In my last article I discussed the emotional response to fear. We talked about what is happening in our mind and body when we experience fear. I suggest you revisit “The Power of Fear, Pt. 1,” as the following will build upon it.
Today I want to provide some practical wisdom from my own experience and the experiences of people I have worked with, regarding triumph over fear!
Fear once sat in the driver’s seat of my life…
For decades, I intentionally limited my environment by finding excuses not to explore new places. I drew a mental comfort radius around the epicenter of my life and refused to leave it. I did this because the unknown freaked me out, and I needed to feel in control to feel safe. I remember a time where I would immediately map out the entire room, looking for exits and bathrooms, upon entering a new place. A nervous sensation of needing to pee would overcome me even if I had just gone minutes before we got there.
Social interactions felt paralyzing to me. While my friend group appeared to be vast to bystanders, it lacked any real depth or intimacy. Socialization centered around drinking and drama. This worked well for me because I needed to be well lubricated or numbed to partake in these events, else my mind would race with concern about how the other people perceived me.
Convinced that my value in the world could only come from others, my making friends was really a search for any form of acceptance I could attain. This led to “friendships” with more unhealthy individuals, who introduced me to new bad habits.
When it came to trying new things and having novel experiences, I always came up with an excuse to why I could not partake. Work was my favorite excuse. “Sorry I am too busy with, fill in the blank” followed by some line about how everything might fall apart if I didn’t get the job done. Ironically, I stayed in a job that did not challenge or fulfill me for way too long. I was afraid if I went for a bigger and more challenging role, that I may fail… and what would everyone think if I failed?
These fears didn’t just limit my life experience, they created a breeding ground for unhealthy beliefs to fester inside me. Deep inside I craved adventure and novelty. I longed to be a social butterfly. Somewhere along the line walls were built up around that person, and I began to believe that I was somehow defective and less than. This belief left me bouncing between self-loathing and feverishly trying to prove something.
Resentment would take over my mind during the periods of self-loathing, where I would convince myself that everyone else became “successful” the easy way. That they somehow had a free pass. Contempt would consume me during periods of proving myself. I would mentally pick apart people and places to prove that I was better than them, helping me boost myself up. Doing so also gave justification to why I didn’t want to be around them. I would find myself in a continuous downward spiral of feeling less than something, followed by superiority over it by diminishing its value and then less than the devalued version of it that I created.
One day it all came crashing down and loss forced me to confront reality. From this place I finally looked in the mirror, wept and said “I’m done pretending”
My hope is that you are able to step out of your own fear cycle before loss.
Through trial and error in my own life, I found the below process to work for me. I have shared this same process with many men who have shared similar results. Now I place it here for you…
The first step to getting out of the fear cycle is learning to identify when you are in a fear cycle and understanding how you respond to fear. From here you can begin to interrupt this response.
How do you do this?
For any change process to occur, you must SLOW DOWN
Start to notice the sensations you experience in your body when your fear response is activated. Do you feel a change in your breathing, body temperature, vision, posture? For a couple weeks, simply acknowledge when you are activated by fear and pay attention to how it feels in your body.
Say it out loud…
“I am afraid, my chest feels tight, I cannot catch my breath, I feel hot, and my vision is blurry.”
This practice in and of itself, is a huge step forward! Instead of turning away or hiding from fear, you have begun to look back at it. You acknowledge its existence and have shown it that you are willing to hold your ground.
The next step after calling out fear when it arrives, is to get comfortable with the bodily sensations you identified so they do not continue to escalate your fear response. When these sensations are no longer able to overwhelm you, fear loses its ability to influence your actions and you can begin dissecting the thought patterns that are bringing on the fear in the first place.
How do you do this?
By exposing yourself to controlled yet uncomfortable sensations that mimic what you identified in Step 1. The point is to challenge yourself, by pushing slightly into the discomfort zone, then learning how to get comfortable there until it no longer feels uncomfortable. Then move a little bit further. Each time you do this, you expand your internal tolerance zone and open up greater possibilities in your life.
If experiencing shortness of breath feels overwhelming, practice finding okayness with it by sitting still and breathing through a large straw or pen tube.
Focus on calm deep breaths
Relax your face, neck and shoulders
While breathing, remind yourself that you are safe
Running can also simulate a feeling of shortness of breath and could be the next phase in your process. If you want to take it another step, try running while only breathing through your nose.
After each session, it is important to give yourself time to acclimate and return to a feeling of safety and groundedness.
For the sensation of hot and sweaty, use hot steamy showers, sit in a sauna or steam room, link the sensation of body heat to the shortness of breath by running.
For blurry vision, you can squint while doing tasks, look through glasses that have been altered to be foggy, or spin in place then sit with the dizzy feeling.
Doing exposure therapy is a lot, so be gentle with yourself. If you have to stop a session early, don’t beat yourself up. Be proud of yourself for trying, and come back again the next day.
Coming back is critical!
Right now fear is controlling your actions and choices. It is important not to confuse resistance with gentleness. Fear is sneaky and will try to convince you to stop what you are doing, so it can maintain its foothold in your mind and continue to run your life.
Working with a coach or therapist who has experience in these exposure techniques is often helpful. They can help you come up with an exposure plan, assist you with learning to relax in the moment, keep you accountable and aid in recentering after the exposure.
The next step once you have expanded your comfort zone around the bodily experience of fear, is to understand what triggered the fear in the first place. Next time you notice your fear response become activated, pay attention to the situation that triggered the fear. Begin to observe all the circumstances around the situation.
Where were you?
What was going on?
Who was there?
What did they say?
What you smelled?
Very often, a pattern exists around the external stimuli that triggers our fear response. Here we aim to identify what these stimuli are so we can begin to address the root cause.
This could be an angry wife, a demeaning boss, large gatherings of people, certain smells, certain environments, etc. Take some time to learn your own fear pattern. When you find yourself feeling anxious, fearful or overwhelmed… Pause, take a deep breath and evaluate the situation as objectively as possible. Write down everything you notice, so you can reference it later.
You are like Indiana Jones braving a new and exotic land in search of a valuable piece of antiquity that was stolen by your adversary. Except the land is you, the piece of antiquity is your soul, and the adversary is fear.
This step doesn’t stop here…
Once you have logged down a handful of situations, it’s time to analyze them and expose the truth around the situation. If reading this makes you feel prickly, that is the fear inside you reacting. This step shines the light directly on the darkness of fear and makes it super uncomfortable. Unfortunately, change always has a component of discomfort.
Do not let fear convince you to turn back now!
In any situation, there are facts, perceptions and interpretations. The first thing we need to do when analyzing the situations that triggered our fear, is to separate the facts from our perceptions and interpretations. You can quite literally do this by making three columns and placing the circumstances you wrote about into each column.
In an example where your wife is expressing her feelings regarding you prioritizing work over family time…
Facts are things like:
The actual words she said should there have been a recording of the event
Her visible body movements while she was talking
The volume of her voice increasing or decreasing
Perceptions are how you subjectively sensed the events:
Whether the tone of her voice was kind or agitated
Whether her movements were calm or aggressive
Whether her voice was loud or soft
Interpretations are the personal meaning we place on the facts and perceptions:
What you think those words mean about you, or what you think she wants you to do
What you think her body language is signaling about her emotional state
What you feel her tone and volume is saying about her feelings toward you
While there is some degree of universal interpretation around things like body language and tone, these are still based on learned experience, not fact. Varying childhood experiences have given us all subtle nuances to how we interpret body language and tone. These nuanced clues along with our past life experiences help our brains create a story about the meaning of the situation. The tricky part is that this story may not match the facts or the message the sender was intending to convey. The sender has their own nuanced way they learned to use their body voice to communicate. They have their own lived experience which has created their own story. This leaves plenty of room for miscommunication.
This is why it’s important to separate facts from perceptions and interpretations. Our fear response is here for a reason. To keep us safe. The FACT that a grizzly bear is 25 feet away from us, should trigger a fear response. It’s when we get stuck in fear loops around our mental interpretations of benign events, that we find ourselves in trouble.
Very few of us are living in a world where apex predators are lingering around every corner, or the risk of a life threatening accident exists with everything we do… Yet we all find ourselves clinging to fear stories as though death will most certainly occur with every impatient boss, upset spouse or explosive teenager.
Now that you have separated your interpretations and perceptions from the facts, you can delve into what about them triggers such a fear response in you. I like to use a technique I call
“Why… +5 What-Ifs.”
Once you identify the situation that activated your fear, ask yourself why does this bother me? Then ask yourself five times “what if that came true?”
Here is an example: I am frustrated and angry because my boss is demanding that a project I am leading gets back on schedule…
Why Does This Bother Me? - I am telling myself that my boss will now have a negative view on my performance, while the reason the project is behind schedule is because he has me on too many projects to manage effectively in a standard working day.
What If This Is True? - His negative opinion regarding the timeliness of this project, may lead to poor grading on my performance review and eventually a performance improvement plan or termination.
What If This Is True? - If I am terminated, I will not be able to find a new job because the job market is terrible right now. This is the best job in the area. The pay and benefits are amazing, and I have a short commute.
What If This Is True? - If I cannot find a job within 3 months, we will have to cancel our vacations and suspend the kids’ extra curricular activities. If it takes more than 6 months we may have to sell our house and downsize.
What If This is True? - My kids and wife will be upset and blame me. They will view me as a failure due to my inability to provide for them and eventually my wife will leave me for a man who can, and my kids will resent me for having to move away from their friends.
What if This is True? - I will be alone and my greatest fear “that I am worthless” will be validated
A version of this story runs rampant in the minds of most family men. Many men in this situation choose to buckle down, start working through lunch and staying late to make the boss happy and prevent the doom story from coming to life.
Now he comes home late, misses family dinner and is too exhausted to engage with his children or connect with his wife. Eventually, this route has the opportunity to lead to the exact same place.
So what did he gain?
By asking ourselves “what if this happens” five times, we aid ourselves in getting to the root of the fear. In this case it centers around how this man assesses his self-worth. When we get to the core of the fear, we can do three things:
Evaluate what in this story is truth vs perception and interpretation
Create a new, empowering story around the core fear
Reclaim your life by learning to stand firm in your new story
You are on the path to experiencing limitless freedom from fear!
Stop back to check out the final segment of this series on fear, where we will discuss in detail, how to break free from these fear based stories and learn how to befriend fear to use it as a guide!
Learning to become comfortable with fear, sitting in the moment and then objectively analyzing the circumstances around experience is very hard to do when you are the person living it out. Our activated state gives us blind spots to impartial reality. This is where working with a quality coach, mentor or therapist can be helpful.
My experience working through my own internal fear patterns has given me a great ability to understand and empathize with the fear stories of my clients. If you are tired of being controlled by fear and yearn for an expansive and adventurous life, reach out to set up a no cost exploratory call!