Aliens, Zombies…and Other Imaginary Fears!
Photo by Stuart Anthony.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Have you ever watched a scary movie then found yourself totally ‘spooked’ for hours afterward? You jump at every tiny sound, you see things in the shadows, hear things, feel things, and generally overreact to everything and nothing. If you have, you’ve experienced your body’s fear response; your built-in, instinctive survival mechanism, designed to help you escape from danger.
Of course, there’s no real danger to escape from. The giant, three-headed, blood-thirsty, chainsaw-wielding alien that you thought you saw hiding behind your curtain isn’t really there and the shape-shifting-werewolf-vampire-zombie that you heard scratching at your door was in fact your dog stretching and yawning in his basket! C’mon, admit it, you’ve been there, right? We’ve all fallen victim to an overactive imagination at some point in our lives and experienced the sensation of the hairs on the back of our necks standing up along with a racing heart and sweaty palms. These are all symptoms of the fear response; but here’s the thing, they represent a very real, physical response to a danger that is entirely imaginary and, let’s face it, entirely unrealistic! The power of your mind is so great that your brain is unable to differentiate between real danger and imagined danger.
With that said, take a moment to answer the following question:
What would you like to be able to do in your life that you currently fear doing?
Perhaps you’d like to be able to give up your job and start your own business but you fear everything going wrong. You focus on what could go wrong; you imagine the worst case scenario so you see yourself sitting in your new business premises waiting for customers to flock through the door but no one comes. You hear your bank manager expressing his concerns over your finances on the phone. You feel your stomach rumbling as you imagine yourself looking into your empty fridge in your empty kitchen…in your home which is about to be repossessed anyway…you get the idea!
Perhaps you’d like to ask someone you know from your work out for a drink but you fear their response. Yet again, you focus on the worst case scenario. You see that person laughing in your face and saying “in your dreams” before tweeting the hilarious incident to the whole world. Or, perhaps you’d like to write a book but fear not being ‘educated’ or interesting enough so you imagine yourself being rejected by publisher after publisher or becoming J.R Hartley – only less famous!
In every case, your fears are imagined. The worst case scenarios that you are ’living’ in your mind are no more real than the alien behind your curtain or the zombie at your door. You are scaring yourself with your imaginings of doom, gloom, and disaster but those scary thoughts trigger your fear response. You feel your heart pounding and your palms sweating at the mere thought of doing any of those things; the fear feels real.
Okay, maybe there are real risks involved in doing what you fear but the bottom line is, if you allow yourself to focus only on scary, negative thoughts, you can only ever experience scary, negative outcomes. If everything going wrong really is the only outcome you can imagine then you better check behind your curtain because that alien really is there!
Related articles
- Finding Courage in the Face of Fear (donmacnaughton.org)
- Look Fear In the Eye – Then Poke It! (donmacnaughton.org)
Copyright © 2009-2010. Don MacNaughton. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission.
Finding Courage in the Face of Fear
“There is no living that is not afraid when it faces danger. The true courage is in facing danger when you are afraid”
- L Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Cover of The Wizard of Oz
Who can forget the ‘cowardly lion’ character in the classic movie The Wizard of Oz? All he wanted was courage. He believed that if he only had courage, he’d be able to do everything he wanted to; everything he believed a lion should be able to do – everything he believed he couldn’t do because he didn’t have courage. So what is courage?
Courage > noun
1. the ability to do something that frightens one.
2. strength in the face of pain or grief.
Above is a dictionary definition of courage, but what’s your definition? How would you describe a courageous person? Brave? Bold? Or daring perhaps? Chances are, you see courageous qualities in other people that you don’t see in yourself, believing yourself to be a bit of a ‘cowardly lion’ instead. But here’s the thing, do the people you believe to have courage, believe themselves to be courageous? Chances are, they don’t – they’re just like you!
As L Frank Baum said, “True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid,” and that’s just it, we don’t all share the same fears. When you think of it that way, the person who is afraid of spiders but manages to pick one up – no matter how teeny-tiny it may be – in order to rescue it from drowning in the bath is no less courageous than the “superhero” fireman who rescues ten people from a burning building. I’m not suggesting for a moment that firemen aren’t courageous or that they don’t feel fear, I’m making the point that what they do is what they’re trained to do and because of that training, they have confidence in themselves and in their ability to do what needs to be done, even when faced with life-threatening danger, and to do it in true “just-doing-my-job-ma’am” Hollywood style! However, the person who is about to scoop up the spider from the bath is facing a fear that to them feels every bit as real and as life-threatening as a burning building. They don’t have any ‘spider-scooping-up training’ behind them, they don’t have confidence in themselves to be able to do it but they go ahead and do it anyway – that’s courage.
It’s fair to say that courage and self-confidence go hand-in-hand. The more you believe in yourself and in your abilities, the easier it is to face your “fears” and to meet life’s challenges head on. Back in the Land of Oz, the cowardly lion demonstrated great courage on many occasions as he journeyed along the yellow brick road with Dorothy but he didn’t recognise any courage in himself or in his actions because he lacked confidence in himself and believed himself to be a coward. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.” Take a moment to ponder over that. The cowardly lion already had his own courage but it wasn’t until the ‘wizard’ gave him a “bravery potion” to drink that he believed it himself. Are you really a cowardly lion? Or do you just think you are? If you think you lack the courage to do what you want to do in life, think again; all the courage you need is already within you.
Copyright © 2009-2010. Don MacNaughton. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission.
Look Fear In the Eye – Then Poke It!
Image via Wikipedia
“The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid,
but he who conquers that fear”
- Nelson Mandella
Have you ever found yourself ‘forced’ into doing something you were fearful of doing or ‘having’ to do something you really thought you’d never do because of fear? It might be that you were ‘forced’ into giving a presentation at work because the person who was meant to be giving it fell ill at the last moment and your boss put you forward as a replacement or it might be that you ’had’ to go on a really scary fairground ride because your friend didn’t want to go on it alone. Whatever your fear and whatever the reason for having to face it, how did you feel afterwards?
I think it’s fair to say that in many cases, doing the thing you thought you were too afraid to do leaves you questioning, “why didn’t I do that ages ago?” For example, let’s say you’ve been wanting to learn to swim for years but you’ve been too afraid to join a class at your local swimming pool because you felt too old or you were afraid of being ’forced’ to jump in at the deep end – literally! – or you feared having a panic attack and embarrassing yourself…and so the list of things you feared goes on!
Then, one day, you face that fear and you do it; you go to your local pool and you join a swimming class. You didn’t feel too old, it was an adult learners class. You didn’t have to go anywhere near the deep end, let alone jump in, and you didn’t have a panic attack or embarrass yourself in any way. In fact, you didn’t want to get out of the pool, you had such a great time. It’s not that you didn’t feel afraid, getting into that pool was scary, but you faced that fear and you kept going, you didn’t let fear continue to prevent you from doing something you wanted to do.
When you actually do something you thought you’d never do, you not only experience a massive sense of achievement at having physically done it, you also experience a powerfully motivating confidence boost: you realise that you not only looked your fear in the face, you poked it in the eye on your way past!
This doesn’t mean that you won’t ever experience fear again or that you won’t feel any fear when facing the same challenge again, but it does mean that you’ll feel less fearful because you’re armed with the knowledge that you can do it, therefore you can do it again and you can face other, new challenges as they come along. Each time you poke fear in the eye, its power over you is weakened – you become the master of your own destiny; you become unstoppable!
“Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not”
-Virgil Thomson
Related articles
- Barbra Streisand, Confidence Lost and Found! (donmacnaughton.org)
- Fear of the Unknown? Try Checking Under Your Bed! (donmacnaughton.org)
Copyright © 2009-2010. Don MacNaughton. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission.
Fear of the Unknown? Try Checking Under Your Bed!
“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood”
- Marie Curie
Image via Wikipedia
If you take a moment to think back to your childhood and the fears you had then, are any of them fears that you still have today? A fear of creepy crawlies perhaps; a fear of the dentist, or, if you’re as old as me, maybe even a fear of policemen! Of course, one of the most common childhood fears of all is a fear of the dark, right?
So what is it about ‘the dark’ that’s so frightening? After all, it’s just darkness; you can’t actually see anything other than blackness, so what is there to fear? Well, it’s the very fact that you can’t see what’s there that makes people afraid. You can’t see what’s there, therefore you can’t be sure that there isn’t something extremely dangerous and incredibly life threatening right behind you…or beside you, or in front of you! We’re not actually afraid of the dark at all, we’re afraid of what might be hiding in it. We fear the unknown.
Many childhood fears simply evaporate as we get ’older and wiser’ and we learn to see and understand the world differently. But, not everyone grows out of their fear of the dark completely and their fear of the unknown may even grow stronger. So what is it that’s so frightening about ‘the unknown’? After all, if you don’t know what it is, what is there to fear? Well, you can probably see where I’m going with this! It’s because you don’t know what’s going to happen that you begin to fear what might happen. Just as not knowing what’s out there in the darkness leads to thoughts of bogey men and monsters, not knowing what’s going to happen if you take a particular course of action leads to negative thoughts of worst case scenarios. Fearing what might happen then leads to not taking any action at all – you’re stuck where you are.
If you feel you’re stuck and that fear is holding you back in life, take a moment to ponder over the following:
- Does being in darkness mean that you must be surrounded by every scary thing you’re conjuring up in your mind and your thoughts?
- Does not knowing what the outcome of your actions will be mean that the worst case scenarios you’re focusing on and ‘living’ in your mind and your thoughts must be the only possible outcomes?
Okay, things are not always so ’cut and dry’ in life but the point I’m making is that children who fear something may be hiding under their bed at night take steps to deal with that fear by checking what really is there before they go to bed the next night. They might still feel afraid but their thoughts are no longer focused on what might be under the bed because they know what is. Dealing with a fear of the unknown is no different.
The more you take steps to replace the unknown with the known, the more power you have to remain focused on the positive “what ifs” of any action you take. The more positively you think, the more positively you act and the more positive your outcomes become.
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Copyright © 2009-2010. Don MacNaughton. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission.
What Do You Fear?
“Fear makes the wolf
bigger than he is”
- German proverb
What do you fear: spiders, heights, small spaces, flying, public speaking…or fluffy kittens? Yes! Some people have a fear of fluffy kittens, well, cats really, but if you are a cat lover, you’ll find the very idea of being afraid of a kitten, fluffy or otherwise, totally ridiculous; you’ll see it as a completely irrational fear.
So, what if you’re a cat lover who is afraid of spiders: is your fear any more rational? To someone who has no fear of either, being afraid of spiders is just as ridiculous as being afraid of cats, right? Perhaps the real question is, can any fear be rationalised?
Fear is an absolutely normal emotional response to danger
It’s all part of our built-in, instinctive ‘flight or fight’ mechanism designed to increase our chances of survival as a species. When faced with danger, such as a close encounter with a giant crocodile, certain areas of the brain respond by releasing chemicals into the blood stream that generate the physical symptoms we associate with fear – rapid heart rate, sweating, heightened senses, etc.
We instinctively know that a giant crocodile represents danger with a capital ‘D’ and to survive, we either need to ‘leg it’ (flight) or start punching it very hard on the nose (fight)! The ‘fear response’ is simply trying to give you a physical boost to help you stay alive. When face-to-face with a giant crocodile, fear is a perfectly rational response.
However, coming face-to-face with a teeny-weeny spider or a cute, cuddly kitten is enough to generate the same physical response in those who fear them. What real danger could either of them possibly represent? The answer is none. Irrational fears are non-instinctive; they are not connected to our natural survival instinct, they are ’learned’ fears. Somewhere along the way, someone who runs screaming from the room at the sight of a spider has learned that pattern of behaviour.
They may have learned it from their parents or from other influential figures in their lives but the chances are, they’ve been ’responding’ in that way for so long that it has become almost instinctive. They know that a spider is not a threat to their survival and there’s no real danger but yet the threat they imagine exists and the danger they perceive a spider to represent takes over their thoughts and they ’leg it’…or metaphorically punch it on the nose by dropping the Yellow Pages on it!
Irrational fears are a clear demonstration of the power of the mind
If you fear spiders, the mere thought of a spider getting too close is enough to trigger the release of the fear response chemicals from your brain. The ‘danger’ is imagined, not real, but in your mind you believe it to be real so your body responds accordingly.
The bottom-line is that it’s you who makes the wolf bigger than he is but the good news is that you can also cut him back down to size. Take a moment to think about what you currently fear, then see if you can think of any real reason why you hold that fear? The same applies whether you fear spiders, fluffy kittens or taking your driving test: what is it you imagine is going to happen to you? The key to conquering a fear is to face it, understand it for what it really is and then change the way you think about it. Learned fears can be unlearned!
© Copyright Don MacNauhgton 20011, All Rights Reserved
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Related articles
- Fear is the Mind-Killer (bigthink.com)
- Is Fear Holding You Back? (donmacnaughton.org)
- 8 Ways To Stop Being Afraid of Making Wrong Decisions (imaginethespirit.wordpress.com)
Copyright © 2009-2010. Don MacNaughton. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission.
Is Fear Holding You Back?
“Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain”
- Mark Twain
The popular clothing brand No Fear use slogans on their T shirts that suggest life is not worth living unless you are pushing the limits…
… If you’re not living life on the edge, you’re taking up too much room!
Are you someone who subscribes to that philosophy and feels ‘no fear’ or are you someone who feels it’s better to be safe than sorry?
In fact, feeling fear is just an instinctive part of being human. If you never feel any fear, then you’re just plain reckless and you’re probably not going to live long enough to worry about taking up too much room! Fear is simply an emotional response generated by a part of your brain known as the lizard brain. It’s the ancient part of your brain, concerned only with basic survival and keeping you alive – it really doesn’t want you to push the limits or get too close to the edge.
If you feel you’re someone who likes to play it safe, the voice you hear in the back of your mind when you’re faced with making a decision in life is the voice of your lizard brain. It’s the voice that says “don’t take any chances” or “don’t do anything risky.” We all have a lizard brain so we all have a little voice in our head telling us to be careful and to stay alive but we don’t all respond to that voice in the same way.
Scientists believe our brains evolved in three stages:
- The lizard brain – the ancient part of your brain, concerned only with keeping you alive and with basic survival. In this first stage, responses to events or happenings in life were purely instinctive.
- The mammalian brain – this stage gave us an ability to file away our experiences of life as memories so responses to events were no longer purely instinctive. Our ever expanding store of memory-based experiences meant that memories could now evoke non-instinctive emotional responses, including fear, and memories of past events could influence our response to current and future events.
- The neocortex; the brain as we understand it today – in this third stage, we’re now able to draw on the memory-based experiences of past events, sift through all of the stored information, consider the events or happenings rationally, and then make conscious decisions on how to respond to current or future situations using our best judgement.
The No Fear T-shirt wearers in life respond to the lizard brain voice by questioning what it says, rationalising whether there is any real danger, then overruling it by using their ’third stage brain’ to make a judgement. They’re not so much fearless as they are calculated risk takers. On the other hand, the ’better safe than sorry’ guys in life respond to the cautioning voice of the lizard brain by allowing it to influence their thoughts and actions without any further questions being asked. For example, let’s say you’re thinking of quitting your job and starting your own business. Your lizard brain voice says, “You’ll fail. Hundreds of new businesses fail every day so you will too.”
No Fear guy response -
“Hundreds of new businesses succeed every day. There are reasons why businesses fail and reasons why businesses succeed. I will succeed because I have prepared for success.”
‘Better safe than sorry’ guy response -
“I’ll fail. Best stay in my job and keep my guaranteed income.”
Your lizard brain is concerned only with your survival so negative thoughts of what might happen are based on negative past experiences. If you have previously cut yourself with a carving knife, the next time you are holding a carving knife, your lizard brain voice will quite rightly begin to yell “danger!“ Of course, you have already learned from your past experience and while you are able to acknowledge that there is a real danger, you’re also able to rationalise the situation and reason that cutting yourself last time does not mean you will cut yourself again this time.
Fear is a natural, built-in survival mechanism but it needn’t hold you back in life. Getting ahead in life is not about becoming fearless, it’s about identifying what your fears are and then using your best judgement to calculate how real and ‘life threatening’ they actually are.
© Copyright Don MacNauhgton 20011, All Rights Reserved
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