On Feel the Fear ... and Do It Anyway

This is a perfectly serviceable self-help book with a genuinely important central idea but weak execution. I think its target audience — largely upper-middle-class, well-educated women who feel stuck — will find it valuable, even if there’s something here for almost anyone.

My therapist recommended it. I feel stuck and anxious and powerless to do anything about it; I’ve been “sheltering in place” behind a wall of what-ifs. What if the economy breaks down and I can’t find work? What if I fail? What if I lose more than I gain by taking drastic action? What if I’m overwhelmed by rejection? The root of all of them is fear, and really a single fear: the fear of not being able to handle it. She’s right about that — we are prisoners of our own thoughts and feelings.

Jeffers’s solution is the obvious one: stop overthinking and just do it. And she’s right. Things get easier by being done, not by endless reflection and analysis paralysis; it’s the only way forward. It won’t make life easier, exactly — we get used to our new capacities and then meet new challenges — but we have to keep pushing through. The rest of the chapters take up specific pieces of this. What if people treat me differently as a result? Some will, and you have to take stock of who’s worth keeping. How do I keep momentum? By listening to positivity recordings and surrounding yourself with cheerful content. How do I get my inner chatterbox to shut the fuck up? By leaning on your higher, affirmative inner voice.

I found those chapters badly lacking, though there were usable bits. There’s a discussion of changing your mindset to believe that you matter, so that you start acting as if you do; if you don’t believe you or your work matter, things fall apart as you shrink from life’s challenges. She’s right, and it landed hard, because I don’t feel that I — or what I do — matter. I tried to put some of her suggestions into practice this week, and it played out strangely. I said I’d do everything I set out to do, and I did. But I’d been afraid of the unpredictable things that might follow, and they turned out worse than I’d feared, and I slid right back into my habitual pessimism. A sign that I need to do something entirely different.

And that points to what this book — and really any book wholly devoted to “self-help” — misses: we don’t live in a world of individuals. We are socially embedded; things beyond our control act on us, and the attempt to control everything produces profound suffering. This is why religious practice can be so therapeutic: it lets us accept what we cannot control. Islam asks us to submit to God’s will rather than fight it, Christianity asks much the same, Buddhism urges non-attachment. We have to accept things as they are. What we can do is say, “There’s nothing I can do to change this, so it’s time to find something else.” Feeling the fear and doing it anyway won’t always work, but we can choose what to be brave about instead of hiding in a corner and letting life pass.

I’d rename the book Do It Anyway, because Jeffers pushes us to act but doesn’t actually help with feeling the fear; most of the advice is preoccupied with drowning it out. Don’t let the fear in at all — fill yourself with light and hope and a positive mindset. It’s not bad advice, but it risks suppression, and suppression takes its toll on your health. My own tendency, when I feel something negative, is the opposite: to ruminate on it, to fill myself with it. That isn’t right either. This won’t be a book for everyone, though I think everyone could take something from it. It falls into the same trap as so many self-help books, which is a shame — but I’m not sure there’s much Jeffers could have done differently without writing an entirely different book.