The Critical First Steps to Conquering Fear
“Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.”
–Judy Blume
Controlled by Emotion ?
How you deal with your fear will determine the quality of your experiences and the value you create in your life. If we want our lives to have meaning for ourselves and our families, we are going to have to consider these ideas and decide on how to act on them. Right now, we are all in a kind of state of negativity. Pessimism. There are riots and people are dying and parents are scared about sending their children to school. Colleges are trying to figure out what to do about classes and football seasons. There is one big cloud that is just wafting over all of us. That cloud is uncertainty. The unknown. The fear of what could be. What do you do when you are paralyzed by fear? What do you do when you are afraid to go outside of your house? How can we get confidence ? How can we control our fear?
One place we can start is to recognize that fear is an emotion. You can feel fear or you can feel sad or you can feel happy or you can feel joy. Are any of those feelings going to kill you ? No. So why let a feeling rule, control or dominate your thinking, your goals or your actions? Is there any value in that? Not likely.
Thought Control
Pay attention because this is very very important. At baseline, right now, most of us are being totally dominated in our own minds by a bias of negativity. The majority of our thoughts are negative and pessimistic. You have a negative bent in your thinking right now just sitting there reading this. That is a critical point to understand on your way to controlling your thoughts.
Even though people claim to hold themselves in high regard, the thoughts that spontaneously occur to them—their “mental chatter,” so to speak—is mostly (up to 70%) negative, a phenomenon that could be referred to as negativity dominance. Negativity dominance suggests that there is a disconnect between how people respond to questions about how well they are doing relative to their peers, how rosy their future is, and the extent to which they wield control over their outcomes—all of which exhibit a distinct positivity bias—and how they actually feel, deep down in their sub-conscious, about their life. Deep down, it turns out that people are much more self-critical, pessimistic, and fearful than they let out in their conscious thoughts.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sapient-nature/201310/how-negative-is-your-mental-chatter
Hey, I’m in the same boat. The hardest part of all this is to recognize that we are in a battle. A war. The war is within our own minds. We are our own worst enemy. We start to feel hopeless and helpless. Remember one thing, one of the primary weapons that Satan uses is fear. When we face our fear, we are engaging in spiritual warfare. We are fighting for what is good and we are focusing on value. If we give in to our fear, and we let it dominate our lives, we are letting evil win and we are also not being an example to those around us. If we love our family members and the people around us, facing our fears and being an example of courage inspires them. When we act by facing our fear, we model strength and confidence. This allows them to feel stronger,more confident and more sure of themselves. Who doesn’t want that for their families? In the same way, if we model timidity and inaction, just by proximity, they will feel timid and uninspired.
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.”
2 Timothy 1:7 NIV
Keep in mind that if we choose fear and timidity, we are ignoring our spirits and we are ignoring our authentic selves. The selves God had in mind when he created us. We are living lives that are inauthentic and fake. We are hurting ourselves, and just as important, we are hurting the people we love most by NOT being the examples that God had in mind for us. So where do we start? We get control of our thoughts. Now. We learn how to discipline our minds. Here is a good blog post to get you started.
https://bravethewave.org/2020/03/12/control-your-thoughts-control-your-anxiety/
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Another place to look is our intake of news and social media feeds. Listen, we need to be smarter and try to understand that the news media, news programs and websites, social media platforms, and television programs have one thing in mind. They need eyeballs, ratings and clicks. They need you to engage. If you ignore them, they lose money and they are out of business. They absolutely need your attention.
We really should stop and think about our own habits when it comes to news shows and websites and what kind of information we are allowing into our brains. This article tells us that social media has an effect on our sense of well-being and tends to move us toward depression. It also sends our brains into comparing mode. We begin to compare our lives to the lives of others which has a horrible effect on our own sense of gratitude.
This article goes on to point out that even if we feel that we are doing better than someone else, it has a negative effect on our mental health.
Part of the reason Facebook makes people feel socially isolated (even though they may not actually be) is the comparison factor. We fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to others as we scroll through our feeds, and make judgements about how we measure up. One study looked at how we make comparisons to others posts, in “upward” or “downward” directions—that is, feeling that we’re either better or worse off than our friends. It turned out that both types of comparisons made people feel worse, which is surprising, since in real life, only upward comparisons (feeling another person has it better than you) makes people feel bad. But in the social network world, it seems that any kind of comparison is linked to depressive symptoms.
When we think about comparisons this could be related to our identities. When we are heavily engaged in social media, we tend to adopt a variety of identities, all of which have the potential to be false or inauthentic. I have focused on the “false” or inauthentic self in my books that involve the “near death experience”. In those illustrations, the function of the near death experience is to point out a “false self” because it is something to be avoided. When it comes to trying to get control of our fear, if we are embracing an identity that is false, this type of identity can possibly create dissonance, fear and a sense of ill-being, not well being.
Gratitude Is HUGE
The social media studies above show us that comparing ourselves either in a positive or negative way to others from the standpoint of social media results in pessimism regardless if we see ourselves in a positive or negative light. That is absolutely amazing to me. I never knew that. As I have mentioned before, when it comes to controlling fear, gratitude is absolutely essential. You can’t be truly grateful and afraid at the same time. You also can’t be genuinely grateful and angry at the same time either. Gratitude brings peace. Peace is something that we all need.
https://bravethewave.org/2019/12/12/the-key-to-unlock-peace/
So one step to conquering fear is to start out our day with gratitude. We should be grateful for our blessings. Don’t compare yourself to your friends or someone on social media, focus on the blessings that God has given you. Automatically, your sense of well being will improve. So will your sense of peace.
The Vicious News Cycle
What about the news? Look at some excerpts from an article on how watching the news, tends to make us more negative and pessimistic.
One thing to point out is that it forces us to be blind to the good things that are all around us.
This matters, because research shows us that what we see on the news can significantly impact our mental health. While negative news may influence our thinking through multiple mechanisms, one important consideration is how it interfaces with our cognitive biases, keeping our focus on everything that’s going wrong while blinding us to all the good things around us.
1. Negativity bias means that we can’t turn negative news off
Negativity bias refers to the fact that humans focus on negative events, information, or emotions more than their positive counterparts. Our preference for the negative has been harnessed to keep our attention.
2. Availability bias means that after we see negativity, we overestimate its significance.
If you’re constantly watching negative news, the availability bias means your brain may be more likely to remember horrible events and then believe that these relatively infrequent occurrences actually represent the general state of things.
3. Confirmation bias means that we will find evidence to support negativity.
Confirmation bias is the idea that we will actively seek out, remember, and favor information that confirms something we already believe.
I’m not saying to avoid all social media and all news programs, but I think it is wise to be aware that there is some manipulation going on with some social media sites and on news programs. What we should be cognizant of is the fact that we have control over the type of information that we allow into our brains. If the psychology studies are telling us that we are already at 70 percent negativity when it comes to our thoughts, I say start your day off in a positive way. If you feel depressed or pessimistic or you feel paralyzed by fear and anxiety, start looking at what kind of information you are allowing into your brain. Limit your social media intake and your news reporting and start focusing on things that are positive. Spend time in the Word and in prayer. Be grateful for the things you have and learn to cultivate a quiet time with Jesus.
I’ll be perfectly honest with you. Right now, in this battle for truth and spreading my message, Satan is kicking my butt. Fighting for truth and light is a hard battle.
I have one review for my book and it is written by a non-believer,
Here is a quote,
What wasn’t clear from the book description that I read at one of my favorite book review sites was that this book is heavily invested in the Christian mythos and bible. The book is full of bible quotes and references to the Christian God and Jesus. If you’re Christian, this will probably be fine and actually be a way to support your passion and purpose with your faith. If you are not Christian, depending on your spiritual bent (or lack of one), you may find this heavy reliance on Christianity to be a bit much.
Christian mythos —— a myth or mythology or set of beliefs or assumptions.
This is the way I see the score in my mind. SATAN 1 Johnny 0
Am I scared, or am I leaning toward quitting or giving up? Bleep NO !! It’s early in the game. I’m just getting warmed up !!
I would like to extend the offer for a free copy of my new book, “Discover Your Passion, Release Your Power:How to Fulfill Your Purpose in the power of the Authentic Self” in any form you would like. If you would like an advance review paperback copy, email your home address to bravethewaveweride@gmail.com. If you would like a pdf or kindle version of the book just email the request to bravethewaveweride@gmail.com and I will send it to you. I am hoping to get some reviews for the book. Any help with those reviews would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you know any other people in the family of believers that are having a particularly tough time during this pandemic, please forward this email to them.
Thank you for your support !!
Your Brother in Christ
Johnny