How Does Fear Affect Your Life?

Fear

The two greatest obstacles to achieving success, happiness, fulfillment and inner peace are fear and worry. Whilst fear is an integral and important element for our safety, it can also work against us and in some cases can be crippling. Fear is an unpleasant feeling of perceived risk or danger, whether it be real or imagined.

I will go as far as to say that we have all experienced fear at some point in our lives. It’s natural, it’s normal, however, it’s the way we deal with it that’s important.

Fear, Emotion, and How it Affects Your Health

Shockingly all forms of fear are stress-related and deplete the immune system. This is why people who live fearful lives are known to be constantly ill and suffer a range of debilitating illnesses, causing the ability to self-heal to be inefficient.

Clearly, there is a great deal of science behind what stress does to the body, and how it affects our emotions, however, I will leave that for another blog. These emotions come in various forms that have been shown to harm many of the organs of the body.

The longer you experience these emotions, the worse your overall health becomes and for some, turning to drugs or alcohol to deal with their anxiety or fears, hoping it will make them feel better, is sadly the case.

Worrying from fear often results from feelings of inadequacy when we compare ourselves to other people who we think are better than us. I would suggest, however, that the only time it’s healthy to compare yourself to another person may be when someone is ahead of you and you use them as a source of motivation or inspiration.

Why fear happens

I’m sure you will agree fear holds many of us back and our imagination can get the better of us.

It may be fear of heights, spiders, flying, rejection,

Fear can be very much influenced by family and the way we are brought up to believe different things. For example, you may recall being afraid as a child when your friends talked about ghosts and goblins, monsters, and bogeymen. Children, in particular, have wild imaginations and their fears often manifested themselves in the form of monsters scary characters All of your monsters are simply your fears running wild.

Also, fear can emerge when something happens to you i.e:

• a burn from a boiling kettle,
• losing a client,
• being told you are not good enough by a family member,
• not succeeding etc

Because of this experience, creates fear and results in you not wanting to do the same thing again.

What people do when faced with fear

You know the feeling when you are asked to do something outside your comfort zone – it could be making a presentation in front of others. We often find ourselves having the fight, flight or freeze response where we don’t do anything or we run away

An example of the flight response is the cornered rat, which will try to run away until it is finally cornered by its predator, at which point it will become belligerent and fight back until it either escapes or is captured. The same goes for most animals.

Humans can become intimidated by fear; causing them to go along with one’s wishes without caring about their input.

They can also become equally violent, and can even become deadly; it can cause an instinctive reaction to rising adrenaline levels rather than a consciously thought-out decision.

Some of the most common fears are social ones for example, fear of others judging you, or the fear of public speaking affects a large percentage of people and is the number one on the list of fears.

We have all experienced fear of failure or rejection at some stage in our life:

• a client wouldn’t buy from you,
• someone canceled an appointment with you,
• you didn’t get the job you were looking for,
• no one liked your idea or
• perhaps the person you asked out on a date said NO!

A single rejection or even a hundred will not kill you, nor does a rejection mean your situation becomes worse e.g. if you asked someone out on a date and they said no, nothing has changed – you didn’t have a date before and you still don’t have a date!

Summary

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be afraid at all. It’s okay to be afraid, however don’t let fear hold you back or lose opportunities because of fear. After all most of your worries will never happen and most fears are nothing more than False, Evidence, Appearing, Real

Finally ask yourself – What’s the worst than can happen?

Whether it’s a presentation, a phone call, a conversation or a relationship that goes horribly wrong, the sun will come up the next morning and life will continue. To put your own fears into perspective, find a way to help someone in need or who is less fortunate than you. You will realize how lucky you are and your problems will look less daunting.

Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life!

The choice is yours