Goodbye to fear: how to overcome your fears
The fear It is one of the basic emotions of people. It is a natural emotion in human beings and very frequent, all at some point we have felt fear. Fear can help us to avoid danger and get safe, but sometimes fear can overtake us and take control.
On these occasions it stops serving us, and becomes an impediment. Being able to know, and overcome our fears, know how to face what we fear and say goodbye to fear, it will allow us to free ourselves from ties and will allow us to develop our potentialities.
Fear is a natural emotion
It is one of the basic emotions, and although it is considered a negative emotion, fear plays a very important role.
Fear appears when we interpret a situation or stimulus as a threat to our integrity. In the face of the threat, fear appears, as an emotion that allows us to be safe and to protect ourselves from the threat. Fear, therefore, is a very useful and very important emotion for survival.
When fear stops being adaptive
But fears, which are really useful in situations of threat and danger, can become an obstacle when there is no such situation of danger. If we feel fear, or we feel a fear too intense, so much that it paralyzes us, in a situation where our life or integrity is not in danger, we will be reacting in an inadequate way to the situation. Fear in these cases will be an emotion that does not serve us that limits us and controls us.
Fear stops being adaptive in two situations:
1. When the situation that is interpreted as threatening is not.
2. When it is too intense and widespread.
Why fear controls us?
Fear is not in the things that scare us, fear is inside us. Fear is an emotion that lives inside us and can have a lot of power.
- Fear appears in situations that are valued as threats. These situations are valued like this due to experiences, and previous learning in similar situations.
- Our mind develops beliefs, sometimes irrational and unconscious, which lead us to interpret threats that are not always real.
- When the threat is interpreted there is the fear that often controls us and limits us.
- Fear is inside of us and for that reason it can control us, and its consequences can be very negative. Sometimes fear prevents us from achieving our dreams, prevents us from loving others, trusting someone, trusting our possibilities, trying new things, preventing us from learning and improving ourselves.
Keys to say goodbye to fear
Freeing ourselves of our fears is necessary to regain control of our lives and what we want to do. It is not a question of going to the opposite extreme and becoming imprudent, but of appropriately assessing situations and thus preventing fear from arising in situations that do not pose a danger.
1. Analyze your fears. Do not fool yourself. Name everything that scares you.
2. Perform an analysis of the situations that cause you fear, how much fear they cause you and how they limit you. Write it down is a good option to realize the power that fear has over us.
3. Identify your thoughts, those that provoke fear. Those beliefs that make you believe that a situation is threatening. For example: thinking that we will make a fool of ourselves by speaking in public, thinking that they will not give us the job we are looking for, that our friends will not accept us, or that this person will reject us and hurt us, etc.
4. Once identified, ask them one by one. Think in a more positive way and try little by little to face your fears.
5. Sometimes, it's enough with doing little by little what we fear to verify that the situation is not a threat.
Celia Rodríguez Ruiz. Clinical health psychologist. Specialist in pedagogy and child and youth psychology. Director of Educa and Learn. Author of the collection Stimulate Reading and Writing Processes.
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