Have You Become More Brave or More Anxious as You Age?

Were you more daring, or just more reckless, as a younger person?

Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano

Key points

• When self-reliance replaces recklessness, you are officially a grown-up.
• Courage depends, paradoxically, on admitting to and coping with authentic vulnerabilities.
• You can be scared as a child and scared as an older person, but the experiences will be different.
• Courage can be cultivated, and it can be loaned to you by others.

Was the courage you had in your first youth different from the courage you have now?

Were you braver because you were more foolish, didn’t fully understand the possible consequences of your actions, or more daring because you felt invincible?

Or were you anxious as a younger person, fearful of being judged harshly by others, wishing for invisibility, unlikely to take risks because the results of failure, or the mere possibility of it, were not worth the effort?

“With my first round of courage,” says my friend Rose Reyes, “I didn’t know any better. I just did. Experience now lets me strategize and lets me allow others to go for it if they have the stamina and a fully resourced first-aid kit.”

For Rose, the wisdom that comes with maturity has allowed her to harvest her own courage and help those who take reasonable risks.

Another friend, Kathleen Delano, explains her journey to the clarity that true courage demands in unflinching terms: “When I was younger, death was something that happened to other people. When I was younger, I drank my courage. Now I’m mortal and sober.” Delano's sobriety gives her strength to face life's challenges without disguising or distorting them, understanding that alcohol can blur reality but never change it. "Mortal and sober" is a declaration of self-reliance.

Replacing recklessness with self-reliance is the definition of being a grown-up.

Some of us, however, had to learn to feel safe enough to achieve recklessness.

Let me explain: I had no courage whatsoever as a child. I was a scared kid and nobody around me knew what to do about it. Informed by a combination of old wives’ tales, soap operas, and Dr. Spock, the adults in my family were baffled by my uneasy relationship to the ordinary world. I was afraid of dogs, unfamiliar neighborhoods, the dark, and silence.

It started when I was about three years old. They tried giving me night lights, a teddy bear, and teaching me to pray. None of it worked. I would be awake all night and worrying: biting my nails, wide-eyed, curled around myself, and terrified of every sound. Somebody decided it would be a good idea if I slept with a transistor radio on my pillow, tuned to the all-news-all-the-time station. It was 1960, and I was falling asleep to interviews about the build-up of nuclear submarine bases, Nikita Khrushchev’s anger issues, and whether The Twist was morally corrosive.

Yes, I found the voices reassuring. (Yes, I am in therapy.)

After a few years, however, my habits changed. I started making friends, felt secure once I started school, and started listening to rock and roll (less degenerate as it might have been but more subversive). I was never a good sleeper, but I became less fearful about the world. I started to pet small dogs if their owners were nearby, became easy-going about riding my bike to new places, and quit the night-light habit. I kept the radio going all night long but could listen to music.

Defying both outside and inside warnings (family: “You’ll never keep a boyfriend if you don’t act more ladylike”; inner-Gina: “You look like an idiot putting your hand up to answer questions all the time”), I gave myself permission to speak up, act out, and accept the invitation of adventure.

More good luck than bad followed my willingness to navigate unmapped paths. Although I did become intimately acquainted with failure, I was surprisingly rewarded by success.

But now I fear losing this sense of measured risk-taking as I age.

As I become cautious about everything from footwear (it needs a grip) to emotional equilibrium (I need to make sure I've got a grip), I want to reconsider courage.

Do we become less brave as we age because we treasure our lives more, having become better acquainted with them?

Or does wisdom give us guts, allowing us not only to be courageous on our behalf but also to help others find their own strength and grit?

Are you like my pal Maureen E. Russell, who declares “I had reckless courage in my youth” but traded it in, and “I have the courage to do the right thing”?

How about those folks who were fearless when they were kids, like Jill Brehm Enders, a self-described daredevil who faced a turnaround in terms of courage as she became a mother? “The first time I really knew fear was the first time I was pregnant. Suddenly my body had limits, but also because I was responsible for a baby. That fear remained and intensified with subsequent babies. I used to say that my job as a stay-at-home mother was to imagine all the ways my kids could suffer and die in any situation and then use all my power to prevent it. Yet I am optimistic that even the big scary I can imagine happening to me has something positive on the other side of it. And my faith grounds me in the creepy dark edges, staring into the abyss.”

Unsurprisingly, Endersl has created one significant and genuine "irrational” fear: a deep dread for MRI machines.

Most of us have a fear of something that poses no real statistical danger: I know for a fact that I am safer in a plane than I am on the highway, but that doesn't stop me from being annoyingly afraid to fly. Yet I am far less scared than I once was, and I consider that a win for psychoanalysis. Coping mechanisms are in place for a reason: "Irrational" fears are the emotionally frightening creations--think Build-a-Bears with teeth and claws and appetites—so that we can hug a palpable scary thing to replace all the genuinely terrifying things we can't (bear to) face.

“Blind bravado in my youth, it got me into just as much trouble as it got me places I wanted to go,” declares Amy Millios. “The courage I have now is more quiet but no less powerful.”

"I didn't think of it as courage in my 20s," says a friend I've known since those early days of rock and roll, Susan Rubenstein. "I followed my inner compass and/or my heart, without second-guessing. What I experience in more recent decades is 'coeur' and 'age' involving more intentional actions on my part—although I summon the 21-year-old who acted bravely and spontaneously when I need her.”

Many of us would like to call on the physical courage we had when we were younger and could rely on our bodies to underwrite the risk, as Pat Levesque suggested in response to my question, but realize that emotional, spiritual, psychological, and social fortitude are excellent compensations.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem titled "The Courage That My Mother Had." The poet wishes her mother could have bequeathed her "courage like a rock, which she/Had no more need of, and I have." Millay wrote the poem when she was grieving her own loss. I find the words, paradoxically enough, a perpetually renewable source of strength. Millay's plea for courage is itself an act of bravery.

Admitting our need for courage is an admission of our vulnerability, and to confess any authentic need takes guts. In order to endure moments of uncertainty we must call on our own fortitude and integrity, and perhaps borrow some from those who offer it.

You can be scared as a child and scared as an older person, but the experiences will be different. Facing mortality when it’s somewhere over the hill and off in the distance is different from seeing it walking down the block, waving at you from the end of the street. Real courage, I suspect, is when you can wave back and keep steady on your own path.