I have no broken bones. 

So now when lining up to try that trick, I don't care less about landing it, but I am less attached to the fear. 

While writing this, I actually realised that I kind of do this without thinking. I sometimes imagine all the possible ways I can crash a trick before sending it. I think it's the same process, but I just didn't have a name for it. At first glance, it seemed counterintuitive, but I believe it can help me with some areas of not only riding, but life.