Fear
Fear is Within
"Fear, like shadows, is born within and grows in darkness. But when the light of awareness shines upon it, it dissolves, revealing that its power was always ours to control." - Gpt4
“We are more often frightened than hurt; And we suffer more in imagination than in reality.” - Seneca
You have the power to evict the fear out of your mind.
How to get out of Fear
Reframe your way of thinking
Reframe your way of thinking, use cognitive distancing to see the same situation from a different view point.
Such as: Reframe thoughts as hypotheses
Reframe thoughts as hypotheses: Instead of treating a thought as a fact, you can treat it as a hypothesis that can be tested or questioned. For example, instead of thinking,
"I'm going to fail,"
you could think
"I have the thought that I might fail."
Now you can:
- Distance yourself from that thought.
- Question the thought.
Or Use the third-person perspective
Use the third-person perspective: Try to look at your situation as if you were an outside observer. This can help you view your thoughts and emotions more objectively.
Visualize your thoughts
Visualize your thoughts: Imagine your thoughts as objects floating by on a stream, or as words written on leaves that are drifting away in the wind. This can help you see your thoughts as transient and separate from yourself.
Use visual submodalities
The visualization of thoughts advise is akin to whats called visual submodalities manipulation from NLP: Neuro Linguistic Programming.
Hence, consider also consider manipulating your fears using visual submodalities to lessen the degree of your fears affecting you.
Visual submodalities are the specific characteristics of our mental imagery. This includes aspects such as brightness, size, distance, and color, as well as the motion (or lack thereof), the image's perspective, and whether it is viewed first-person or third-person.
Here are ways to adjust these visual submodalities to modify the intensity of their impact:
Increase Intensity
To intensify the emotional effect of a mental image, adjust its submodalities as follows:
- Add motion: Make the image dynamic or moving.
- Enhance brightness: Make the image brightly lit.
- Enlarge: Increase the image's size.
- Saturate: Infuse the image with vibrant colors.
Decrease Intensity
To lessen the emotional effect of a mental image, manipulate its submodalities as follows:
- Keep it static: Make the image stationary or still.
- Diminish brightness: Make the image dim or dull.
- Reduce size: Shrink the image to a smaller size.
- Desaturate: Transform the image into black and white.
Question yourself in why NOT fashion
- Why you are not afraid?
- Why were you afraid? What made you overcome your fear?
- What steps have you taken mentally to move past it?
Worst case scenario tactic
You can also use worst case scenario tactic. Imagine the worst case scenario. While imaging worst case and coping with it all of a sudden you realize the problem that you feared is not as large you have imagined.
In the end zoom out. Memento Mori (Remember That you will Die), what you fear now will pass.
Fear Increases Pain
It’s what we feel when we think we’re in danger. - Book: The Way Out
But fear doesn’t just magnify our senses. Fear also amplifies danger signals like pain. A group of researchers proved this using terrifying pictures and a hot probe. Fun! In this experiment, people got hot pulses on their skin randomly while looking through a series of photos. Some of the pictures were scary, while others were neutral. Even though the pulses were all the same, the subjects experienced much more pain when looking at the scary photos.
What’s really interesting is that sometimes the participants felt pain when there was no hot pulse at all. But this happened only when they were looking at the scary photos, not the neutral ones. The fear from the pictures put their brains on high alert, and they experienced pain even when the probe was off. - Book: The Way Out
Fear is the fuel for the pain. A study in the Netherlands showed this phenomenon in action. The researchers recruited people with low back pain and measured how much pain-related fear they had. When they followed up six months later, the people who scored high on fear were much more likely to still be in pain. This was true regardless of how bad their pain was initially or how long they’d had it. The Dutch scientists looked at back pain, but dozens of studies on everything from headaches to knee pain to fibromyalgia all show the same pattern. The more fear you have around your pain, the more likely your pain is to continue. - Book: The Way Out
A group of researchers proved this using terrifying pictures and a hot probe. Fun! In this experiment, people got hot pulses on their skin randomly while looking through a series of photos. Some of the pictures were scary, while others were neutral. Even though the pulses were all the same, the subjects experienced much more pain when looking at the scary photos.What’s really interesting is that sometimes the participants felt pain when there was no hot pulse at all. But this happened only when they were looking at the scary photos, not the neutral ones. The fear from the pictures put their brains on high alert, and they experienced pain even when the probe was off. This is the key to understanding neuroplastic pain. Being in a state of high alert can change the way we perceive signals from our body. Fear can create pain. -- Book: The Way Out
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