Facing Your Fears

Many things in life seem complicated. I have a habit of complicating things even further. I’m sure you know someone like that, “over-thinkers”. Really when looked at objectively many challenges come down to one thing; facing your fears.

Here is an inspirational quote found on Makoviney.net

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt

My wife and I both suffer from panic attacks. We have been through a lot of “stuff” so have learned various strategies for coping with them. Still on occasion something will happen, or we will fear something will happen, and the old panic patterns emerge to knock us back.

The thing we have learned, and seem to have to keep learning, is excessive worrying does absolutely no good. I emphasize “excessive” because a little caution can help you avoid some pitfalls. Panicking while being ruinous to your health also can cause you to make the wrong decisions. Worrying saps your energy and stops you taking opportunities when they arise. Fear of what might go wrong locks you into a holding pattern, clinging onto your ever-shrinking comfort zone and holding you back from better things.

Some people find sharing their problems helps. I don’t actually get much comfort from talking about what is worrying me. My personal strategy is to try to push the anxiety down and think about something else. For me unless someone can take the fear away entirely, for example a doctor telling me there is nothing wrong with me, I would rather just avoid the topic altogether. This I guess is “denial” but it works for me.

Clare gets a lot out of a tapping technique called EFT. People often want to get into debates about alternative therapies. In my opinion I don’t care how it works or if it should, so long as it does. So many people would rather see someone get no comfort at all and take anti-depressants than follow an approach they don’t personally approve or believe in. It’s about personal belief and respecting others rights to hold different beliefs. I was raised Catholic and while I largely fell out with some aspects, and find some of the things done in the name of religion chills my blood, I still believe in God and find comfort in that.

At some point though despite the anxiety you have to keep plodding on. You must deal with the things you have some influence with and try to not chew over things you have no control over every waking moment. Here are some thoughts that help me:

• Does it really matter what others think of you? – A lot of things we fear are not about the thing itself but what the consequences are for our friendships, relationships or reputations. 99% of the time people will not think any less of you, will forgive you or are not worth bothering with. It’s easy to forget that in actual fact most people are pretty decent when given the chance and if they are not decent why are you having anything to do with them? Sometimes this is a fear of loneliness. We have all been there at some point. You have to take comfort from the fact that even if you are completely alone (which is rare) if you try you can meet new people.
• How much of the fear is in your head? – As I said above, I over-think and so compound my own problems. Most fears are not rational. My fear of spiders would make sense if I lived in Australia, not so useful in England. You have to try to overcome emotion with logic. Easier said than done I know. If you are open minded we have found things like NLP and EFT can help take some of the edge off the emotion so you can deal with the actual issue.
• Health fears – Be very careful about looking up health fears on the interweb tubes. What you will find is spam selling products and hyped up worst-case-scenarios. Absolutely not what you need. Go see your Doctor. That is what they are there for, even if you don’t want to “bother” them with your troubles. In most cases you will feel a heck of a lot better from speaking to the expert and if not at least you will be working from a better position than if you had left it longer.
• Kids – We do our best as parents but your kids are individuals who at some point have to do their own thing. The best we can do is bring them up as well as we can and hope the good stuff sticks. Worrying what if will not help them and in fact could just pass on the worrying habit. Tell them they are loved, warn them of real dangers without giving them nightmares, instill them with confidence and trust. That’s pretty much all we can do.
• Financial Meltdown – Finances do sometimes keep me up at night but in reality there are things you can do. When things are going well put some money aside. When things aren’t going so well take concrete steps to do something about it. Many people get into financial difficulties because they bury their heads in the sand hoping everything will turn out ok in the end. Problems can be avoided by carefully monitoring cashflow, sticking to a budget (that allows for rainy-day savings), if necessary cutting back, not buying every shiny precious you see and if it all goes pear-shaped getting help. Swallow your pride, the Joneses don’t care if you keep up with them or not.

Of course I am no expert on dealing with fear, I am just another bloke who gets in a panic every now and then. I find blogging therapeutic so this post has helped me already, I hope it helps someone else too.