Battle Your Fears (Part 1 – Searching the Source)
What are you scared of?
Everybody has some fears and worries – as humans, we’re programmed to feel fear as a natural response to threats in order to protect and look after ourselves.
But, what happens when your fears begin to take over? Fear can control your life and keep you from following your dreams, prevent you from taking risks, and stop you from living the life that you want and doing the things which you desire.
But…
It doesn’t have to be this way! Fear can hold many people back, and one of the biggest mistakes that you might be making right now is taking your fear at face value.
What you need to understand is that fear can be both real and imagined, and it’s hard for your body and brain to differentiate between the two. Let’s look at two different situations to put this in perspective.
Imagine that there’s an angry bull racing towards you, and you’re wearing a red t-shirt. This would be real fear. You have every reason to be scared if you’re being charged at by a furious horned animal!
Now, imagine that you’ve just turned the lights off after watching a particularly scary horror movie. You know that you’re absolutely safe in your home, but you still can’t shift that nauseous feeling in your gut when you think about some of the scenes from the movie. This fear is imagined.
Fear can be a product of two different things – it’s either due to reality, or a product of your imagination. In general, real fear will be felt by both you and others around you and imagined fear will be personal to you alone. Imagined fear is generated by your beliefs and individual perspective of the world, which is why some people have fears which are completely incomprehensible to others.
For example, a person who fell into a lake as a small child may have a fear of water even into adulthood, whilst somebody who’s never had a scary experience with water could be a professional swimmer with absolutely no fear of scuba diving in the sea. This is because the water in and of itself isn’t something to be fearful of, but your personal experience could make it scary for you.
In general, the fears which hold us back are these imagined fears which are personal to each and every one of us. Just because they’re imagined, however, doesn’t mean that they’re not real – they certainly feel very real to the person who is feeling them.
Conquering the fears which are holding you back relies on you getting down to the source. Discovering what causes your fears is key to facing them head-on and taking control of your own life and happiness. Figuring out what you need to do to push your fears out of your life and no longer allow them to hold you back will involve putting everything into perspective and sifting out the irrational fears from the rational ones.
Once you know where it is that your fears come from and how to deal with them, you’ll become a braver and stronger person. Fear and anxiety can severely hold you back, and taking the steps to gain control over them and no longer allow them to rule your life is a process that will take time, effort, and patience – but it will all be worth it in the end.
Many fears are a product of your own mind, whether it be going to the dentist, flying in a plane, or public speaking. Some fears are caused by a bad or even traumatic past experience, whilst others can be the product of in-fluence from other people.
However, no matter how your fears were established, conquering them is entirely possible when you use the right steps and strategies.
Before you begin, it’s vital to understand that you will need to be patient with yourself. Fear is an extremely strong emotion, and the ‘fight or flight’ response generated by chemicals and hormones in the body can lead to different physical responses which can make facing and conquering your fears extremely difficult.
When you decide to conquer your fears, you need to be aware of what this entails – at some point, you will need to face them. Although the prospect of this is initially terrifying for many, by the time you are ready it won’t seem quite as bad. This is why it’s important to be patient with yourself and resolve to take small steps towards achieving your goal of fearlessness.
Being kind to yourself is crucial when you are learning to conquer your fears, although you’ll need to get a healthy balance between self-care and self-motivation. Finding the balance between the two will involve changing your mindset to include more confidence in yourself and a kinder attitude towards yourself and your feelings. Many of us beat ourselves up for feeling fears that we deem irrational; it’s crucial that you stop doing this and instead accept your fears rather than trying to fight them.
Accepting your fears is the crucial first step that you will need to take before trying any of the following strategies. Fighting a mental battle against your- self and your fears can make it significantly more difficult to gain any positive benefits from any of these strategies, which is why learning to be accepting is key. Learning to accept your fears can even create a sense of calm and positivity which you can’t gain from fighting them.
Take a deep breath, and tell yourself that you accept all of your fears – even the ones that you think are silly. Repeat this process as many times as you need throughout your journey to fearlessness!
Determining the source of your fears and anxieties is the first step that you will need to take in order to eventually be able to take control of your fears and manage them efficiently.
Knowing what is causing your fear is crucial to finding the solutions that you need, and at this point, it is essential to prepare for some serious self-evaluation as well as the need to be completely honest with yourself.
You should also be aware that you may need to revisit some unhappy memories, therefore it’s vital to choose a time when you are feeling calm, relaxed, and energized before you begin to explore the reasons for your fear.
Discovering the reasons for your fear can also help to improve your confidence. For many people, not quite knowing why they’re scared of something can lead to even more feelings of fear – have you ever been scared of fear itself? This is why it’s important to invest time to do some serious soul-searching and delve deep into your memories to discover the sources of your fears, even the worst ones.
Self-Evaluation
In order to discover the source of your fears, it’s important to self-evaluate. This process involves asking yourself a number of different questions, such as what your biggest fears are, what triggers feelings of fear and anxiety in you, and which memories invoke the most anxious feelings in you.
The process may be difficult and could take some time as you unearth memories that you may not want to remember, therefore it’s important to take your time, be kind to yourself and give yourself a lot of self-love.
You may find it helpful to go through this process with a trusted friend, family member, or even a professional therapist.
An easy way to help you to determine the source of your fears is to write them all down on paper. No matter how small or insignificant you may believe your fears to be, jot them all down in front of you, in order of the worst to the least.
Then, write down what you think maybe the source of your fears next to them. For example, if you are afraid of driving due to being in an accident, write ‘driving – traffic accident’. If you come to fear and you’re not sure why you feel it, don’t worry – just concentrate on the ones which you can determine the source of for now.
Possible Sources
When it comes to the source of fear, there can be a range of different reasons. You may feel fear due to something that you have experienced your- self or a traumatic experience that you have been through. If you have been through a frightening experience, it’s highly likely that you’ll feel fear as a response to a similar situation or in fact anything which reminds you of it.
This is why it’s important to jot down the different things which trigger feelings of fear in you, as memories can stick around even from the earliest years of childhood – it’s not uncommon for people to still experience fear as a response to something reminding them of a situation that they experienced as a young child.
Learned Fears
Along with things that you have experienced, other people’s experiences and fears can also contribute to your own emotions and determine what you are fearful of. You may find yourself fearful of certain things even if you yourself have no reason to be as the result of influence from somebody with who you are close to.
Take this as an example. Let’s imagine a little girl who is bitten by a dog. Although she is not seriously hurt, the incident is painful and quite traumatic for her, and because of it, she develops a fear of dogs which remains with her as she grows up and she remains scared of dogs well into her adult life.
As an adult, she has a child. Still fearful of dogs, she won’t let her child play with any dogs and crosses to the other side of the road with her child if she sees a dog walker approaching. Because of this fear, her child learns that dogs are to be feared; subsequently growing up scared of dogs themselves even though they have not personally had a bad experience with any dogs at all.
Think about some of your fears – do you feel them because of a parent or sibling who does? Growing up, was your mom or dad scared of flying, go- ing to the dentist, or did an older sibling display fears of a certain animal because of a bad experience that they had? Some fears can be learned from others, and it is important to distinguish these learned fears from the fears which you have developed due to your own experiences.
Friends and Family
Some people can also develop fears due to something that they have seen a close friend or family member go through. For example, you might see a close friend crash their car and spend a long time recovering from their injuries.
Even though you may not have been directly involved yourself, the trauma of sharing in their experience as a friend and seeing first-hand what they have been through could be enough for you to develop your own fears regarding driving.
It’s important to understand that this type of fear is normal – just because something hasn’t happened to you directly, understanding how it feels due to being close to someone who has experienced it is likely to invoke feelings of fear and anxiety in many of us.
You might also develop feelings of fear and anxiety for the other person who you are close to – for instance going back to the car crash example, you may feel fear for your friend when they begin to start driving their car again. Again, this is normal and part of having a healthy relationship with somebody with who you are close.
However, it’s important to understand that if your fears grow, you could end up holding both yourself and the other person back from living life to its full potential and successfully recovering from the traumatic experience which you saw them have.
Tackling All Your Fears
Because the reasons for and sources of fear can be so diverse, it may take you a while to get down all of your different fears on paper and understand where they are stemming from. It’s vital to realize when you are doing this that your fears may not always be for yourself, and sometimes the source of them is not always something that happened to you.
For example, you may be fearful when your child begins to go to school by themselves as you have heard about kidnappings on the news.
Even if some fears aren’t taking over your life and are not at the point of holding you or others in your life back, it’s a good idea to list them all so that you can decide which fears need working on and which ones you are at a healthy point with.
Knowing which fears you are dealing with in a healthy manner can also help to serve as an example of what you want to achieve with the fears which are causing more problems for you.
When tackling your worst fears, it’s helpful to be aware of the things you do when faced with the fears that you manage well so that you can make the effort to consciously implement these strategies.
Published in Motivation
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