Irish Times
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Health Supplement 16 November 2004
Understanding the fear and doing it anyway


Carmel Wynne

Are you aware that you can decide how you react to any person, place, event or thing?  You are the manager of your own emotional state whether you recognise this or not.

You may believe that an upsetting situation is responsible for your feelings.  You may even blame someone for how you feel unaware that your feelings are stimulated by your thinking.

It is not the event but the meaning that you give to the event that creates your emotional reaction.  Bungee jumping which can be an exciting and stimulating sport for one person is a terrifying life-threatening activity for another.

It’s not the height of the jump but how the person responds to their thinking about jumping from a great height and hanging on a rope that makes the activity exciting or frightening.

What you tell yourself produces your emotional feelings.  When you change what you think you also change how you feel.

What you believe powerfully influences the life choices you make.  Emotionally aware people understand that their feeling come from how they think.

They have an awareness of where their feelings originate.  They give themselves choices and work with their emotions.

Let’s take fear as an example of an emotion that is often seen as negative and undesirable.  Healthy fear keeps you safe.  Unhealthy fear acts as a barrier to growth and achievement.

In extreme cases fear can immobilise and seriously limit a person’s choices.  The American psychologist Abraham Maslow saw life as a series of two-sided choices.  One side represented safety and being afraid, the other moving forward and growth.

Fear is one of the easier emotions to recognise because almost everyone admits to feeling scared.  What is not so readily recognised is that many of the events that people fear are created by fantasy, wrong beliefs and outdated thinking.

In our society it is accepted as normal that people worry about issues like health, employment, relationships and children.  Intelligent adults put themselves through agonies of fear that defy logic because they lack the understanding of what they are doing to themselves.

People who live in fear of what the future might bring are responding to mental fantasies that they have created.  They respond emotionally to catastrophic scenarios they create in their own imagination.

The feelings of pain they experience in response to the fantasies are very real.  Those ‘False Expectation Appearing Real’ give rise to genuine feelings that are as intense as if the imagined scene occurred.

Fear is a resource that gives you vital information about how you are feeling in response to how you are thinking.

Were you to create the illusion of enjoying excellent health, having the dream career or enjoying responsible children who can be trusted to make good decisions F E A R would change into ‘Feeling Excited And Ready’.

Experienced in a healthy way fear is a necessary emotion that keeps you safe and out of danger.  Experienced in an unhealthy way it stops you from taking risks and going after what you really want.

Extreme fear can immobilise you, keep you stuck, afraid to get out of a rut.  Fear is usually perceived as a negative emotion.  It is seldom seen as a positive feeling that can be utilised for growth.

Useful questions to ask yourself are ‘How do I recognise whether I am feeling fear or excitement?’  ‘How can I tell the difference?’

Some people find it very difficult to identify how they distinguish between the two.  This is hardly surprising.  When we name an emotional feeling what we are doing is putting a label on physical sensations that are in the body.

The butterflies in the stomach that are labelled excitement in one situation are branded fear in another.  So why fight the feeling?  Accept it and change the meaning it has for you.

Author Susan Jeffers says ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’.  Fear is a positive energy to unlock your potential to face new challenges.

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