Why the hell is there fear for?

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it" is a great quote by Mark Twain, but let’s be honest, how many people actually freeze when in fear? and then they torment themselves thinking that they never accomplish anything because they are afraid once and again.

I hope that with this post I can help you overcome the fears that keep you tied to your comfort zone and prevent you from achieving everything you set out to do.

Let’s first understand what fear really is. Fear is our brain warning us about the dangers that a situation entails, that feeling of your heart racing, when you start sweating and you feel like your body is telling you that something is wrong. This bodily sensation is a biochemical response to an emotion that we define as fear, but here's the thing, our brain interprets it and two things happen: we have a body reaction and we observe a situation that our brain filters and that automatically goes through our mental models. For example, a call at three in the morning while you are asleep; many people will wake up feeling scared because "something very bad happened". The call is not threatening in itself, the interpretation we give it, is.

The brain searches for an emotion according to our beliefs, to our emotional dictionary and selects the emotion closest to what it wants to convey; when it is fear, it will consequently trigger the reactions in our nervous system.

I don't want you to stop being afraid in a life-threatening situation, the problem is that there is a culture of fear that has served many governments or people to control others. We live in fear because we mistakenly believe that everything can end with our lives, our stability or our security.

One of the things that has been most criticized in handling the COVID-19 crisis this year, has been the terror campaign that governments produced in people, with a high social cost, but which served to keep much of the world population locked up. Fear limits and controls our ability to think rationally, this is because your brain literally sends a lot of blood to the muscles, and guess what? our reasoning becomes clouded because it does not get enough oxygen.

It is healthy to feel fear when our life is at risk, but to be honest, many of our fears are unfounded, our life is no longer in danger all the time, so we must ask ourselves when we feel fear: does this fear really protect me? What is the worst that can happen?

According to neuroscience, even fear is built in resonance to the definition we give the word, so if we believe that we feel fear because we simply cannot find a better word, we cause our body to act according to what it means to feel fear. Could you give a different name to that emotion? Is it really fear what I'm feeling? Could it be simply indecision, insecurity or stress?

Let's talk about the fears we feel when we don't want to fail, when we believe we can't make more money, when we don't want to make a fool of ourselves, when we simply "don't know what's going to happen." Those fears, why am I feeling them? What can I learn from them?

Unfortunately we live in fear because our brain does not find a more suitable emotion, we live chained to fear because our brain seeks to keep us to a minimum. A powerful phrase for me is:

Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Analyze your fears, analyze what they are saying, does your brain want you to simply remain the same person out of comfort? because "better the devil you know…"?

Some will say, "yes, of course, but let's see, what about the fear of death?”...My psychologist once told me that when we are afraid of dying, in truth we are afraid of “not living"; it made sense to me and I began to live differently.

Credits

Imagen: Freepik.com | Usuario: @teksomolika