To face your fears is to grow and become a stronger and more capable person. Avoiding fears and stressors may be comfortable in the short term, but it only reinforces the fear and leads to more long-term restrictions.
The recipe for getting over a fear is to voluntarily invite stress and then teach yourself to adapt and overcome.
Let’s break this down piece by piece!
Voluntarily
Fear-causing things may be thrust upon you without warning. In these cases, it’s difficult to have a productive response because your instinct is to fight back.
Putting yourself in the path of your fears is a hard but necessary step. If you know that you’ll be in an uncomfortable position, you can use it as practice to break down your internal barriers.
It’s easier to be intentional with your action plan when you can anticipate what’s to come. Done well, you’ll be ready to stay calm even when the situations are unexpected.
This can be tremendously difficult, but you’ll recognize that the fleeting discomfort is a small price to pay for lasting freedom.
Invite stress
Provoke the very thing that causes you to be fearful, worried, or anxious.
This needs to be done delicately. Invite minor stress, not major stress. If you want to get over a fear of heights, don’t go skydiving right off the bat. Likewise, being scared of the dark isn’t best tackled by dropping yourself in a forest overnight without a flashlight.
Do things gradually. The extreme exposures will make the fear more acute. Over time, as you get more and more comfortable, you can progress toward full exposure.
Do this with others, too. Courage is much more easily found in the presence of others.
Teach yourself
When in these situations, you have to change the narrative. Doing so requires that you teach yourself that all is well.
This will require taking the situation at face value, looking at the facts, and using your mental abilities to erase the reactions and thoughts that erroneously brought you fear.
It’s not about ignoring the reason for stress and fear. After all, fears of heights and the dark exist to keep you safe.
But the key distinction that you must teach yourself is that there is another way. It’s not a choice of peace or the things you fear. They aren’t mutually exclusive. The way to accept this is to teach yourself that it’s so.
For more, read my post about how false beliefs may be deceiving you.
Adapt and overcome
The overall intention is to adapt and overcome. Phrased another way, you want to develop mental agility that allows you to transcend the things that previously stopped you in your tracks.
Adapting and overcoming might be a process you have to work at. As you continue to place yourself in situations that safely elicit a stress response, you’ll develop confidence that you can successfully coexist with the situation at hand.
That’s truly what you’re after: being faced with a situation and replacing the stress response with confidence. This cannot be done with avoidance. You must throw yourself into the fire again and again to forge confidence.
Going even further, facing your fears can lead to clearer thinking, better heart health, and better overall emotional regulation according to the University of Minnesota.
Face your fears! You’ll thank yourself later!
If fear-related stressful moments are represented by speedbumps along a highway, you want to smooth those out. That way, traveling the roads you need is easy and just flows.
The tactic outlined in this post provides an iron you can use for smoothing. (Well, maybe a jackhammer fits the metaphor better.)
Either way, voluntarily face your fears and teach yourself to transcend them. Avoidance isn’t the solution. Exposure is!
Thank you so much for reading! Please share with others who may benefit! 🙂
