Fear can be safely put in the first place among all unpleasant emotions. This feeling most often interferes with living comfortably and harmoniously.
In this article, I'll talk about how to respond constructively to his signals, and also what to do if you have fear when there is no real reason for it.
Fear has many names - anxiety, anxiety, tension, excitement, nervousness, but all this is one feeling, which differs only in the degree of acuteness of the sensation.
This feeling has a very important function of its own - to notify of a threat. If there is a threat, fear arises; if there is no danger, there is no fear. The threat can be both real and imaginary, and the larger and closer it is, the stronger the fear. This is the only and vital role of fear on which our survival depends.
Fear is unpleasant and is felt both on the emotional level and on the body level. There is no need to test it longer than necessary and sufficient. And there is a simple and constructive reaction to this feeling.
- Assess the threat and, possibly, understand that there is actually no danger;
- Eliminate the threat itself;
- Protect yourself.
Once these actions are completed, the fear always goes away. It has fulfilled its function, and after that it is no longer needed.
But how can one explain the fact that people often live in a constant sense of anxiety or even intense fear? Here it is necessary to separate the rational and the irrational.
All emotions are important and necessary if they are based on the real circumstances of the surrounding reality. If a person is in danger, he must be afraid. In the modern world, the danger has acquired a different character compared to the past centuries. It is unlikely to become a victim of an attack by a wild beast or a gang of robbers, but there is a threat of dismissal, bankruptcy, breakdown of relations, deterioration of health and other problems of the 21st century.
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If such a threat hangs over a person, he will live in anxiety until it is eliminated. This is rational fear. It is perfectly justified and all that needs to be done is to take the aforementioned actions to eliminate the danger and the fear will pass. These steps are not always easy and pleasant, but they need to be done, otherwise the fear will remain and will continue to signal danger. This is how human psychology works, and it must be understood and used. I wrote about this in the post "How to Be Happy".
But what if there is no danger? What if a person walks down the street and realizes his head that nothing threatens him, everything is fine, but a lump shrinks in the chest, the body becomes covered with sweat and the knees begin to tremble? This is an irrational fear, not based on the surrounding reality. And this is a common condition that many people have been struggling with unsuccessfully for many years, either on their own or with the help of psychologists.
If fear is a signal of danger, and a person consciously understands that there is no threat, why does not fear go away? It is felt because the threat actually exists, but it is not in this place and not in this time. Let me explain what I mean.
Such an irrational fear is at the subconscious level and arises in response not to the surrounding reality, but to the events of the past. These past events carried the threat that was then, and the body remembers the fear in response to it. These sensations automatically rise from the subconscious when something appears in the surrounding reality that resonates with them.
This is how people are afraid of elevators, subways, planes, confined spaces - they automatically and uncontrollably react to their past, and not to what is happening now.
The human psyche is like rings on a tree cut.
Each ring is a year of life, and the largest and outermost one is the person's current age. In one of these circles, rational fear emerged in response to a threat, which turned into a weak subconscious association that connected what was perceived as a danger with fear. This association has taken hold over the years, with each new "circle" and has turned into an irrational fear at the present age.
Therefore, every time a person experiences excitement, when there seems to be no real reason for him, this is excitement of a different age and a different event. Moreover, sometimes it happens that the fear that a person experiences is not his fear at all.
It is possible to dive into your own subconscious and find the first event that caused the fear. And it almost always turns out that the fear was wrong, that there was nothing extremely dangerous and everything ended well. A child could be scared of a small dog, which seemed big to him, or lose his mother in a shopping center - and after thirty years he was afraid of all dogs or crowded places.
Using the resources of your own consciousness, you can change your attitude to that first event. And with a changed attitude, emotions change. From that situation, feelings of danger and fear leave. And since all subsequent ones were held on to that event, fear leaves all levels of consciousness, and a person is freed from it forever.
In a certain mode of work of your own consciousness, you can edit the errors of your perception, which interfere many years later. The consciousness of each person is capable of turning life into anxiety or giving freedom from it forever. And each person has the opportunity to choose the latter.
Alexander Valyunin