Fear is a normal human emotion, sometimes it’s actually a very necessary one , because it’s what can keep us alive. Fear of snakes or spiders might seem irrational if most aren’t poisonous, but fear saves you from the small chance it is poisonous, and that’s been ingrained into our genetics as a survival trait.
However, fear only seems to work well when it’s temporary, if you live in constant fear, the emotion has likely become self-damaging since we aren’t currently living in a post apocalyptic world that would warrant living in constant fear.
Sometimes we like to think of fear as your heart beating fast, your brain and body being shocked, hairs standing on end. But that’s just on the upper end of what constitutes fear, on the lower end is worry, even small worries are fears.
Fear is partly the enabling of your sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight system. This system is enabled to help you react better to a dangerous situation, it’s priming you literally to either fight a threat or to run away from it. This system floods your body with stress hormone, which part of its job is to agitate every system to be alerted to danger and possibility of damage or high output being required. Relaxation becomes very difficult to attain when your body is in alert mode.
In fight or flight, you are burning excess energy constantly, muscles are being tensed and your blood flow is alerted to react to danger. You likely then run out of energy and the chemicals your body normally doesn’t use up quickly when relaxed, this can cause a massive imbalance in your body, where you enter a cycle of stress because of lack of energy from being stressed.
Prolonged use of this nervous system response will cause your body to degrade more and more, as it strays further from homeostasis, and enters disease mode. Your brain might even assume you are actively dying if there is enough stress response being fed to it, and shut down all your energy use to conserve as much as possible. This actively traps you in a hole of your body’s own making.
The first step is to try to relax as much as possible when it makes sense to. Obviously you might be going through pain and fatigue and a life situation that isn’t anywhere near to ideal. It makes it very hard to relax, but to get better, you have to find some time to relax.
Relaxing isn’t necessarily something like sleeping. Relaxing isn’t using your phone and keeping your mind distracted. Relaxation is a subconscious state, that you need to tap into. Flow is the best state to access when you’re awake, this is a state where you’re focused and relaxed, and it’s the most ideal state to get through the day in, and it works best the earlier you can activate it from waking up.
Breathing is also a very important factor in achieving relaxation. We all know that deep breaths relax us. Making an audible sigh and releasing tension in your shoulders. Performing some slow movements to release the tension in your body. Scanning your body for tense areas that have escaped your notice, that you have to actively relax. It might not be immediately obvious that you’re carrying tension somewhere in your body without trying to actively relax it step by step. Making breathing, slow movement and body scanning habits that you do once per hour, even just for a few minutes, is something that can establish a move towards a relaxed nervous system response.
Closing down your worry loops is another step to take. We all suffer from worry loops, where we can’t stop thinking about it, and developing the thought into more and more thoughts, imaging the worry as real. If this happens to you daily, it’s most likely something that is fuelling your fight or flight response, and you need to close down the looped thinking as best you can. Try to write out your main worries, and then why you have them, how likely they are, whether you can do anything about them and what your plan to deal with them is if you can do something about it. Any time your worries come up again, then you default to whether nothing can be done about it, it’s likelihood and what your plan is. These worry loops tend to happen to people when they stop becoming distracted, and their brain finally has a chance to bombard the mind with all the worries it’s conjured up, all the little fears that have been stacking up in the back of your mind, things you keep pushing aside, and don’t deal with.
Once your brain has an answer to something, it’s usually happy to let it go. It’s when we keep pushing off dealing with a worry, that worries start to pile up and up, and they all start to feed into each other, growing stronger and stronger in our mind, and spelling our doom to us. Thoughts are just thoughts, and 90% of the time, bad thoughts are totally unfounded, they are usually the imagination conjuring up the worst possibilities, in some vain attempt to train us to deal with a possible tragedy before it’s even occurred. This can be a specific coping mechanism if you’ve suffered pain of any time, your brain wants to avoid suffering, and ironically makes you suffer worries in an attempt to soften the possible blow.
The most important time to listen to your thoughts, are when your instincts align with them at the same time. If you have a worry, and your instinct tells you this worry is very important to pay attention to, then you should always listen to your instincts, because in normal life, your instincts aren’t triggering all the time like your thoughts are, they tend to be wired to a very specific threat that your conscious brain might not easily pick up upon. This might be micro-aggressions in a person’s behaviour, or a certain grouping of senses that predict a disaster, etc. However these types of worries are nearly always occurring in an ongoing situation, and unlikely to be worth much worry when you’re simply alone trying to sleep, unless for example you just heard a disturbing sound in the distance.
Overall, we live in interesting but nonetheless stressful times, considering the imminent future problems for human society, and the current problems that still rage on. To add on chronic illness to your worries, likely creates a cycle of fear and worry for people, if they aren’t worrying about themselves and their health, they worry about the world and what could happen to everyone else. Not many people are in a position to accurately predict the future, whether it’s about themselves or the world. There are worst case scenarios, and technically they can come true, even though they might be unlikely. However there’s no point in prepping yourself for the possible blows of reality by worrying about them in the present and damaging your health in the present. If you are truly convinced of these scenarios, create a plan, and then you can stop holding onto to the worry of it all, you can instead focus on achieving peace and flow in daily life, rather than ping ponging between distraction, dissatisfaction and worries of demise or danger. Don’t let fear and worry control your mind, confront them, and let them go. The mind is better spent on what it values, and generally worries aren’t that valuable to us, all they do is to attempt to hurt us, even if it’s an attempt to train us for the worst, it’s a system that gets out of control if you let it in every day, every hour.
our brain is a very interesting area to study, i just wish i knew more.