The high cost of fear in research

“Terrifying!”.
 
That’s the word I hear most from ECRs considering a tenure track job offer. They, like most of us, once sat in a PhD interview saying this is exactly what they wanted. So what explains this reaction when it becomes reality?
 
We all find something scary. I feel it when chairing a meeting or pursuing a big new opportunity. Many people, inside and outside science, fear public speaking. And whose heart doesn’t beat faster on reading the email subject line “Decision on your manuscript”?
 
Why? And what does it do to us?

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Helpful fear
Fear is an incredibly useful emotion. If someone rushes at you with a knife, your life depends on the quick action it promotes. On a more mundane level, the nagging intuition we get when someone won’t look us in the eye, or give a straight answer to a question, is fear telling us not to trust them. This ‘in the moment fear’ helps us survive and thrive. Unlike the other kinds below, it usually has the good sense to stop when the situation no longer requires it.
 
Unhelpful fear
But there are other kinds of fear, or anxiety, that are far less useful and definitely not healthy. Although we are not always aware of it, and rarely talk about it, research life is full of it! 
 
Am I good enough? 
Pippa Grange, author of Fear Less, describes the deep costs of ‘Not-good-enough fear’, a point echoed by entrepreneurs Steven Bartlett and Brian Cesky. In research life, this manifests as fear of rejection (of our grant, our paper or job application), fear of criticism (of our research, our presentation or how we handle a meeting), or fear of failure (of our experiment, our hypothesis or in achieving our goals). ​

‘Not-good-enough’ fear gnaws at us constantly, until one day, if we allow ourselves to believe it, something banishes it. It may be our first conference poster, our PhD viva, or our first paper. Just before my first paper, I was scooped by similar work from another group. Strangely though, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief that work similar to mine was actually publishable! My first funded grant was another watershed moment. It was ‘only’ £20K for travel between collaborating labs. It was mostly written by my mentor and collaborator, Richard Ribchester. But as a sign that our work was considered worthy of funding it was an enormous boost. 
 
Do I fit in?
Another fundamental fear is ‘do-I-fit-in?’. This manifests as imposter syndrome and unconsciously distorts our behaviour to fit with cultural norms. It drives behaviours that do not represent our true values, causing persistent stress. We may work later than is good for us because others do that, or feel reluctant to ask seminar questions because our peers don’t ask, and we worry what others will think. We may even find ourselves laughing at jokes we find distasteful, or keeping silent when we hear a colleague being unfairly criticised behind their back. This type of fear is particularly challenging for those whose gender, race, cultural background, native language, accent, and even area of scientific expertise differs from those around them.
 
What is fear doing to us?
These are deep, primal fears with roots in early tribal times. For most of human history, the risk of being cast out if we were deemed ‘not good enough’ or ‘not fitting in’ was truly life threatening. What we feel today is a legacy of those times, part genetic and part cultural. It is completely normal but out of all proportion with the type of problems we face today. What would an early human have given for their only fear to be some red ink on their manuscript?
 
Nevertheless, if we deny the role fear plays in the lab, the committee room or the conference hall, it will run our lives. We close off opportunities and stay within our comfort zone, not because we want that, but because we fear mistakes and criticism. Fear drains our energy as we navigate the daily maze to ‘fit in’ instead of relaxing and being our true selves. Repeated over years and decades, this leads to demotivation, burnout and illness. 
 
What is fear doing to our research?
But fear is not ‘just’ a wellbeing issue. It weakens our research. For example, if you get a result that conflicts with your PI’s cherished hypothesis do you: (a) Rush over to tell them? (b) Think carefully first about how to break the news? (c) Feel sure you’ve done something wrong? or (d) Keep it quiet? When applying for a grant, do you start from: 'What is the most important scientific question?' or 'What is most likely to get funded?'. Do you build a career in a topic that is widely studied already, or an unexplored area that you constantly have to explain and justify? We don’t realise how much the powerful drive to ‘fit in’ affects how we think. 
 
This is a huge problem. Insecurity for early career researchers (ECRs) is a major source of fear, playing straight into our ability to keep a roof over our head or feed our children. ECRs are the very people who are least indoctrinated by, and thus most able to question established models but the need to ‘fit in’, for job security and progression, and the fear of looking ‘stupid’ stops too many questions from ever being asked. The fear of challenging the views of those who influence our career prospects helps to explain Max Planck's observation that is commonly paraphrased as: ‘science advances one funeral at a time’. 
 
What can we do about it?
The first step is to recognise and normalise fear. Admitting it, even to ourselves, is hard but to make rational decisions about how to handle it we must first express it somewhere.
 
At a cultural level, we can recognise the crucial importance of psychological safety. This concept, which is increasingly promoted in business and sport, is rarely discussed in research life. But it has a vital role: a half-formed, but potentially ground-breaking idea will not be shared with others to develop it further if the response makes us feel attacked. Challenging our ideas is essential for advancing science, but once this spills over into attacking the person expressing them, it has exactly the opposite effect. 
 
As an individual, we can distinguish between fear, or its close relative anxiety, and excitement. The key is to recognise the role of choice. President Kennedy galvanised a nation by saying: “We choose to go to the moon”, and Free Solo climber Alex Honnold achieved the seemingly impossible by choosing to climb the 2,900 foot El Capitan rock face without ropes. Once we are clear that something is our choice, we can harness the courage to see it through whatever the hardships. Even grant or paper rejections hurt less if we are clear that we choose this career and why, and that no-one makes us do it. 

​Equally important is to rationally assess the consequences of our worst fears. Both Honnold and statistician David Spiegelhalter point out how safe our everyday lives really are. If a talk goes badly or a grant is rejected, nobody dies! And any colleagues, or loved ones worth having will not change their view of us in any way. It may hurt our ego but the consequences are not those that our feelings suggest. 
 
Are we afraid of success?
So why would an ECR fear accepting a PI post they have long aspired to? Gay Hendricks’ book The Big Leap, summarised in this podcast from Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt-Miller, explains how limiting beliefs hold us back. The belief that we ‘don’t deserve success’, or that ‘success could alienate us from our friends’ are particularly problematic. Fear of the unknown is also often a part of it, along with those ancient fears of 'not being good enough' or 'not fitting in'.

​There may be many causes that we need to consider, but one primary solution: by first expressing and understanding our fears, we can choose our actions rationally and commit to seeing them through.