How to Befriend your Fears
How is fear born?
Have you ever felt that you couldn’t do anything in your life? Were you scared of doing things in which you were an expert?
First, let me tell you how fear starts. It is not a single day process. It depends on your childhood life, your surroundings and environment. There are many causes of fears but it is seeded in your mind since your childhood, directly or indirectly.
Let’s say your father or mother is doctor or an engineer. Then most probably you will choose your career as a doctor or an engineer. Have you ever thought why? Because you’ve seen your parents as a doctor or an engineer since your childhood. You are more confident to choose the same career, you are not scared of it. However, for another profession, you will think a lot, maybe you will fear to choose another profession.
One should have a strong mind, readiness and faith in their own abilities to face all the obstacles connected with the choice of new profession. For instance, nowadays many farmers’ kids are getting into other professional fields and nor following their parents “business”. The same is relevant for kids of doctor and engineer dynasties.
Fear can be from anything. It can be in your profession, it can be any kind of phobia, and it can be from specific type of people or thing. All it starts from childhood directly or indirectly. Have you ever seen how someone gives speech with full confident, but other not? Many students have fear of exams, facing interviews but some not. Why? The answer is the same. It all depends how they have been living since childhood and what kind of environment they have had.
Unfortunately, you can’t win the fear completely once you got, but you can tackle and control it. If you are not able to control the fear, it will create a chain and you will get multiple fears from many things. You may even get fear from the things which you were not scared of before at all. Finally, time will come when you will feel that you cannot do anything, you are useless, if you cannot control your fear.
Trust me, if you cannot control it, one day you will start fearing mostly everything and it will become a cause of deep depression.
The big question is how to control the fear and stop the chain. We can categorize fears in two types. First is instant fear. For example, you have felt an earthquake or something has fallen down in front of you. This is not a cause of depression or a lifelong fear. Here I am discussing the second type of fear, which creates a chain of fears and becomes a cause of depression.
First, I will discuss how to stop the chain. Let’s say that you are scared of giving interviews for jobs. Whenever your interview time is near, first thing to do is to stop thinking about other pending things like any kind of exam or any task from your business which is still remaining like giving a seminar etc. Therefore, whenever your fear starts, if you think about other pending things at the same time, you will start getting fear for other things as well. This is a beginning of a chain of fears.
How does a chain of fears start?
The fear makes you nervous. Once you are nervous, your mind will not work normally. Therefore, your mind cannot distinguish things. It will make you feel scared of other things, too. Because the mind learns how and what to fear and saves this information in memory. If you are scared, stop thinking about other things. This is a way that you can stop the chain. However, more important is how to tackle any kind of fear. Let’s discuss it below.
How to tackle fear
Either you are giving a seminar, or having an exam, or an interview etc., if you are scared of it, the first thing you have to do is to accept your fear. No need to fight with it in your mind. Accept it gently and say, “I know I can’t do better, anyway it will be not good so let’s accept it, why to fear”. When you accept it, you will do better than before. Next time when you are scared, think that previously you did much better, so this time you can do even much better. Therefore, this is how you can stop the chain of fears and tackle it smartly. Acception is very important to tackle any kind of fear, try it and practise to accept.
“Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.” ~Judy Blume~
There are other ways you can try to tackle your fears. Whenever you are scared of anything, focus your mind on one thing only and take a deep breathe at the same time, try to repeat it several times.
Now the question is how to focus, how to learn to focus when you are scared, so it can help you to stop the chain of fears. Here meditation appears. If you do mediation daily, it will help you to concentrate, to focus. But how to meditate if you cannot concentrate your mind? Meditation requires concentration. Let me explain to you how to meditate.
Meditation
First, understand what mediation is. Meditation is not only when you are closing your eyes, reading mantra, or awaking your chakra. Mediation is a way by which you can control your mind. And to control the mind we require to learn how to concentrate our mind. Therefore, in order to meditate we have to concentrate our mind at anything. We just need to do something for 30-60 minutes every day, later you can increase the time.
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt~
For meditate first figure out your favourite work, hobbies, and activities, whatever. For example, I love cooking; therefore, whenever I cook I concentrate on cooking only, because I like cooking so it is easy to do for me. So whatever you like, do it passionately without thinking about other things and you will become an expert in mediation. Either your like running or doing gym, listening to the music or watching movies, just concentrate on it only at that time.
Apart from the above, you can practise eating healthy food, doing daily exercise, yoga etc. All these will help to keep your body and mind in tonus.
Remember, even if you cannot win your enemy (read here ‘fear’), you can put it under control and limit its activity whenever you want.
“The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” ~Nelson Mandela~