Vaccine Anxiety

I just spoke to a dear friend in Santa Cruz who is terrified of getting the vaccine but has summoned the courage to get it anyway, today. We just spoke on the phone.

Her fear if familiar. I was scared too. Yet this is the kind of fear that we should not abide/obey because it’s in response to a supposed but not actual threat. Ironically, Covid is a real threat we should fear.

Vaccination fear we need to challenge and march through courageously. That’s what she is doing and she called for support because we had a sane talk a few days ago about it, sorting out fact from fiction.

This is why fear education (emotional intelligence) is so crucial. For largely unrealistic, unreasonable fears (Covid vaccine), we have to feel the fear and do it anyway. And breathe deeply through it! In contrast, Covid the disease is a realistic, reasonable fear, and we should fear it (and work with the fear so it doesn’t get out of control, another part of emotional intelligence).

To get the Covid shot, my friend has to act counterintuitively. Intuition says “Don’t do it!” because that is fear’s purpose: to prevent us from harm. But the devil in the details is that there are different forms of fear. Again, unrealistic fears we challenge, realistic ones we abide/obey.

Unfortunately, our nervous systems haven’t evolved to shut down the fear response to largely unrealistic/unhelpful fears, such as getting the vaccine. That’s cuz it’s a primitive, automatic response to bypass reasoning (to save our lives in the face of a charging tiger, for example) and our brains react the same way to both realistic and unrealistic fear.

So, she is white-knuckling it and I told her to call me if she needs support when the time comes closer. Her feelings are real, but the threat isn’t (for the most part). This is PRECISELY when we need to use critical thinking . . . we reason with the facts, make a decision based on the facts and realistic risks (very very very small for the vaccine that something will go wrong), and then manage our emotions while we do what is right.

That takes courage! If someone doesn’t have “fear intelligence” and courage to work through the false threat and “do it anyway” when the body is screaming “don’t do it!” then the tendency is going to be to shrink away from right action. This is, ironically, to be a victim of fear.

Now I offer something for consideration, which I am educatedly guessing at:

In light of caving to fear like this, many have to then make sense of their reaction. If this doesn’t happen consciously in most cases, perhaps it’s why many adopt conspiracy theories to justify their fear. After all, they have just heeded an ultimately false warning by obeying unrealistic fear (to a supposed but largely not actual threat) and allowed their fear to be “bigger” than they are. So to prevent cognitive dissonance, a cognitive match is needed: something equally wrong. Thus is born a staunch adherence to conspiracy theories, resistance to facts, and the anger and aggression we find in many resisting the vaccine for no good reason. Unreckoned fear shows up as anger.

So it’s possible that many who resist the vaccine—similar to those who resist masks and distancing— who chant “no fear and freedom” are actually and secretly prisoners to their own fear . . . because they are reacting to fear and not navigating it with emotional and cognitive smarts. That’s called fear of fear.

In the end it comes down to what you believe and what you don’t. If you don’t believe the science, please learn about the process of science, the peer review process (the vaccines have been peer reviewed for safety), and epistemology. And what may be a more radical bottom line is investigating the nature of your fear as it informs your beliefs and choices, per the above discussion. Aloha.

My New Masterpiece