Overcoming Fear
From HowTo.Lifehack
Fear can be an obstacle in motivating yourself. You may be too worried about the outcome that you can't make an attempt.
Contents |
[edit] Courage is Overrated
Solving emotional problems is important, and developing courage is valuable. But, don't assume that it is simply fear or social conditioning that forms the bulk of your problems. Some fears are irrational, others are the result of your past experiences and expectations.
If your scared to start a business, there is probably good reason for that. Starting a business can be expensive and difficult, especially if you've never done it before. Fear is an emotional compass to keep you from making bad decisions.
The real triumph over fear isn't the positive swelling of confidence or motivation. Instead, the victory is in the ability to recognize your fear, become aware of it, and decide intelligently whether you are going to follow its advice. Let fear be an advisor to you, but not a master.
Intelligent courage is worth more than blind confidence. It is the ability to weigh the potential loss with potential gain and make a rational decision. Even when the amount of information is limited and fear feels overwhelming.
[edit] Progressive Training
Intelligent courage, the ability to move emotional decisions into the realm of understanding and logic, isn't easy. Some fears are mild anxieties, while others terrorize, freezing you before you can make a decision. Social situations, tests and risky environments can be a source of fear.
The first way to help reduce fear is to progressively eliminate it. This is often necessary when the fear is irrational and keeps you from taking action. Progressive training is often used in weight lifting. This way bodybuilders lift slowly increased amounts of weight so their muscles can handle the physical burden.
Progressive training for fear involves building your emotional muscles and desensitizing you to a specific fear.
Let's say you want to do some public speaking, but getting up in front of a crowd scares you to death. Progressive training would say you start small and increase the fear threshold slowly so it becomes manageable. This might mean:
- In your first week you try just giving a talk to five or ten people.
- During the second week you try speaking to a formal crowd of fifteen or twenty.
- Keep practicing on that and in two months you can try speaking to a crowd of fifty.
- Eventually you should be comfortable speaking in front of hundreds or thousands.
[edit] Tips for Progressive Training
Progressive training can be difficult when the environment wants you to do something all at once. Turning up the dial on fear to slowly eliminate it isn't as simple as adding another five pounds to the dumbbell. Here are some suggestions:
- Join groups. Toastmasters is great for public speaking. Find organizations that practice skills you wish to become better at and you can take time to eliminate the fear.
- Create milestones. Where no groups exist, create specific milestones representing levels of difficulty. In social situations this could mean saying hi to a stranger at the bottom and starting up a conversation with a group of strangers at the top.
- Take time. Don't expect to conquer your fears in a night. Instead work slowly to release the grip fear has on you to start making decisions intelligently. Think months and years, not days and weeks.
[edit] Information
Another way to combat fear is to get new information. Information itself can't be a complete cure for fear. Often data is limited and decisions need to be made on only a fraction of the whole. But finding the right info does two major things:
- It helps rational decision making. If new information boosts your rational assertion of the correct choice, it can give you added motivation to release the grips fear has on you.
- Emotional information can reduce fear. Although your fears won't usually release just through statistics, emotional info can persuade you to become more courageous.
[edit] Research
Prepare and research heavily for what you want to do. Talk to public speakers if you want to start speaking. Ask people about their experiences with something you want to do. Get the right information from the start so you can decide consciously.
- Read books. Reading books that give you great examples of why your fear is misguided can resolve you to action.
- Audio tapes. Often motivational material has less specific information to your fear, but it can give you an emotional boost that, at least temporarily, can boost your courage.
[edit] Practice Selective Memory
Blind optimism is a practice I don't recommend for intelligent thinking. But if you've decided that a course of action is wise, practicing selective memory can give you the right emotional references to back up your logical decision.
Selective memory means you pick out references from your past, others pasts and even visualizing from your future that back up your will. If you want to ask someone on a date, don't think back to the times you've failed in relationships or been rejected, but pick out references where you felt attractive and successful.
Because your memory doesn't average experiences but picks out specific incidents, it can't be relied on to determine results. You may have had 188 moments of success and 14 moments of failure, but your brain can only remember one moment - either 100% success or 100% failure. You might as well take over this process and use it to your advantage to conquer your fears.
[edit] Worry and Fear
For women, fear is often experience and expressed as worry. Worse, we often worry about the wrong things. How rational are our fears?
In late 2006 a study discovered the word evoked the greatest fear. The study included the words spider, snake death, rape, murder and incest. “Shark” evoked the strongest reaction.
But why? Sharks rarely come in contact with us. Three reasons: the seeming randomness of their strike, the lack of warning for it and the apparent lack of remorse.
Why this is especially important for women to understand? We women worry more than men. Much more. And worry leads to fear, as Adrianna Huffington has noted in her book Fearless. Yet, how can we know when a fear for personal safety is justified and when a worry is sapping our spirit and making us see the world simply as a dangerous place?
“Our fears are fashioned out of the ways in which we perceive the world,” wrote Gavin Becker, author of The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence.
Recognize when someone’s hostile or other less apparently dangerous actions are, in fact, a danger to you, so you can act to protect yourself, and not let unfounded fears and worry contaminate your life.
Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain or death. Said DeBecker, “When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections.
When you feel it, take notice to find the link back to see if you need to take action. That’s important because as the “shark” study showed, our fears are not always “rational.” Yet we can put ourselves in danger when we disregard our genuine fears.
The most apparently unlikely people are predators. While the media often portray human violence as random, de Becker points out that it seldom. You can anticipate the patterns in most cases, if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and take action.
You can better protect yourself by learning to recognize and act on the intuitive signals you pick up but reject as unfounded.
Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture.
Worry, anxiety, concern and wariness all have a purpose, but they are not fear. Any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really should not be confused with fear.
Worry will not bring solutions. Worry distracts from finding solutions. It is a form of self-harassment.
To free yourself from worry sooner, understand what it really is. Most people worry because it provides some secondary reward such as:
• Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.
• Worry allows us to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something. Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.
• Worry is a cloying way to have a connection with others. Worry somehow shows love. The other side of this is the beleif that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about that person. As many people who’ve been worried about know well, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.
• Worry is a protection against future disappointment. After you complete an important project where the success of your approach won’t be known for some while, for example, you can worry about it. Ostensibly, if you can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens.
But how would you want to spend the time while you find out: worrying, playing or initiating another action on another endeavor?
For some people, worrying is a “magical amulet”, according to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman. Some people feel it wards off danger. They truly believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening.
Most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur. This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen.
The connection between real fear and worry is similar to the relationship between pain and suffering.
Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life. Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life. Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens your life.
When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?” To be free of fear and yet still get its gift (to protect you from dangerous situations), consider these techniques:
1. When you feel fear, listen.
2. When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it.
3. If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.
We Choke on Anxiety Anxiety, unlike real fear and like worry, is always caused by uncertainty. it is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence. If you predict you will be fired and you are certain that your prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired, but about the ramifications of losing a job.
Predictions in which you have a high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever you need to do. You can reduce your anxiety by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty. It is worth doing, because the word anxiety, like worry, stems from a root that means “to choke,” and that is just what it does to us.
Our imaginations can be fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law: “Only that which is absent can be imagined.” In other words, what you imagine -- just like what you fear -- is not happening.
