What is fear?
Fear is a healthy and natural emotion that you will never eliminate from your life (sorry!), it’s there for good reason. There are fear receptors all over your body that are hard-wired to protect you from danger, not feeling any fear at all would leave you vulnerable to all sorts of nasties.
Fear comes in many different guises, from the low-level nervousness you might feel before going on stage to do a presentation or chat up up a new beau. To the paralysing fear that might cause you to freeze and prevent any action at all. Fear manifests in different ways in order to protect you, and its triggers can change at different stages of your life.
Some fear reactions are coded and instinctive, they are built into us subconsciously from a young age as a result of our environment from the womb onwards. Others are learned from your personal experience. For example, if you were bitten by a dog as a child then fear of dogs in adulthood could be directly attributed to that lived experience. It’s your brain’s way of telling you to be careful as it remembers what happened last time.
How does fear affect behaviour?
Heightened sense of awareness – When something changes in your body will send signals to the brain to assess the situation and check that it’s safe for you to be there. Regular healthy fear will increase your sense of perception of situations and develop empathy for different people in different contexts.
It can paralyse action – Overwhelming fear can stop any action at all. Have you ever frozen on the spot when you don’t know what to do? Or found yourself feeling anxious and faffing around situation but doing nothing directly to tackle it and move forward
It can spur momentum – The fear of being stuck, for example, can spur new learning and development goals, a move to a new house or country. Or the fear of not fitting into that expensive dress you bought, might make you get your backside to the gym. We, humans, are bizarre creatures and are more motivated by the fear of loss than the glory of gaining.
Can fear be a good thing?
Even in challenging situations, fear is a good thing. It’s the body’s way of sifting through all the evidence it has about a situation and ensuring it’s the best thing for you. This is thought to be how travel is perceived to “open the mind” Constantly being in new situations forces new assessments and tunes these skills to a fine art.
In that respect it gets us out of our comfort zones, it challenges us to see the world from multiple different viewpoints to assess whether they are good for us and the people we care about. From choices like:
- Should I take that trip?
- Should I go out for that run?
- Should I quit my job?
It forces you to assess the real-time consequences of each to ensure that you are doing what is instinctively right for you based on your coded and learned experiences.
Improved emotional intelligence helps assess situations earlier, from multiple points of view and can help bring fear along for the ride in a productive way instead of allowing it to stop the show.
How can I manage my fear?
There are multiple ways you can learn to work with your fear instead of against it, here are two that I love to use with clients.
Make a date with your fear
What? Hear me out! Settle yourself down in a coffee shop, a quiet corner of the house or even the park if it’s sunny. Take it out somewhere you would usually be and have a chat with it. Take a pen and paper with you, draw a line down the middle and on one side write down all the things you are afraid of in all their glory. Go to town with it all the details, what is the worst thing that could happen if this fear comes to pass? Put it all in there.
Then on the other side write down the truth of what you would do if that was to happen.
For example,
what would happen if you were so successful at work that you had a waitlist of clients?
You could invest in a new system or assistant to manage them.
What if you were so successful on dating apps you had a queue of people waiting to date you?
You could create an excellent filtration system that narrowed down the best matches for you!
Come up with a solution or truth for them all, as some of them will be fear simply trying to keep you still and safe and some of them you will be able to handle with a simple solution, and others will be just plain fear and will make you laugh with the ridiculousness. It’s a quick and dirty way to get it all out there in bullets and easy to refer to when fear pops its head back up again.
If you are more of a writer and are ready to get up close and personal with your fear the next one might appeal.
Write a letter to your fear
Now this is similar to the fear date but with an added nuance, I want you to write a letter to your fear but also your courage and observe what happens.
Start with the letter to your fear, address it and describe in detail how it makes you feel. What senses are activated when you experience fear?
- What does it look like?
- Does it have a shape?
- What colour is it?
- What form does it take? Animal, object, person etc
- How does your body react when it is around?
- What emotions come up when fear is around?
Go to town on all the details of what fear brings up for you when it appears in your life. Send it love for the lessons it teaches you and the situations it tends to make repeat appearances in and thank it for what it offers you in wisdom and guidance.
Then… Write a letter to your courage. Inviting all the same details as you did for fear.
- How does it feel when you engage with your courage?
- What shape does it take?
- How do you respond?
- How does your energy feel or change when you engage with each of them?
- Is it the same or different?
Then come the most important questions… which do you believe? Which would you like to spend the most time with?
You can choose! And having these detailed descriptions can help you engage with and manage them as they come up. You might even want to name them so you can address them directly, I have clients that find this helpful. My mind was blown the first time I did this, it’s inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic
Please let me know if you try either of the exercises, I’d love to know how you get on!
If you want more support, sign up for updates and listen to my complimentary activate your sweet life visualisation to get you started living more of your own sweet days or book a Spark Session to chat about working with me 1:1.