Rediscovering You: Fear

The simulation of what could be but isn't.

Fear is something that controls all of us at some time in our lives. It is said that the average human has around 7 major fears that prevent us from living our best lives. As babies we are only born with two fears; fear of falling and fear of loud noises. If a baby feels it is about to fall, its body actually reacts automatically to try and protect itself; if babies hear loud noises, they cry. If these are the only two fears we are born with, then it means that the rest are learnt fears and if we can learn to have those fears, we can also unlearn them.

We have both physical fears such as a fear of enclosed spaces or a fear of blood - something that we can actually physically interact with, and then we have more emotional fears such as fear of being alone, fear of disappointment and fear of the unknown. These emotional fears you can’t physically interact with and can be hard to overcome because they are difficult to measure. For example if you are fearful of small spaces, then you can practice standing in an enclosed space, you can measure the size of the space and you can measure the time you stand in that space for before you need to come out of the space. On the other hand, fears you can’t physically interact with (lets call them ‘abstract' fears) are harder to measure in terms of exposure to them. It’s because of this lack of measurement that allows people to be trapped by these fears for sometimes their whole lives.

False Evidence Appearing Real

Fear Scale

You may wonder “Eight, how can I combat these fears if I have no way of measuring my success in overcoming them?”.

Well, if there is no way of measuring them that exists, then you have to create your own form of measurement. For me, I have a fear scale based on distressed levels. 10 is the highest level of distress and 0 is no distress at all. Fear can be a healthy thing and it protects us from many things and that is why I only ever attempt to reduce my distress to 1 and not completely eradicate it by lowering it to a 0. Distress level 1 is me acknowledging the fear and acknowledging the feeling but also evaluating it calmly, realising that it is nothing to worry about and then reacting appropriately.

To design your distress scale, it’s a good idea to start with your physical fears - these are usually the easier ones to identify because they probably effect you on a more obvious level such as fear of spiders or fear of heights or fear of riding a bike. These are also more likely to effect you less and so they would probably be in the 1-5 of your scale.

Next, you need to be aware of your abstract fears such as fear of abandonment, fear of failure, fear of success or any that you can’t physically hold or physically measure. You may struggle at first to identify these fears if you’ve never done any self searching and have little idea behind what causes the actions you take in your life. If you struggle with this, I recommend asking the people close to you with whom you trust and getting them to name the top 3 abstract fears they think you have. After you have asked a decent number of people, look at the list you have created and see if there are some that people have mentioned a lot. The abstract fears people have mentioned a lot in relation to you are most likely to be the fears you need to work on and also the ones that scare you the most.

Abstract fears often come from much deeper psychological trauma, unlike surface level fears. A fear of flying on aeroplanes is usually a surface level fear and could have been created after you watched a film about a plane crash when you were younger. Although the fear feels very real, the fear doesn’t come from first hand experience. On the other side of the spectrum, you have abstract fears which develop most commonly through personal experience. For example, fear of disappointing may have arisen from having strict parents who you always felt you were disappointing hence it develops into a major fear and prevents you applying for new jobs or clubs or being in a relationship since you are afraid to disappoint someone.

Once you have all your fears, both abstract and surface level written down, begin to consider each fear independently, thinking, “How distressed would I be thinking about this fear happening?”. Notice I’ve worded the question very carefully. I have not asked how you would feel if it happened but instead how you would feel thinking about it happening. This is a very big difference we need to learn to distinguish if we want to move forward. Most commonly, the reaction someone has to the possibility of the bad situation happening is much worse than their reaction if the bad thing actually happens. This is because of a universal fear, the fear of the unknown. We often fear situations when we don’t know what the outcome would be or we don’t know how we would cope. When the fear has already come true, there is nothing left that is unknown, the fear happened and you now know what happened and how you reacted which means there is no longer a reason to fear that particular thing and so your brain moves onto the next fear.

On your distress scale have two columns, one that measures the distress you feel when thinking and worrying about it and the second column is for you to fill in once you have actually attempted the thing your scared of. If your scared of rejection, think about something in your life that the fear of rejection is stopping and then do that thing. Think of it like an experiment to help you get a better understanding of you and your reactions to things. If you don’t get rejected then acknowledge how you feel, maybe even write it down, and then move onto the next action you should take to overcome your rejection fear. The whole point of the exercise is to keep going until you get rejected. It may be that you were rejected after a job interview or you were rejected by your top university but after that rejection happens you need to pay attention to the feeling and also to the level of distress. When you have done that, you record your level of distress in the second column. Each time you expose yourself to the fear you add a column and your distress number and watch as eventually, after you keep repeating this, you’ll see a gradual reduction in how scared you are of that particular fear. Eventually that fear that used to cause you a distress level 10, will become just a bad memory back when you let it control you. This distress scale also helps monitor your progress so you can congratulate yourself as you work your way down the scale.

Paying Attention to your Body

Despite being in our minds, fear is often displayed through physical reactions. Some people have trouble breathing, some people’s hand shake, and some people have goosebumps appear on their skin. Paying attention to what your body does when you are scared is an important part of learning to move on. Using an example, lets pretend that person A has a fear of dying and whenever they think about this fear, a pain starts to form in their left wrist. It’s a kind of pulsing pain but it only ever happens when they are thinking about their fear of death or worrying they might die instantaneously. The next time they think about death and the shooting pains start, instead of focusing on the fear, they focus on the pain shooting through their left wrist. This method of thinking about the present as a way of solving fear is actually originally from Buddhist teachings. Fears are predictions, they project possible future outcomes which we don’t want to happen. By focusing purely on the present, we shift our focus away from the prediction of bad fortune, which is fear, and focus on what we know is definitely happening. If person A focuses on the pain in their wrist, they can feel it pulsing, if they focus on it more they can count how many times it pulses. Rather than being concerned about dying, something they know will definitely happen eventually, they are able to focus on something else long enough for the actual feeling of fear to subside. This is a method that I have tried myself and can reassure you does work if you focus and give your mind time to readjust it’s focus from future predictions to present events. It’s something that’s tough at first but so incredibly rewarding and somewhat fascinating as you focus, you draw your attention away from the fear just long enough for it to subside. As the emotional reaction to the fear subsides, so will the physical reaction and pay attention to your body as the physical reaction fades. Doing this on a regular basis is a helpful way of letting your body know that you care enough about it to pay attention to it while also letting it know that it doesn’t have to react in this way every time you think of a particular topic. This peaceful technique of awareness helps with physical reactions your body may have to fear.

The Simulation

“Acknowledge fear - be aware of it, think of it like seeing an old friend that you drive by on the motorway. You may wave to them to acknowledge you've seen them, but you don't stop the car.”

I mentioned in my previous blog about the idea of acknowledging fear. I referred to it like driving down the motorway and seeing an old friend drive past you on the other side of the road; you may wave to them to acknowledge that you’ve seen them but you would never consider stopping the car in the middle of the motorway in order to say hello. Instead, you would keep moving forward and perhaps text them later to say hello or see how they are. With fear it’s important to learn to create an override button, the kind of button that allows you to keep moving forward even when you notice your fear. This button should say something like “This physical reaction is not physically harmful to me”. This is when the idea of a fear simulation comes in. If you imagine a firefighter training in a training facility - it simulates a real life fire but that’s all it is - a simulation. It’s a test to see how you’ll react if the situation was real. The building the firefighter is in has controlled fire, meaning the people running the simulation can turn the fire on and off, there are also no real people in real danger but the firefighter is aware of this before entering the simulation. When you expose yourself to a particular fear you have, your body is going to react. It may be that your breathing gets more difficult or your skin begins to get goosebumps or parts of your body, such as your hands or legs, begin to shake and you feel you cannot keep them steady.

Lets think of you exposing yourself to the fear, like the firefighter entering the simulation. Like the firefighter, you enter knowing that whatever you feel inside the simulation will not affect you once you are out of the simulation. Just like the firefighter knows that the dummy inside the fire is not a real person, they know they will leave the simulation unharmed. Anxiousness that comes as a result of fear, is a temporary reaction that has no long lasting physical effects. If we feel we can’t breathe, our body will always find a way to get that oxygen into our body even if it has to force us. It may do this by making us thirsty and then we will drink water which holds oxygen. My body forces me to yawn when it can’t get enough oxygen because a yawn forces me to open my airways.

It sounds obvious but it is easy to forget, anxiety is only in your head. It’s not asthma, it isn’t actually preventing you from breathing, it just feels like it with no actual physical damage.

Facing a fear is all about seeing how long you can sit with the anxiousness. At first, this may only be a few seconds but that’s more than not doing it at all. After you begin exposing yourself to the things that scare you, you will eventually learn to tolerate your body’s reaction. Once I had a fear, that when exposed to it, my body would paralyse for around half an hour before it returned to its original state. To prepare for this exposure, I had to let myself know that anything I was about to experience was just a simulation and the effects I felt were not long lasting. In fact, the more I did this exposure, I would find the paralysis would eventually subside and I’d be free to carry on my day.

Anyway, because I knew my body would paralyse from past experience, I knew to put pillows on the floor so that when I fell, I wouldn’t actually hurt myself. I also did the first few exposures sitting down to minimise the distance I fell. As a said before, the first time I did the exposure, my whole body collapsed and paralysed for around 30 minutes. It was very uncomfortable and at the time I felt completely helpless but I kept telling myself that I was doing it in a controlled situation so that later I would not fear the thing I once feared anymore and that after this was over, I would be able to live my life more fully. I also told myself that the physical reaction my body was having was simply because I had never taught it any other way to handle the situation and that this exposure was my way of teaching my body an alternative way of handling the fear by pushing through it.

This may all seem unreachable right now but I assure you if you keep opening yourself up to these kinds of things and do them in small, but regular, chunks you will find that you eventually get there. If it gives you any hope, after the 5th time of doing the exposure, my body decided paralysing itself wasn’t the most effective way of dealing with it and so my brain halved the amount of time it took for my body to recover. Rather than taking half an hour, it took 15 minutes to recover and I was back up and walking. I can say now that after more exposure to my fear, my body no longer reacts by paralysing itself. I’m still working on it and sometimes there are days where I’m stressed and I’m tired and I face the simulation with a little less strength. My breathing becomes difficult but despite me not being fully there yet, the idea of entering a simulation and coming back out again afterwards helps me tolerate the anxiousness while I'm inside the simulation because I know it’s not real.

Fears are unique to everyone but fear itself is universally felt. The point of this blog entry was to help you understand the concept of fear because if you understand the concept and deconstruct it then it becomes easier to, not only know yourself, but also be persistent in overcoming your fears.

All the best,

Eight