Fear doesn’t just make you anxious. It limits what you can do, because you naturally steer clear what you fear.

For example, let’s say you’re afraid of water. According to Harvard Medical School, the fear of water (or aquaphobia) is common. And it causes some people to avoid the kind of deep water they’d encounter on a cruise. Others have a fear of getting into water, and so won’t go swimming or even use a bathtub.1

Fortunately, there are ways to greatly lessen or even completely overcome this fear. They take time and often include gradually acclimating yourself to deeper and deeper water.

But you can’t simply ignore this fear and hope it goes away. Harvard Medical says that to overcome aquaphobia you must, “Try to think about what exactly you might be nervous about. If you can identify the fear, then you can look for solutions.”

This is good advice for defeating any kind of unreasonable anxiety—especially if it involves money.

According to a recent survey by Alianz Life Insurance, a “remarkable” 61% of Americans say they are more afraid of running out of money in retirement than they are of death. And yet 40% of respondents said they don’t have a financial plan for retirement and “they’re planning to just figure it out when they get there.”

If we can believe the medical experts at Harvard, that’s not a good way to deal with a significant fear.

Running out of money in retirement is a real possibility—if you haven’t forecast how much money you’ll need to live and come up with a plan to save up that amount of money while you’re working.

However, funding your retirement is more than a simple math problem. Your post-work life is going to be different. It would be prudent to begin by acknowledging that change and setting expectations accordingly. Then you can begin to plan your finances around what your new chapter will look like.

But that’s not all. You need to take into account the fact that life is full of surprises. There are going to be some factors that affect your life that you simply can’t predict right now. And that’s why your plan needs to include some flexibility. When an unexpected situation arises (financial, health-related, or otherwise), you need to have options in place.

There’s no need to live in fear. Your trusted financial advisor can help you talk through the specifics of the retirement you hope to have, then he or she can help you with the financial planning so that you’ll know how much you’ll need to live on and can be on track to save for that goal.