The Lion That Wasn't There

Why we spend so much of our lives fearing what might never happen.

I have a daughter who deals with high anxiety. As I began to write that last sentence, I was tempted to say she struggles with anxiety, and then I thought, is it a struggle? What actually makes it hard? I question this as someone who has spent most of my adult life trying to unravel the sources of worry and build a defence against them, leading me to coin my own phrase: “Worrying is the most redundant of all human activities.”

I first began thinking this way because, when I was younger, I saw people around me becoming incredibly overwhelmed, almost paralysed by the prospect of something that hadn't even happened. I watched people convince themselves that the worst possible outcome would unfold, a fear that seemed to underpin every movement they made.

I'm sure there is an anthropological purpose to worrying, to fearing what could happen. After all, knowing that something could hurt us protects us, keeps us alive, and keeps our genes in the pool. If no one feared falling, we'd all simply wander off cliffs like lemmings. Interesting side question: do lemmings actually walk off cliffs unknowingly? My only real reference is the 1990s computer game of the same name.

So, knowing that something can hurt us is important for our survival, but when and why does that fear cloud some people's ability to rationalise? I'm not writing this passage as a clinical study, nor am I going to reach for a reference book on the topic. I've been prompted to write about it because of a recent experience where someone was feeling overcome with anxiety, and she never really unpacked what she was actually concerned about. I was left guessing.

With my daughter, however, I have a little more insight into the fears she carries around, although I can't relate to them, nor can I fully understand why she is sometimes petrified, unable to move forward. My daughter has been diagnosed with autism, and she presents with high anxiety, so clinicians have assessed her and applied those labels. I purposely use that terminology because I feel so many people in society today have these badges applied to them.

Discussing the merits or hindrances of these diagnoses isn't going to be the topic here. I'm neither qualified nor particularly interested in competing with the thoughts of others on the subject. I have my own views, partly shaped by my usual personal logic, but also as a father who only wants his daughter to thrive.

But what is it that some people are so afraid of? As I've mentioned, I think worrying is a redundant activity, not because I believe it serves no purpose, but because the repeated process of avoiding something, or doing nothing at all, is, in my opinion, futile. I've watched friends, and now family members, expend huge amounts of energy, spinning themselves in circles, consuming more time and effort avoiding something than it would take to simply confront it.

Let's use maths for a moment. If a path takes us 10 metres to reach an unknown destination or state, and we discover that something isn't right, or isn't quite how we expected it to be, the worst-case scenario would be a return to base. 20 metres in total.

Yet people will travel hundreds of metres, worrying in circles, over a journey that would have taken them just twenty. And in those twenty metres, they would have discovered an important lesson. Firstly, that the destination wasn't right, but more importantly, they would have proved to themselves the power of re-direction. That small corrections are better than no movement at all.

Not to mention the economic efficiencies of travelling less and achieving more.

But perhaps there's another dimension to this journey, and that's how differently we perceive the same ten metres. I might see a perfectly ordinary path, a clear destination and nothing particularly threatening between here and there. The person standing beside me might see something entirely different. Perhaps their view is obscured, their eyesight doesn't extend quite as far, or their imagination has populated the path with all manner of dangers. Where I see ten metres, they see a hundred. But here's the thing: the path is still only ten metres long.

Our perception of something doesn't necessarily change the reality of what actually exists.

Imagine someone afraid of encountering a lion along that path. They've never seen a lion there, nobody else has reported one, and we're nowhere near anywhere a lion might reasonably be found. Yet the possibility of meeting one becomes so overwhelming that they cannot bring themselves to take the first step. I can understand that the fear feels real, but does that make the danger real?

And more importantly, does accepting the fear, without ever challenging its foundations, actually help anyone?

Surely there's a difference between acknowledging that someone is frightened and agreeing that they have something to be frightened of.  But perhaps the lion isn't entirely a product of imagination. Perhaps it's a creature born from experience, or rather, our interpretation of that experience. Imagine someone who has walked a similar path before, reached the destination and discovered something unpleasant waiting for them. They were hurt, disappointed, or perhaps simply found themselves somewhere they never wanted to be. And in trying to make sense of what happened, they concluded that there must have been a lion lurking somewhere along the way. After all, something caused the pain, and surely something must be responsible.

Now, presented with a new path, they see the same lion. Or worse, they imagine an entire pride waiting at the destination. But this isn't the same path, nor necessarily the same destination. And perhaps most importantly, there may never have been a lion on the original journey at all. The harm was real, but their explanation for it might have been entirely wrong. Yet somehow, that explanation has become the evidence upon which every future journey is judged.

And here's where I find myself questioning the logic once again. If we convince ourselves that every unfortunate destination must have been guarded by a lion, aren't we condemning every future path before we've even taken the first step? We're no longer learning from experience, but allowing our interpretation of it to dictate what we expect to find. Surely the lesson from a difficult journey should be to understand what actually went wrong, rather than assume that every road leads us back into the jaws of the same imaginary creature.

Of course, uncertainty exists. A lion could, through some extraordinary chain of events, appear where one has never appeared before. But if we allow every conceivable possibility to dictate our actions, we'd barely move at all. We've walked other paths, watched others travel them, and arrived at destinations without catastrophe. Yet one painful experience can somehow outweigh a hundred uneventful ones, allowing a lion that may never have existed to become a permanent feature of the landscape.

And this brings me back to my original conviction that worrying is redundant. Not because fear itself is foolish, nor because I believe everyone can simply switch it off, but because worrying about an imagined danger doesn't make us any safer. It merely exhausts us before we've even begun. I don't want to dismiss the person who sees the lion, but I do question whether, by repeatedly accepting that fear rather than challenging it, we inadvertently help keep the lion alive.