The secret to overcoming your fears
We fear something or someone that is likely to be dangerous or threatening, as Guy Finley puts it: ”…fear is a self limiting reaction that we cling to in the darkness of our present level of consciousness having mistaken it for a shield of protection”.
If you’re anything like me, the human kind, you’ll relate to this: we’re scared of everything these days:
- your car losing a wheel while you drive 120kms/hr on the highway
- eating too much beef and heart disease
- skin cancer from being in the sun
- lung cancer from second hand smoking
- gaining weight from watching too many Netflix series and bingeing on chips and ice cream(maybe more for pregnant women in this combo)
- plane crashing just as you’re about to go to Hawaii
- having your identity stolen online and bank account emptied
- your cell giving you brain cancer
- having your heart broken
- getting an incurable disease
- losing a loved one
- losing your job
- being wrongfully perceived/judged
- being misunderstood
- losing your wallet
- etc…..
This is a very short list come to think of it!! As I started typing I couldn’t stop, so I decided that it was best leave it at that lol
What is causing these fears?
This week I engaged in conversations about fear with the people in my life and what interesting conversations came out it! One that stirred my interest the most was on fear in relation to anxiety. It was more personal as I’m noticing so many people being anxious these days, including my kids:( this makes me so sad as I recall my 7 year old making himself sick in the morning from anxiety of getting to school and his teacher criticizing him! Can you imagine how scared he must be in order for such a little man to feel like that?! Well is it because we don’t teach them how to process what others project onto them when they are criticized and seeing fear as an external source and not an internal part of us? It could be…as adults we struggle with fear daily. It is limiting our growth, progress, human connections, confidence, career, etc. As we experience one or all of these at once we become anxious. Emotionally it’s too much to process and handle, and we stall our progress.
So how is it that we are anxious when we’re scared?
This is such a complex state to explain and dissect ! I’ve experienced anxiety because of fear when I allowed multiple fears to accumulate without facing them. One example is recent when I was changing jobs, deciding on going back to school, starting my own business and the kids wanting to go to private school. I was scared to make a decision that would impact the kids and their future negatively so I because too anxious that I froze and decided to disconnect from all decisions and take a trip without thinking about any of it, at all!! So I did a full disconnect in order to reconnect with what matters to me: my values-help others, have an impact on people’s lives, take care of my family, always act with integrity! While I did that I realized that all my fears were irrational and served me to justify my lack of decisions, lack of power and my attention seeking state. So I faced all my fears, one by one. And made a list of why I was scared and how I could deal with each one of them in the worst case scenario! Well it turned out that it wasn’t so bad after all. All the plan Bs were safe and I was able to make the best possible decision for my family. All of the fears were external and how I reacted to them was internal. This distinction was an eye opener and it allowed me to make a decision without anxiety or fear, it’s liberating!!
Why are we scared?
We are scared of getting hurt or being humiliated because we feel that we’re having our opinions challenged, or being ridiculed, we feel like we don’t belong, we’re misunderstood — mostly allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and receiving ego punches as you can see! The rest is a survival instinct. And how often is this one present? Not that much unless we live somewhere that forces us to fear for our lives, like the jungle!
This means that everything else happens in our heads! It starts and ends in the outside world by being translated into actions and words deriving from our thoughts. Practicing self awareness and mindfulness meditation allows us to become aware of these thoughts as they occur and see them as an external event, facing it and putting a positive spin to them instead. This removes the self induced fear and prevents anxiety. This puts us in control of our thoughts and lives.
How do we get past our fears ?
We do small things that scare us and force us to step outside of our comfort zone! The more scary things we do, the less scared we become! Dare to proceed while feeling scared! Be curious about it instead of believing in it and making it real. See it as a reaction to something we’re scared of and control it. This will make us stronger to overcome our fears and become fearless. Don’t avoid anything that scares you! This will tell our mind that we’re the one controlling fear and not vice versa. W will learn about ourselves by putting ourselves in that situation instead of imagining that situation. We will see parts of ourselves that we’ve never seen before! We will live those moments and not get carried away by our fears. These unconscious reactions will disappear as the fears do not belong to us. They are external and our thoughts of it made us scared. Fear itself was never ours as a part of us. The fear we felt was in what we thought the situation or the person could do to us, while we were giving them control over us, when the entire time it was our thoughts that drove it to fear. The mind is our most powerful under-utilized tool we have, we give our power away too often, let us reclaim it!!
Start today! One thing that scares you — tackle it:)
“Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom” Marilyn Ferguson