3 Ways to Conquer Your Fears and Challenge Yourself Everyday
3 Ways to Conquer Your Fears and Challenge Yourself Everyday
Have you ever felt overwhelmed by fear – so much so that it prevented you from doing something you wanted to do? Believe it or not, this is a common problem faced by many people daily.
Fear has the power to hold you back from taking risks, following your dreams, or becoming successful at anything you attempt to do. If you allow it to control you for long enough, it can eventually erode your quality of life and keep you locked in a prison of inactivity.
What many people fail to realize is that fear is nothing more than a conditioned response. It’s a natural reaction to a frightening or unfamiliar situation. While it is usually automatic, there are things you can do to overcome it. Use the 3 suggested ways below to conquer your fears:
1) Check your expectations.
One major contributor of fear is the prevalence of negative expectations. Do you usually find yourself expecting the worst in every situation? Do you worry obsessively about what could go wrong, rather than focusing on your strengths and capabilities?
If you make a conscious effort to expect the best, see the positive side of each situation and keep reminding yourself that you can handle more than you often think, you’ll find yourself with much less fear to deal with. Even if feelings of fear do manage to creep into your consciousness, you’ll still be able to keep them in perspective and balance them against an underlying sense of confidence.
2) Discredit your fears.
Experts will tell you that the majority of things you fear will never come to pass anyway. While this may be true, it sure doesn’t feel that way when fear has a chokehold on you! However, if you look a little more closely at your fears when they arise, you may be able to dismiss at least a few.
For example, if you have a fear of public speaking and your boss wants you to give a presentation at work, you might feel like your life (and perhaps your livelihood) is on the line. You may fear getting fired, or worry that your colleagues will lose respect for you if you don’t do a good job.
But is any of this likely to happen? In most cases, no. Rather than worrying about what “might” happen if you don’t give a solid presentation, you might brainstorm ways to help improve your performance, such as being well prepared, practicing your delivery on friends and family members, writing notes to yourself and so on.
3) Do the very thing you fear.
When you remember that fear is simply a feeling, it loses much of its power. It can’t harm you and except in truly threatening situations you can choose to ignore it and move forward anyway.
If you weigh the pros and cons in any situation, you may decide that the possibility of negative consequences is minimal so there’s nothing to stop you from ignoring your fear and going for it! This will be determined by you on a case-by-case basis, of course. The point isn’t to become reckless with your decision-making but rather to empower yourself to know when a fear is groundless and easily overcome.
Overcoming fear: How to Challenge Yourself Everyday
Fear serves a useful function. It keeps us safe by placing us in a high state of alert when we sense danger. But irrational or illogical fear can also limit our lives and keep us from rising to new challenges. In those with anxiety disorder, the normal nervous system response to a threat is easily aroused and difficult to subdue. Fear can cause physical and psychological symptoms that sabotage our goals.
Fortunately, there are a few simple ways to challenge yourself and lean into fear.
Recognize that fear is a universal emotion, one you are vulnerable to. In her book “The Gifts of Imperfection, researcher Dr. Brene Brown said that “Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
The first step is to be honest and admit you are afraid. The second step is to choose to be brave. Realize that fear is mostly a learned response and it’s possible to recondition a fear response. Fear is controlled by the amygdala, a set of neurons located in the brain’s medial temporal lobe.
When the amygdala receives a danger warning, logical or not, stress hormones begin to flood the body. We learn to fear based on our experiences, but we can de-program fear by confronting the things we are most afraid of. Talk about fear to defuse it.
People who are afraid of public speaking, for example, attend Toastmasters International meetings where they share and confront their fears with like-minded individuals. Trick your mind by imagining a best case/worst case scenario. You dread asking for a raise and your mind races with awful possibilities.
One way to calm such fears is to imagine the best case/worst case scenarios. First imagine that all will go as well as it possibly could. You ask for a raise and the boss realize you deserve twice your current salary. Great. Then imagine the worst possible scenario. He’s so insulted you asked that he fires you on the spot.
The reality will probably fall somewhere in between. And that’s generally the case. Remember the “10” rule. You can do most things for 10 minutes even if you fear that you will be able to finish the entire project. Tell yourself you can make it through 10 minutes, and then tell yourself that again until the job is done.
If fear overwhelms your life and prevents you from challenging yourself, don’t be afraid to seek professional help.
