Don't allow your fears to imprison you..........

Fear.

Fear is a powerful emotion and although at times necessary for survival, if unbridled, it can overpower many other emotions.

Fear, "is an emotional response to a perceived threat" and for the purpose of this blog, I am going to focus on the word "perceived". Whether perceived or actual, our responses often tend to be the same.

Have you heard the saying: "better safe than sorry"? Often times when we feel fearful of something, we have a tendency to react/respond first and then find out whether our fears were legitimate or not. "Is that a poisonous snake? Dunno, but I'm definitely not gonna hang around to find out."

"Better safe than sorry" works well in many situations, especially involving creepy crawlers and hairy critters methinks, but there are also situations when the approach "better safe than sorry" can become a problem. As someone diagnosed with GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, I am quite familiar with perceiving threats all over the place. For someone suffering with GAD, potentially dangerous and threatening scenarios constantly play out in the mind, often beginning with the words "what if?"

"What if he/she doesn't show up, what if I fail, what if I am not good enough, what if I forgot to lock the doors, what if I make a mistake, what if I am wrong", and so on.

Anxiety, often has more to do with the perception of something fearful/scary/dangerous happening in the future rather than something happening right now. 

At this point it's probably a good idea to also talk about worry...is worrying the same as anxiety, for instance?

According to some, when we worry about something, worrying is the thought process that often leads to feelings of anxiety. In my opinion, (as an expert worrier) worrying at times can also be helpful in finding solutions to problems. Some examples: Worrying about being late for an important event, the worrier may give him/herself extra time to get to the event which would solve the "what if something comes up that may make me late for the event" problem. Worrying about running out of gas in the wrong "neighborhood", the worrier may make sure that the petrol tank is never below a quarter,.....and so on.

One person's worry may be another person's anxiety, one person's anxiety may be another person's fear. Regardless of what we call it, worry, anxiety or fear, most of us feel uncomfortable when we experience those emotions.

And regardless of the term we use, what is important in my view, is how we cope with it.

So let me suggest a few things that may be helpful:

*The thing that worries you, or is making you anxious, is it something you can solve?

*Is it something "real", something you know as a fact or is it something you are perceiving to be real?

*What can you learn about it, as in, is there information about it you can get your hands on?

 *Have you dealt with something similar before that you overcame? (Talking here about life-affirming methods such as mindfulness, counselling, etc...not mind altering drugs, booze, etc.)

*Is there someone you can talk to about it?

*Acknowledge your feelings without staying stuck in them; feelings come and go. Change your thoughts and your feelings change.

*Challenge your perceptions by introducing different ones. Are there other ways of looking at this?

*Try to focus on the here and now, when or if, the mind wanders back to the problem/concern/worry, bring it back into the now. Sometimes distracting oneself by doing a simple task of some sort can be helpful.

At times, avoidance may seem as an excellent coping strategy, and at times it may be: "Run Forest, run!" , but as an indiscriminate coping strategy, may I suggest that finding out the underlying reasons for our anxieties and worries is far more helpful. According to those in the know, we are born with only two innate fears: the fear of falling, and the fear of loud noises. All other fears are learned behaviours, and here is the good news, what we have learned we can unlearn.

"You can't always control what goes on outside, but you can always control what goes on inside." (Wayne  Dyer)

"You don't have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you." 

 (Dan Millman)

(About the painting. Some people can become so overwhelmed and fearful of life and the world around them, that they create their own "prison cells" in order to feel safe.)