Ask me about my FUD

I love the term FUD. It’s used to discredit people who are spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt. FUD, though, is a healthy part of any decision-making process.

There’s this myth that discipline means using logic to make decisions rather than emotions. According to this view, a disciplined person should ignore their FUD. But it’s impossible to make decisions without an emotional component. People who lose the connection to their emotions can’t make basic decisions about what to eat for breakfast or what shirt to wear.

That being said, when people are unaware of them, fear, uncertainty, and doubt are like the ghosts in a haunted mansion. They move the furniture around and we try to explain their actions through logic. “When I opened the door, the difference in air pressure knocked that spooky painting off the wall. And somehow that caused the knife to stick in the wall right next to my head.”

If you show someone with a split brain a card of a person standing up, they might react by standing up. The other half of the brain has the language centers, so if you ask them why they stood up, they might respond with something like, “I felt like stretching my legs.” That part of their brain didn’t know they were responding to an image the other half was shown. They used logic to explain their behavior based on the knowledge they had.

We do the same thing with emotions if we’re not aware of them. Emotions move us, and we use logic to explain why we moved.

That is why, every now and again, I use my writing to explore my own FUD. FUD is a huge component of writer’s block and usually works in a feedback loop. We don’t write because of our FUD, and we have FUD because we don’t write.

I can explain my avoidant behaviors logically in terms of my environment, but underneath the dashboard, my FUD is hitting the brakes.

Writing won’t necessarily remove the FUD, but the awareness it provides can help expose the real chain of logic. I might stop writing and say it’s because I’m overworked, or I lack discipline. Really though, I stopped writing because people were starting to pay attention to my writing, and I see attention as something dangerous.

If I see this FUD that is really holding me back, I can start to challenge the false logic I was using to protect my soft underbelly, and then I might get a step closer to that mythical beast called Discipline. Discipline doesn’t work against emotions. It helps shape emotions one decision at a time.