To fear or not to fear

After nearly three years of pandemic living, we’re traveling! Without the kids!!

With this new adventure at hand, my brain has been working overtime to keep me safe. But it’s not helpful. If I listened to its messages rooted mostly in fear, I’d cancel our trip.

This is what our brain does, though. We’ve all felt the fear when we’re about to take a step in the direction of something exciting.

Your heart races, your breathing quickens and becomes shallow, you feel a knot in your stomach.

Our fear response, based in our amygdala, is so amazing! And so powerful! It should be, we’ve honed it over millennia. It’s what has kept the human species alive on the planet.

What is far less developed is the thinking part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex.

If those two parts of our brain had a weightlifting competition, the amygdala would win hands down.

The good news is, it’s totally possible to interrupt the fear-based thinking and move to a more grounded place where new thoughts can arise.

So that’s what I did when the voices of fear were quite loud a few days ago.

I first acknowledged what I was afraid of. And I wrote out each thought. There were five fears. They even sort of breathed a sigh of relief just to be acknowledged and seen. They started to lose some of their power.

And beside each fear, I offered myself a counterpoint. A new thought. A thought anchored in love.

And something amazing happened. When I read through the thoughts on the right hand column, my body relaxed. I started to feel more peaceful and trust that my fears wouldn’t materialize.

By the time you read this, I’ll be in Portugal, sipping port and walking by the Douro River and dipping bread in some of the world’s best olive oil.

Speaker and entrepreneur Tim Ferris provides a useful exercise that he calls fear setting that he adapted from the Stoics.

In fear setting, similar to what I did above, you write out all your fears. And then, in the second column, you create a response plan for each fear if it were to materialize. You handle your fears.

Try one or both of these methods for handling fear the next time you’re up to something big and the fear starts to creep in. and entrepreneur Tim Ferris provides a useful exercise that he calls fear setting that he adapted from the Stoics.

In fear setting, similar to what I did above, you write out all your fears. And then, in the second column, you create a response plan for each fear if it were to materialize. You handle your fears.

Try one or both of these methods for handling fear the next time you’re up to something big and the fear starts to creep in.

Love,

Audrey