Fear impacts us all. We can live a more fulfilling life when we have less fear and anxiety. Examining my own life I took a look at how to move through fear and what fear really is.
21 sharks. My husband and I went on a paddleboarding excursion in the Florida Keys a couple of weeks ago and in two hours we came across 21 sharks. We planned on snorkeling on the reefs, or a wreck, or the mangroves, he was still all for it… me… not so much. I’d been thinking about the emotion, Fear and the different kinds of it, how it crops up in our lives, how it stifles us, and how it can keep us from being who we want to be. How to move through different aspects of fear is a topic I think about often. Fear is not all bad, mind you, it can also keep us alive, and that’s the reason it exists in the first place.
Humans are born with two innate fears, the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling, the rest… are fears we learn or create. I glided over shark after shark just watching them. I was thinking maybe my fear of them isn’t valid, my husband isn’t afraid. Then my inner rationalist said, “Why are you comparing your fear to someone else’s? They’re not you. If it is present it is real and valid in some way, even if you don’t like it.” That cheered me up a bit.
The questions invigorated me. I love questions. What makes some people afraid or anxious about something specific and others not at all? How do we go from two to the hundreds of possibilities out there? We all know about facing our fears to overcome them. That there is clarity or rationality to seeing them for what they are. I’m not suggesting fear isn’t valid, it is in some way. Although, not always the way we first think. In fear’s most benevolent form (haha) it is there to keep us safe and alive. However, I would argue that many of our constructed fears do more harm to us than good.
Many years ago I had an extreme anxiety of emails. This anxiety was definitely not helping me stay safe or alive. The cortisol bath I had with the tons I got each day was actually harming my health. Why though? Why was my body reacting that way to emails? I changed my perception and it made a profound shift in my life. The below steps were and are incredibly valuable to increasing my daily happiness and my ability to handle stress/anxiety/fear differently. I’ll use my email example as it’s probably pretty identifiable and something we don’t need to be anxious about that tends to lessen the quality of life.
How to move through fear tip #1 – Identify what is actually causing the fear
Fear is one of the basic emotions but there are many forms of it. Low-level would be something like nervousness or being uneasy while high-level would be terror. It’s a wide range. At this point in my life, I wasn’t very good at knowing my emotions or feelings. Something I was quite good at was repressing them. To this day I still practice being aware of them. While working full-time I had also just started my company. I didn’t at this point know what my problem was. Stress seemed to be my constant companion. I had yet to learn how to move through my own fear.
There is a wearable stress tracker that I bought called a Spire Stone, it tracks your breathing among other things. When stressed out, people tend to hold their breath, which increases the stress we feel both mentally and physically. The stone vibrates a bit when you’re holding your breath, which then makes you aware of when you’re doing it. This was the beginning of my intentional path to my lifelong mindfulness practice. I realized that I held my breath when I was doing anything with emails. I became curious about that. The dawning realization that I was damaging my health in some respect because of emails felt terrible. Something had to change, and I love my career, so the emails were there to stay. It was me that had to find a way to change.
2. Breathe through the fear
It’s so simple but we need to be aware of what creates or provokes the fear within us, then we need to intentionally breathe through it. The Spire helped me a lot in this because it caught me at the beginning of holding my breath. Our bodies mimic the response of being relaxed when we breath through the stress or anxiety. That helps us move through the moments of anxiety properly. A great thing about this technique is that no one knows when you’re intentionally breathing, only you.
I used a method called Box Breathing or Square Breathing, it was a game-changer for me. Sit down if possible and intentionally breathe in for a count of 4, hold your breath for a count of 4, inhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4. Repeat. At the beginning of this practice it can make you a bit dizzy but that ends when you are more proficient with it. I didn’t get dizzy, but I have prescribed it to others and have had that feedback.
3. Ask yourself “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
I remember the first time I asked myself that question regarding responding quickly to my emails. I’m not going to lie, it felt like an absurdly urgent matter of life and death. That was how it felt if I let the emotion take root. I asked myself what could happen? The answers were “nothing”, or “they wait for a couple of hours”, or “they solve their own problem”, or “they get annoyed with me.” With that simple question posed, it no longer felt like life and death. In fact, it seemed really manageable. Often, we create a world where our own personal baggage makes more out of our stress than is necessary or wise to do.
4. Ask yourself, “What’s this fear doing for me?”
This is an uncomfortable question and usually has an uncomfortable answer. For me, the fear was validating my self-worth. The vindicating stress of it. That’s what busy, productive, valuable entrepreneurs feel, right? That self-perception was aiding and exaggerating my stress because of the story I told myself. I would have been more productive and less stressed in many ways if I hadn’t been self-sabotaging in making my life harder than it needed to be. Something I realized about myself after figuring out what the fear was doing for me was that I made almost everything harder for me than it needed to be. Why? When things were hard, I could say, “look what did, I overcame that” and could feel worthy, because overcoming things when the odds are stacked against you is valuable right? Another terrible story I was consistently telling myself.
How to move through fear tip #5 – Trace the fear to where the fear started
This ties in the physical, mental, and emotional pieces of why we let fears diminish our lives when they don’t have to. Why was I in some way equating answering some emails with a fight or flight response? Too much of my life has been carelessly spent in this dangerous illusion. The fight or flight response is to protect us from harm or death. In some way, my mind and body were equating this innocuous task with harm or death.
The fear I write about in my story of how a “real” entrepreneur feels and making situations harder on myself than necessary can be traced back to my first job when I was 13 and really even earlier to helping around the house as a young child. The fear ties directly to equating work with being protected and valued.
My childhood fear was if I don’t work, I’ll be sent away = harm or death. If I work and can contribute, I will get to stay = safety. The story that I crafted at a young age was without working I would not have a place in a family and I would not be safe. From that early age until a few years ago, when I felt overwhelmed with work my body and mind responded with the embedded fear of not doing a good job means being unsafe.
Thankfully, it’s no longer like that for me. I still run my company and work, it’s just so much more enjoyable now. Life is so much more enjoyable now. I still use these 5 steps to move through fear when something new comes to my attention.
