“When a determined young fellow faces the great bully of the world and boldly seizes him by the beard, he is often surprised to find that it comes loose in his hand, and that it was only tied to drive away the timid adventurers . .”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear.
It’s so easy to get stuck in it. To let it hold you back.
I’ve been there many times in my life.
For example, fear has prevented me from:
- Try new things. It has stopped me from trying something new for lunch or a new hobby because I was afraid I would have a bad experience or fail. And so I stuck to my usual routine and choices.
- Asking someone out on a date. Because I didn’t want to risk being rejected or looking like a fool in other people’s eyes.
- Living my life the way I wanted deep down. Fear has taken hold of me and calmly explained to me that it would be best and most comfortable for me to stay where I am and do nothing new. And many times, unfortunately, I have believed the fear and found myself stuck in a place where, honestly, deep down, I didn’t want to be.
The fears we have are based on the way we think about things. Destructive thinking habits can cause a lot of anxiety that is actually unnecessary and harmful.
But there are also ways to deal with these habits when they emerge and – over time – replace them with healthier habits.
That’s why today I’d like to share with you six destructive and frightening thinking habits, and what you can do instead of letting them run rampant in your mind.
1. You keep the fear vague and undefined.
As long as your fear of doing something is vague and undefined and just floating around in your head, it will hold you back and often grow stronger over time.
What you can do instead:
Ask yourself this question: What’s the worst that could realistically happen?
And don’t just take a second or two to answer this one.
Sit down with a pen and a piece of paper. Take the time to really think about it and write down the realistic worst-case scenario.
This will:
- Bring a lot of clarity for what you are really afraid of.
- Defuse quite a few vague fears or disaster scenarios that may have been haunting your thoughts.
- Help you realize that you can often bounce back pretty quickly, even if the worst-case scenario somehow becomes reality.
2. You keep the fear to yourself.
If you keep the fear to yourself, in my experience it can easily take control of your imagination and create a horrific and paralyzing nightmare in your mind.
Just being alone with the fear makes it easy to lose touch with reality.
What you can do instead:
Writing it down as mentioned above can certainly help. Another step you can take is to share your fear with someone else.
By sharing and getting some level-headed input from a friend or family member, that nightmare can often quickly be emptied and seen for what it really is.
And if you just talk about it with someone who really listens, you can release a lot of your inner tension.
3. You concentrate on aspects that keep you stuck.
If you only focus on the negative things that can happen if you face your fear, it will be very difficult to move forward.
What you can do instead:
A change of perspective is needed.
You can get this by talking to your friend or family member and exchanging ideas and experiences about the opportunities that await you if you make progress.
You do it by focusing on the positive and why you want to move towards what you fear.
A few questions that have helped me find a more constructive and positive perspective when dealing with anxiety are:
- What are the potential benefits I want and can achieve by taking these actions?
- What are the potential benefits a year from now if I follow this path? And in five years?
- And what will my life be like in five years if I continue on the frightening path I am on now?
Discuss these questions with someone. Or take a piece of paper and write down the answers. Or do both.
4. You misinterpret the often little information you have.
It’s easy to take very few experiences—perhaps just one—and start seeing them as evidence of something permanent and frightening in your life.
What you can do instead:
Question your fears and what they are based on.
Again, sit down with that pen and a piece of paper. Think back to the evidence you have in your memories of a fear and belief of yours.
Today, try to look at the situation(s) that caused your anxiety with fresh eyes. Instead of the way you normally see them.
For example, doing this has helped me reduce my stress fear of social rejection.
I looked back at a few situations from my past that shaped and fueled that fear.
And I realized that:
- To be honest, maybe I just misinterpreted it is rejected in some of these situations.
- I often wasn’t rejected because something was wrong with what I did, but simply because we weren’t realistically a good fit for each other. Or because the other person was having a bad day or because he or she simply wanted to push me down to feel better about themselves at that moment.
This was an eye-opening experience and also helped me understand that not everything is about me and what I do. And that our memories can often be quite inaccurate and useless if not re-examined later.
And that our minds like to create patterns and conclusions based on very little evidence or few experiences.
5. You try to push the fear away.
When you try to deny a fear in your life, when you try to push it away or don’t think about it, it can often become stronger.
What you can do instead:
I have discovered in recent years that pushing the fear away can certainly work and help you not become paralyzed from taking action. But I’ve also discovered that sometimes it can be more helpful to accept the fear.
To accept that it is there, instead of, for example, telling yourself to focus on the positive like a laser beam.
That might sound a little vague, so here’s how I do it.
- To breathe. Take a few breaths and focus just on the air going in and out to calm and center yourself a little.
- Tell yourself something like: “Yes, the fear is there. It’s just contemporary.”
- Take in that feeling of fear and just let it be there in your body and mind. It’ll be awkward. But only for a short time.
Because if you do let it in, after a while – in my experience often after a few minutes of discomfort – the anxiety starts to lose steam. It becomes a lot smaller or just seems to float away.
And it becomes a lot easier to think clearly and constructively again.
6. You make it harder than it needs to be to take action.
Thinking you need to take action in a big, heroic, risky leap to overcome your fear can often lead to more fear and no action at all.
What you can do instead:
A more useful way to go about things is not to do everything at once. But to just dip your toes in instead. To take a small step forward, but to do it today or as soon as possible.
And to take that first step slowly if you want.
The most important thing is that you get moving. That you start to build momentum forward so that you can take more small and perhaps slow steps forward.
Doing things this way not only builds momentum, but also confidence and expands your comfort zone. And all this makes it a lot easier to take bigger steps later if you want to.