Fear is a self-created lie.

Is fear a self-created lie or one of our most important instincts? All of us are alive today because our ancestors were good at predicting and reacting to threats. The ability to detect threats in our environments has served us well over the millennia, enabling us to pass on our genes. Human babies require a huge amount of protection and education to survive long enough to replicate and fear helps us do this successfully. The problem with fear in our modern age is it gets it wrong. Our brains now detect threats where it does not exist in reality and this makes us feel anxious, stressed, and worried. I think fear motivates a sizable proportion of our choices and behaviour.  A perceived threat to our ego or psychological safety activates the same survival mechanism but what we do not realize is that too often fear is false evidence appearing real.

If your life is dominated by anxiety and worry, fear has constantly been telling you two things:

1. Terrible things are going to happen:

 You’re going to fail, people won’t like you, your loved ones are in danger, you’ll lose your health.

This kind of prediction is called‘’ Likelihood estimates ‘’ where you go on and on worrying about the probability that your fear will come true.

2. You won't be able to handle it: 

You'll be overwhelmed, alone, and unable to cope.

This kind of prediction is called ‘’Severity estimates’’ Where you are unable to live peacefully because you are constantly predicting the Intensity of the fear.

For ex: How bad it will be if it actually happens?

Let’s understand more about these predictions:

When you say fear that terrible things are going to happen:

Someone once told us that fear was a self-created lie. You probably know from experience that fear exaggerates the likelihood of bad things happening. As a recent study found, about nine out of 10 worries are false alarms. So, 90 per cent of the time, your fear is lying to you about the bad things that are going to happen.

Unless it’s telling the truth. Ten per cent is a lot more than zero. Sometimes the things we’re worried about actually happen and that’s okay because we all sometimes worry that something bad is going to happen. And the reality is that sometimes things DO go wrong. Life is far from perfect. But if your head is always full of worrying thoughts? And if you spend most days (if not all) stressed that something bad will happen to you, your loved ones, or the world? Then it’s less about any real danger and more about your mind.

When you fear that you won't be able to handle it:

Most fears are derived by possibilities, which means that our minds engage in attempting to predict negative possibilities, rather than a positive one.  When you pay close attention to your fears, you’ll probably notice that the predicted outcome is always worse than bad like

• If you’re worried about getting sick on vacation, you assume it’s going to be terrible.

• If you're late for a meeting, you assume it will be awful.

• If you lose your job, you fear life will be over.

• If your relationship ends, you think you’ll never recover.

• In one way or another, you won’t be able to handle what you fear.

The problem is that our imagination doesn’t look far enough into the future—we stop at the point at which our fear comes true. It’s as though we’ll meet a cliff, and the bad thing that might happen will be the end of the story. But If you notice you’ve handled countless problems already to get to this point in your life, and none of them was the end of the story. Each one became a task to attend to. When we fear something from happening and then it does, the severity of it isn’t as much as we had pictured it in our minds. You probably were unhappy about it, and then you moved into problem-solving mode. When what we are afraid of materializes and we deal with it, we realize that it wasn’t really as bad as we had expected it to be. We then realize the amount of overthinking we put our minds through.

This is not to say that none of the problems you run into will be a big deal. Sometimes the bad thing that happens is a very, very big deal. But it won’t be what your fear is telling you it will be. It will still be you in your life, doing what you can to respond to what has happened. You'll also have the love and support of those who care about you, which your fear often leaves out. So, don't give into fear. Stay strong. We believe in you. 🙂

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