Today we are talking about fear, and every single human on the planet experiences fear from time to time. So today it’s about forever fearing the fear.
It’s one of the big questions I ask an awful lot of my clients when they come and see me for the first time, especially those clients who come to me experiencing things such as anxiety and I will ask them straight out, do you know what the fear is? And a lot of people will say to me “I don’t know, I don’t think I’m scared of anything, I just feel anxious”.
So I thought it’s really important to go through fear with you guys today and make sure that you understand the link between fear and your mental health and how it can trigger certain mental health responses as well, and then for some of you who might be experiencing some of these mental health responses, what I’m going to do in the next episode is I’m going to go into a lot more detail with regards to coping mechanisms for how to manage fear and how to manage some of those mental health conditions that link to it as well.
For me to really, really be able to help people, I think it’s really important that you understand what sits behind the thing you think something is. So, for me, if somebody comes to me with anxiety, it’s important for them to understand that it’s what sits behind the anxiety that’s the issue, not the anxiety itself. The anxiety in the present can feel like it’s the most dominant thing in your life at that time, for example, but actually, when it comes to managing the anxiety or overcoming the anxiety, we really need to understand what sits behind it. I’m a firm believer of understanding the why behind everything, and I say that an awful lot in these episodes, it’s about understanding the why.
When you understand the why, you have more knowledge, you have more data to deal with or to work with when trying to resolve what the issue might be. And so today, one of the big whys for many mental health conditions is fear.
So, what is it? Let’s have a look at what fear really is, well, let’s get rid of some of the myths as quickly as we possibly can. Number one, fear is really healthy for us because fear is a killer king emotion. It’s an emotion that’s telling us that we might be in danger, or we are in perceived danger, and it’s that fear that lets us respond to whatever we think that danger might be so it’s actually really healthy to experience fear.
Fear itself comes in lots of different shades. There’s no such thing as black and white when it comes to fear. It’s not like you’re not scared, and you are scared, it comes in many shades. Some are not great for us, some actually are really good for us and some we love, some we chase, some we go for the thrill. You imagine ever being scared when you go on the rides at the fairground and it’s fantastic. You absolutely love that fear, it’s the adrenaline that comes with it.
For those of you might be addicted to a horror movie, fair play to you, I’m absolutely petrified of horror movies, but that fear that you get there gives you a buzz, it gives you an adrenaline rush.
So not every fear is really bad, not every fear makes you feel incredibly uncomfortable. Some fear we chase because it actually is fun and then on top of that, it’s not as simple as one minute I’m scared and one minute I’m not or one minute I’m not scared and the next minute I am, fear is not as automatic as that.
A lot of other emotions can happen really quickly and with regards to fear, in some cases it can come on really, really quickly, but in other cases fear can build up over a period of time. Sometimes that can be hours, other times it can be months, other times it can be years.
So, fear isn’t black and white. It isn’t simple. It isn’t something that you can go, right it’s here with us right now, it’s very different for lots of different people and although fear, in theory, is connected to this perceived danger, this perceived threat, perceived is the word to focus on here really, you do not necessarily have to be in danger to be scared.
For example, watching a horror movie is a classic example. Again, you’re watching a horror movie, you know you are not in danger, but you can still be scared at the same time, and that’s what fear is. Fear can be nothing, it could be nothing in front of you, and you can still be scared of something, you can still be fearful of something, you could still feel that you’re in danger of something even when there’s no danger there.
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