You know the saying “as you think you shall become” and the fact that you decide your perspective on things. Well that is absolutely what I believe.
However, I have noticed that the sense of “fear” that we all have, no matter how illogical, can really throw a wrench into your plans to do and have the things you want.
Take for instance, at work the other night at a restaurant. There’s this waitress there I was flirting with all day. At the end of the night, I had my chance to ask her out. It was me, her and a few others sitting around in the break area towards the end of the night.
Now all I had to do was say “hey what are you doing tonight? You wanna come out with me?”. And it might have worked. At the least I could have got her number.
But no, instead, I thought “I can’t do that. What would everyone else around think?”. (YEAH WHO CARES??? I know)
And in the midst of keeping up with the conversation, this thought became very real and permanent, when it was actually just dumb.
It seems to happen alot to me and I believe it’s mostly due to the fact that I don’t think things through enough. If I had questioned that thought like “do I really care what these other people think?” I would have recognized it for what it was, illogical fear. Who knows then what might have happened.
So basically, for people who have a strong sense of self control and focus, and who have learned to conquer illogical fears – how do you do it?
Lol. I actually just read that thread. But not to worry, she is a co-worker of mine and wasn’t being friendly just because she had too. I can see where the confusion might arise though.
I’ll be interested to see if anyone can tell you how to overcome “illogical fears”, but in the meantime, I just read a chapter on where those fears come from and how they’ve evolved over time.
You might be interested to learn, according to this author anyway, how those fears came about.
It’s from a book called The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris. This is the website. If you go to the first link where it says to download the first chapter, there’s a pdf where he talks about how fears evolved, and the fear that you’re referencing if the one where people are really concerned with how others think of them. Essentially, he says that it’s from the time where survival depended on being part of a clan since individual survival was almost impossible. So the fear of not belonging or looking bad in front of others was key to surviving. Times may have changed, but the fears have not.
In order to overcome those fears, you’re working against generations of inbred fear that had a logical basis at the time.
You may not be able to control your fears, but you certainly can control your responses to them. Deep breathing techniques, meditation, biofeedback, self-talk, or cognitive-behavioral therapy could all help with that. Or you could just accept the fact that you’re very young, these feelings are normal, and you’ll probably outgrow it as you mature.
I didn’t mean to imply that you couldn’t work on the responses to the fears or anything like that. I just meant that the fears are generally very real, so they can’t just be eliminated very likely. But yes, all those ideas are great for working with dealing with them.
One thing that can help: Ask yourself what you’d be saying or doing if you didn’t have that fear. Make it as concrete as possible, not abstract. You might even imagine a fearless twin next to you, and ask yourself what he would say or do. You might then mimic him, or just pretend that you actually are him.
Not to get too OT here, but many societies kept the ethos of the clan, and those fears, very much alive through concrete collective action long after the hunter-gatherer era. In many agrarian and industrial communities it was quite acceptable to stigmatize and harass your neighbors for “simply being different” - sometimes even to spill blood if the differences ran to religion or skin color.
I would argue with Harris that such fears are not always as illogical as he might wish to think. Communities need only a certain amount of scarcity and danger to start hurting or killing. Individuals sometimes need none at all - only for you or me to look at them a little funny.
My bad. I wanted to summarize about a page of information into a sentence and didn’t do a very good job. And it’s also coming from a slightly different context. He’s trying to explain why it’s often difficult to find happiness inately.
I would say that the fears are more outdated, not necessarily illogical. They definitely had usefulness at one time, and may have usefulness in some situations currently. But in many more instances now, the fears work against us and don’t have the same function as before.
I was in a company aircraft crash. The plane was totaled and the pilots back was broken. I walked away from it with a chipped tooth and a cracked sternum - both issues very minor.
After that I had an irrational, illogical fear of flying. Just walking close to an airplane was upsetting and would cause a little nausea.
I overcame it by brute force - flying a lot. That was very difficult at first but after more than 250,000 flight miles I became comfortable flying again.
See I agree that mostly the fears just hold us back. Say I’d asked her out in front of the others. She could have said ok and that would have been cool. She could have said no and I would have been rejected in front of the others, which would have been embarrassing but had no real consequences. Lastly, she could have gave some excuse which could turn out to be good or bad.
I’ll even go as far to say that each of those answers would have probably depended more on how I asked than anything else.
So why can’t I figure this out beforehand or at least in the moment instead of beiing wrapped up with dumb, illogical fear?
P.s. I read the first chapter to that book. Looks good, I suppose you would recommend it?
No, sorry. I had just read the first chapter from that website and was thinking of it when I read your OP. I haven’t read the book. I do like the concept of mindfulness, but I don’t know how successfully the book brings out the concept.
If you like the concept of mindfulness to help you get rid of fears, you might take a look at Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He’s credited with bringing meditation into mainstream medicine by some. But I think that’s a little overkill for your situation.
It sounds like you could try any number of techniques to help you in that situation including just brute force like the person above mentioned. It doesn’t sound like debilitating fear, just feeling tongue-tied at the moment. It might work just to practice on some people when you’re not in a situation where you feel something is at stake and then work your way up to when you’re really hoping the answer is yes.
Fear? No. That’s not something I have. Through a series of events starting in my pre-teen years and lasting til my early 20s, it’s kind of been bred out of me. How? Experience, mostly. I just got used to doing scary things and finding that nothing bad came of it. It’s a conditioned way of thinking- that nothing bad will happen to you.
So I suggest you use all the regular techniques for conditioning yourself. Start small. Think positive. Finally, JUST DO IT.
I overcame my illogical fears in a 12 step program. I wish I could have learned how to deal with fear in an easier, softer way but I could not. I almost drank myself to death. I was self medicating to stop the fear. It has been a much better life since learning the technique. Also I have not felt the need to drink in years.
It is basicly identifying and walking through the fears, one at a time. I had to “Feel, Deal and Heal” in that order. It took me a few years of work and writing to accomplish it. I had to learn to let go and trust and rely on a higher power. "Not me " Knowledge and self reliance was not enough. I had to do the work, face everything and recover instead of “F everything and run”. I couldn’t think my way out of it like you are trying to do. I also could not drink my way out of it.
I don’t think they have a 12 step program for fear. They should as life on lifes terms can be very scary. I still have fear but at least today I have some tools to cope with it other then drinking and I know if it is logical or illogical fear. Good Luck!
Some fears, like social stigmas, are best dealt with by just jumping in and doing the thing anyway. Others such as physical fears can be overcome with repeated exposure in increasing degrees of extremity. Sometimes you just have to let go though. Sometimes it is learning the skills to give you confidence.
The key for me was learning to translate fear into respect, and the acceptance of death. Live each day as if it is your last, it might well be. For example when learning to work with venomous snakes, I had a fear of elapids (cobras and their kin), while being just fine with vipers. It was just something in how fast they moved! They could climb as well. It took a little while for me to transmutate my fear into respect. I’m no longer afraid of being bitten, I KNOW that it could happen any time I work with one of those animals. I respect that they can quite probably kill me and take every precaution to avoid that result. This developed into a strict regimen of never taking shortcuts and always following safety procedures when dealing with those animals. The skills keep me safe, and I can enjoy working with a group of animals that very few people ever do. Any risky business holds no fear now that I accept that death will happen at some point, and take precautions to avoid it; but not to the point of losing out on experiences that intrigue me.
I have been thinking a lot about phobias lately, because I just had to face one of my worse ones. I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday, and I’m afraid to go to the doctor. I was thinking about this, and I realized that a fear of seeing a doctor would have served my ancestors pretty well up until about the nineteenth century, when medical treatments started doing more good than harm. Until then, it would have encouraged them to avoid toxic treatments (such as mercury), or treatments that do more harm than good in most cases, like bloodletting with a dirty knife.
I have a phobia of needles (but I still managed to get a shot yesterday, YAY ME!). So do my father and sister. My father’s father had at least one phobia that I know of, he was afraid of crossing bridges. I suspect there is a genetic predisposition to phobias in my family. So some of you who have no phobias may have just gotten lucky in the genetic lottery…
I deal with fear issues a lot, especially the kind that you’re describing – social situations, work, etc. I sometimes do describe it as feeling like a lion is going to eat me, even if the problem is more like “which work problem should I deal with first?,” or “how can I get out of this uncomfortable social situation?”
I have found that the cognitive therapy techniques from the book Learned Optimism have been extremely useful to me. The book provides specific exercises that you can do to change the way you think in anxiety-producing situations. The more I practice those exercises, the easier and less anxious the situations become.
It’s worth taking a look to see if it might work for you.
