“Fearlessness is not only possible, it is the ultimate joy. When you touch nonfear, you are free. If I am ever in an airplane and the pilot announces that the plane is about to crash, I will practice mindful breathing. If you receive bad news, I hope you will do the same. But don’t wait for the critical moment to arrive before you start practicing to transform your fear and live mindfully. Nobody can give you fearlessness. Even if the Buddha were sitting right here next to you, he couldn’t give it to you. You have to practice and realize it yourself. If you make a habit of mindfulness practice, when difficulties arise, you will already know what to do.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh, Fear
The simplicity of famed Buddhist monk and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, does not overshadow its profundity. To use a corollary of Will Durant’s famous quotation (misattributed often to Aristotle), “We are what we repeatedly [feel]. [Fearlessness], then, is not an act, but a habit.”
As we discussed in last week’s article, How Fear Impacts Our Health, we learned that fear can have some pretty negative mental health effects on us if we don’t respond to it. In this article, let’s address how to overcome mental fears. We will discuss how to identify mental fears, and then techniques for working through mental fears.
Think about your mental fears.
When we think about mental fears, we must remember that we’re thinking about our thinking. And, this can be difficult by itself to consider! But, if we remember that aside from the complexity involved in our mental fears’ roots, these fears are by their very nature, all in our head. We have control. And, if we provide enough focus on our mental fears, we can overcome them.
As Noam Shpancer, PhD, notes in his Psychology Today article, “Overcoming Fear: The Only Way Out is Through,” is “that familiar things get boring.” Our neuropsychological framework is designed to seek out new things. Once we identify this novelty, it’s no longer so. And, we habituate (i.e., get used to it). This is how we overcome mental fears.
Think about it. (Pun intended.) If I ask you to perform an exercise where you are exposed persistently to something you fear; for example, spiders. And, you spend the next year, five years, 10 years, in the presence of spiders. They are with you each and every day, wherever you go. They don’t interact with you. They are simply present.
What do you logically (not emotionally) believe happens to your fear of spiders? If you didn’t curl up into a ball for all that time, you get on with your life. The spiders fades into the background of life. You habituate.
So too is the reality with your mental fears. No spiders necessary. Take your mental fear of choice: fear of failure, your mother-in-law, taking on that tough project, or getting fired. Now, focus on that fear. Give it some good, long thought. You might even start to consider alternative ways to circumnavigate the negative outcomes if you don’t face the fear in your life. What becomes of the fear? It becomes small to you. It possibly becomes boring. You habituate.
With mental fears, it’s better to think more about mental fears until they’re no longer strangers lurking outside your window at night. Invite them into your living room. Sit down and have a conversation with them. Soon enough, you’ll find they’re not that scary and likely provide you more insight than fright.
Find the mental fears in your body.
When you eat one piece of cake at your friend’s birthday party, you enjoy it. But, now eat the whole cake. All of it. Right there and then. How do you feel after eating that whole cake? Not so great, eh?
That’s how fear works in your body. When you feel fear, it’s a neurological chain reaction that leads to a physiological response. Your brain releases chemicals into your bloodstream that instantaneously triggers a series of events.
Your digestive system shuts down. Who needs to think about eating when a lion is about to eat you?
Your pulse quickens and your muscles tighten, so you can leap into action to get out of harm’s way. Your blood vessels also constrict so that your mind can think faster, and you gain alertness as your pupils dilate.
For many millennia, evolution has taught your body to simply overcompensate for every kind of fear by going through this process. It’s akin to that cake gluttony exercise for your mental and nervous system.
Thankfully, there’s a trick for overcoming these fear-based reactions. It turns out that almost identically, the physical reactions you feel to mental fears, anxiety, worry, overwhelm and more is what you feel when you’re ecstatic, excited and overjoyed in the moment.
You have two options once you start to recognize these feelings stirring in you. The first option is to use that fearful reaction and transfer it to excitement. Can you use that energy to get motivated and into action to tackle a tough project? (That’s the fight side of the fight-or-flight response.)
Otherwise, the other option is to sit with your physical feelings until the chemical response dissipates. We tend to think that this will last a long time, but in actuality, the fight-or-flight response mental fear dulls fairly rapidly as it sets off.
While your body may take anywhere from 20 minutes up to an hour to come down from the arousal state, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of the energy unleashed and do some healthy physical activity. Learning to control your mental fears takes time, and that takes us to our next behavioral intervention for tackling mental fears.
Practice breathing.
While Stoicism, the Hellenistics philosophy that teaches about self-control and fortitude, lost its popularity (as it was the dominant philosophy of the third century BCE) when the Emperor of Rome, Constantine, declared Christianity its official religion, it provides us a valuable lesson in managing our mental fears, namely temperance.
In the Stoic’s worldview, temperance affords a “virtuous” person the ability to moderate their emotions. In a psychologist’s parlance, we might call this “purposeful” emotional regulation. Remember Durant and “we are what we repeatedly [feel]?” What if you could wrap this Stoic temperance into an activity that can help you regulate those mental fears? It turns out, this brings us back to the venerable Nhat Hanh’s quotation with which I began this article.
If you can learn to be mindful of your mental fears, and practice concentrating your breath into those fears, then your body’s natural healing response activates. As I have written before, there are many ways to meditate or practice mindfulness exercises.
Now, combine each of the concepts I cover here in this article. Dwell on your mental fears, one at a time, by feeling the physical reactions in a safe place when they’re not being triggered. You start to become comfortable with the discomfort.
Then, you practice breathing exercises, such as meditation or other mindfulness exercises, to shut down the mental fears sooner and redirect your attentional faculties and actions toward more productive uses. Fearlessness, then, is not an act of bravery once in the face of a mental fear, but the regular habit of practicing mindfulness.
This is the one-two punch to conquering mental fears, that works not as a quick-fix, but as Nhat Hanh states, over time as you practice and embrace the mental fears until they’re no longer so.
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“A feeling is just a feeling. And you are much more than that feeling. We shouldn’t let ourselves be carried away by a feeling, even a pleasant one, much less an unpleasant one. We just practice recognition of the feeling.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh, Fear
Have you ever experienced such a mental fear that you’ve been able to overcome through practicing embracing and ultimately letting it go? Other suggestions for overcoming mental fears? Let us know in the comments!