What do you fear? Not being good enough, not being loved, not belonging and being alone? It may be failure, success, being too fat, being too thin, being too friendly, not being friendly enough, being too lazy, working too hard. You may fear spiders, snakes, public speaking, even death. Maybe it’s the creepy old man down the end of the street, your fifth-grade teacher who you sometimes still bump into down at the shops.
Fear, as irrational or logical as it may be can be paralysing. It can waste your time and energy, cause you emotional distress, make you doubt yourself. It can ruin relationships. It can prevent you from living the life you truly want. Fear is insidious. It’s sneaky. And it can affect you without you even being aware of it.
However, whatever it is that you fear, if you want to overcome the fear, you can.
The first step in conquering fear is being aware of it. If you’re having trouble with something, whether it be achieving something or communicating with someone, chances are fear has a lot to do with it.
Fear can originate in a number of ways. It can be learnt behaviour, anchored by past experiences. For example, when you were 12 years old you had a freak encounter with a ginormous python and every time someone mentions bushwalking you have the emotional response of fear (either consciously or not). You may even fear things you haven’t experienced yourself but have only witnessed and experienced empathically.
You may have been conditioned to be fearful of certain things by modelling the behaviour of those close to you when you were growing up. For example, your dad may have had a fear of success and now you don’t know how to be successful without having to constantly fight your own fears of it. Or your mum may have been concerned as a young baby that you’d be burned by fire so she kept you away from it by making you scared of it so now you experience anxiety around an open flame.
Fear can also come from the ego. The ego’s job is to protect your identity and keep you in your box. It uses the fear of the unknown to prevent you from challenging yourself, because it knows your identity might change if you do.
Given that fear is something commonly experienced in our society, fortunately there’s many different ways that have been found to assist you in overcoming it. Here’s a list of my top 13, I hope you find one in there that suits you.
1. When you’re facing a fear, acknowledge where the fear is coming from, whether it be your past experiences, conditioning or ego and then use logic to determine whether the fear is justified. If we’re honest with ourselves, the only time fear is relevant is when our survival or those of our loved ones is at stake.
2. Be aware of how you manage your fears now. Do you eat too much, drink too much or neglect your loved ones? How is your fear-based behaviour affecting other areas of your life? Is it worth it or do you need to take action?
3. Explore EFT Tapping. This involves thinking about the fear whilst tapping on certain meridian points in the body in order to anchoring the fearful thought with feelings of safety, thereby breaking their association with a feeling of anxiety. There are stacks of resources on the web where you can tap along.
4. Hypnotherapy can take you back to the time where the fear was installed in the sub conscious mind and sever the emotional link with the memory in question.
5. NLP (Neuro linguistic therapy) offers some really quick, simple techniques for overcoming phobias if this is your particular fear.
6. Talk about the fear. With a loved one, a friend, a complete stranger or a therapist. Talking about fears really puts them into perspective and helps you define the issue you’re facing, thereby helping you decide on a method to overcome it.
7. If you’re not much of a talker, journal it. One way or another, articulate it. Talking and writing about it helps to release it as well.
8. Give your fear a meaning. If the universe was trying to tell you something by having this fear or the experiences that you associate with it, what would it be saying?
9. Exposure therapy involves facing your fears. The idea behind it is that once you’ve faced your fears and survived you realise you no longer have anything to fear.
10. Use affirmations to back yourself, love yourself and be kind to yourself while you’re travelling through your fears.
11. Physical exercise can help to release trapped fears within you. It’s common to associate some anger with your fears, so as you exercise, think about the fear and anger and let it go with each and every effort.
12. Meditation can help to release fear by visualising it either within you somewhere (as a colour or shape) or you holding on to it (perhaps as a helium balloon or a heavy bag) and letting them go.
13. Take slow, calm, deep breathes and breath your way through your fear.
Things to give thought to this week:
· Take some time alone, and maybe with a journal articulate your fear(s). What triggers it specifically? Is it a past memory, conditioning or ego driven? How is it affecting other areas of your life?
· Find someone who you can talk to about it
· If you’ve considered professional help, do some research to find a therapy and therapist who would be able to assist you.
· If your fear had a meaning, what would it be?
· Use your regular exercise routine to consciously release your fears
Here’s a (very) brief experience of meditative relaxation