Fear can be paralyzing, it takes away your dreams, your life, your soul. For anyone who suffers with severe anxiety, fear can be a constant. It’s with you at work, when you’re out with people, when you’re at home alone. Fear can get in the way of enjoying the little things in life, and can impede you from enjoying those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Living in fear is not conducive to a good life. So one must tackle the beast and find the source of it.

Understanding the Root Cause of Fear

Fear exists as part of our evolutionary blueprint, that in some ways, still dominates people’s lives. But instead of protecting us from predators or dangerous situations, in current times it generally permeates instances where it shouldn’t. We’ve all experienced fear at some point, your first date, taking a big test, going for a job interview. But when everything in life is surrounded by paralyzing fear, you have a severe problem. Sometimes it is to just one thing in the form of a phobia, such as a fear of spiders. Those are usually easy to identify, and therapy can help overcome that phobia.

When fear is in everything you experience, you go through elevated levels of stress hormones, which in the long-term is extremely detrimental to your health. Fear can often be attributed to a lack of control. Finding ways to feel control can help process some of those fears. If your fears are a result of catastrophizing thoughts, you can also tackle those with reframing and therapy.

We Learn Fear Through Personal Experiences

If you grew up in an unstable household, arguing may trigger memories, consciously or otherwise, and you experience the feeling of fear. The same fear you felt as a little kid, the same intensity, the same desire of wanting to be invisible, the same inability to deal with the situation. This can not only affect our personal lives, but professional careers too.

If you work with a hot-head, the last thing you want to do is trigger them yelling at you, so you take on extra work, you don’t speak your mind even though you know you are in the right in a meeting with them, and you convince yourself that your lack of confrontation is for the best. What you are doing is enabling fear to dictate your life.

Someone who has experienced a highly traumatic event in their lives, be it a car accident, getting raped, being held captive, living through a natural disaster, to name a few possibilities, all can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. One major instance in your life can then lead to a series of events that become disabling. Your inability to confront what happened to you, and then failing to identify why your triggers are triggers, can only lead to a downward spiral. At some point you need to do the hard work and tackle fear.

Tackling Fear

Exposure therapy can help with fears and phobias. Treatment usually involves being gradually exposed to the cause of the fear in a controlled environment. Working with a counsellor can also help you identify fears you are unaware of. Practice can help you become more self-aware, when you experience fear in your day-to-day life, take note. Jot it down, and then review at the end of the week all the times you felt fear.

Do you know what caused the fear? What was the situation leading up to it? How long did you hold on to that feeling? Did it cause a domino effect with the rest of the day? Being aware of how our feelings impact our thoughts and actions, will help you develop strategies to change your emotions. And vice versa, catastrophizing thoughts can trigger feelings of fear and your respective actions. Figure out what you could have done differently in those situations. And next time you are experiencing it again, remember what your plan was.

You can also try to identify what things or situations make you feel in control and try to actively expose yourself to it. For example, if you feel great teaching someone how to read, look into mentoring opportunities that can help you do it regularly, while building your inner strength and sense of control. The more you do it, the more that good feeling stays with you, and in turn, you can find other activities that do the same. The greater sense of control you have over your life, the less fear has a chance to take over it.

What are your fears?

Setbacks will happen, especially when confronted with unexpected circumstances. Don’t panic, that is normal. The great thing is that you will bounce back faster and better each time because of all the work you have put into being less fearful. Remember that fears are often the result of a perceived lack of our control. Once you find a way you can regain that control, the fear diminishes or disappears altogether.

IMAGE CREDIT: Unsplash | Camila Quintero Franco.