What You Need to Know About Your Fears But Are Too Afraid To Ask

Don’t be scared. Most of your fears are not real.

When you fear something — causing you to feel anxious, to worry or to panic — your brain is distorting your thoughts. Your fears are your perceptions and are NOT based on reality.

Some look at FEAR as an acronym — False Evidence Appearing Real.

In the bestselling book, The Gift of Fear, author Gavin deBecker breaks down the components of fear and talks about how understanding your fears can benefit you.

DeBecker — who experienced severe early childhood trauma and says he was fearful of everything as a child — was able to use his constant fear to build a deeper understanding of fear which then turned into a multimillion dollar celebrity security business.

In his study of fear, he says there are similarities among your concepts of threat, anxiety and worry, fear, panic and terror and yet, each has its own nuances.

There are also significant differences between how someone who is impacted by trauma experiences each of these and the degree to which the trauma impacted the person.

When you feel fear, you perceive there’s some degree of impending or actual danger that requires you to react. Many times your fear will trigger your stress response system which activates your fight-flight-freeze response.

Typically, this leads to a whole progression of neurological responses that are connected to your core belief system, flashbacks, triggers, thoughts, and behaviors.

This then causes the corresponding release of neurotransmitters and hormones into your system that in turn create their own set of reactions and sensations. Whether or not you’ve experienced trauma or toxic stress will determine the intensity of your fear response.

Anxiety

Your anxiety is always caused by uncertainty.

DeBecker says your anxiety “…is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence. When you predict that you will be fired from your job and you are certain that the prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired. You might have anxiety about the things you can’t predict with certainty, such as the ramifications of losing the job. Predictions in which you have high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or do whatever is needed. Accordingly, anxiety is reduced by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty.“

Worry

Worry is the fear you manufacture — it’s not authentic.

Worrying does not bring solutions and often detracts from finding them. DeBecker calls this a “form of self harassment.”

He says you may worry as a “tool to magically ward off danger.” You may believe that worrying about something will somehow stop it from happening.

Worry is a way to avoid change — when you worry, you don’t do anything about the matter.

Worry is a way to avoid admitting powerlessness over something — since worry feels like you’re doing something.

Worry is a cloying way to have connections with others — the idea being that to worry about someone shows love. The flip side of that is that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about them. As many worried-about-people will tell you — worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.

Worry is a protection against future disappointment. For example — after taking an important test, a student might worry about whether he/she failed. If he/she can feel the experience of failure now by worrying about it — kind of like rehearsing it — then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens.

But since he/she can’t do anything about the results of the test at this point anyway, should he/she spend two days worrying and then learn that he/she failed, or spend the same two days not worrying and then learn that he/she failed? Most importantly, how about if he/she learns that they passed the test — and spent two days of anxiety for nothing?

Real fear and worry is like the difference between pain and suffering. Pain and fear may be necessary as part of your journey of life — while worrying and suffering are destructive and unnecessary.

Worry interrupts your clear thinking, wastes time and affects your health. Don’t manufacture fear through worrying and try to find out what’s underneath your worry to help you heal.

Panic

Panic, according to deBecker, is described as “the great enemy of survival, and can be perceived as an unmanageable kaleidoscope of fears.”

If you have been impacted by trauma or toxic stress you may be prone to panic disorders. It’s the nature of someone with PTSD to struggle with not only knowing — but sensing — danger in the here and now when a flashback or trigger instantaneously places you in a past moment of fear or terror — the most extreme degree of panic you can experience.

Real Fear

Real fear, according to deBecker, is not paralyzing — it’s energizing. It’s objective. What you fear is not actually happening — it’s something that might happen.

If what you fear begins to happen, you stop fearing it. Rather you start to respond to it, manage it or surrender to it. Or you start to fear the next thing you may predict is coming.

There are two rules of your fears that will help you understand them better.

Fear Rule 1 — When you fear something, it’s solid evidence that it is not actually happening. “Fear summons powerful predictive resources that tell (you) what may come next.” says deBecker, “It is that which might come next that (you) fear — what might happen, not what is happening now.”

He uses this example. “As you stand near the edge of a high cliff, you might fear getting too close. Now when you stand right at the edge you no longer fear getting too close — you now fear falling. If you do fall, you no longer fear falling — now you fear landing.”

So when you feel fear — since what you fear is not actually happening to you — you can do things to advocate for yourself in those moments. Using breathing, mindfulness and positive self-talk can tame your fear in that moment.

Fear Rule 2 — Usually it’s not what you THINK you fear, it’s what you LINK to your fear. “When it is real fear,” deBecker says, “it will either be in the presence of danger, or it will link to pain or death. When you get a fear signal, your intuition has already made many connections. To best respond, bring those links into your consciousness and follow them to their high-stakes destination if they lead you there.”

He notes that in many surveys, the fear of public speaking ranks very closely to the fear of death. He explains why for many, this fear of public speaking can be linked to death: when fearing public speaking, a person actually fears the loss of identity that can occur when a performance is done badly.

This is rooted in your survival needs, because in order to survive, you may need approval from others. The fear of talking to a large group of people is not just a fear of embarrassment — it’s also the fear of being seen as incompetent.

This is linked to your fears of losing security, losing your home, family, ability to be active in society, values and your identity and life.

All of these links lead to a fear of a form of death.

You can change how you look at your fears. DeBecker says fear is “nature’s greatest accomplishment — the human brain is never more efficient or invested than when its host is at risk.”

He notes that “real fear is a signal intended to be very brief — a mere servant of intuition. But though few would argue that extended, unanswered fear is destructive — millions choose to stay there. They may have forgotten or never learned that fear is not an emotion like sadness or happiness — either of which might last a long time. It’s not a state, like anxiety. True fear is a survival signal that sounds only in the presence of danger — yet unwarranted fear has assumed power over us that it holds over no other creature on earth.”

Learn Not to Fear

You can learn not to fear. Through exposure, relaxation training and response prevention, you can calm your distorted fear response.

Feeling love — respect, compassion, understanding, tolerance — from healthy and supportive relationships is the best way to calm your fears. Avoid toxic people and situations that will only exacerbate your fears.

“Hope and Fear cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Invite one to stay.” — Maya Angelou

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I’m an Emotional Healing Coach. I’ve helped hundreds of people — professional athletes, performers, business leaders, parents — heal from emotional trauma and toxic stress. Feel happier, more joy and achieve peak performance! Get your Ultimate Guide to Begin Your Emotional Healing