7 Ways to Harness Fear By Therese Borchard

F.E.A.R – Forget everything and run. We are wired to fear, as fear has kept us alive back when we had hair on our feet, and continues to save our lives today when something threatens our existence. The almond-shaped cluster within our brain known as the amygdala, or fear center, is quite effective at sending “fight or flight” messages when anything—a sweat bee, public speaking, gossip--could be considered dangerous—physically or emotionally.

While that response was appropriate when an ape was chasing after us, and can be if a car merges suddenly into our lane, fear can often disable us today without good reason. Thus, we need to harness it. Here are seven ways.

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Specify

“Fear is the static that prevents me from hearing myself,” said Samuel Butler. That’s exactly what fear sounds like - static. No notes, no tempo, no distinguishing sounds. Just static. Terrifying static. Static that says, “Bad things are coming. Your existence, as you know it, is over.” However, when you break down the vague, general message of doom into sub-fears, and then break those into even smaller categories, the fear is much less overwhelming. For example, say that you just started a new job.

Your fear is that you won’t be able to meet expectations, that you will be fired and your family will starve. Your kids will be forced to collect money on the street by playing a drum set made out of old soda cans. Take the expectations, and divide them into sub-categories. What specific tasks are you afraid you won’t be able to complete? Of those, which ones make you most anxious?

Create a Top 10 List

As part of a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) program, Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D., author of The Now Effect, suggests persons create a Top Ten Hit List of their most automatic negative thoughts (ANTs). For example: “I am a failure. I’m no good. I’ve let people down. I’m worthless.” By recording them on paper, individuals can begin to see the distortions in their thinking. Then, depending on how ambitious they are, they can apply some of David Burns’ ways of untwisting distorted thinking, such as “Examine the Evidence” (find two reasons why they aren’t worthless), “Thinking in Shades of Gray” (go over black-and-white thinking with shades of gray) or “Define Terms” (define general terms, such as “worthless” – what, exactly, does that mean?)

Count to Five

Deep breathing is an easy exercise to do when you’re panicked or stuck in fear. The practice of deep breathing stimulates our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), responsible for activities that occur when our body is at rest. It functions in opposite to the sympathetic nervous system, which stimulates activities associated with the flight-or-fight response. Coherent breathing is basically breathing at a rate of five breaths per minute, which is the middle of the resonant breathing rate range. I achieve this if I count to five inhaling and count to five exhaling. The five-minute rate maximizes the heart rate variability (HRV), a measurement of how well the parasympathetic nervous system is working.

Revisit Past Fears

When I am fearful, afraid to take one step in any direction--because I know that any step in any direction would result in a deadly mistake--I remind myself of past accomplishments and the strength I showed to get there. In fact, I have taken a symbol of three major feats in the last three years and put them on my desk as a kind of visual pep talk: a swim cap from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge race that I finished last month; a small bell symbolizing the speech I gave to 3,500 people in May of 2011; and my book, something I didn’t think I was capable of writing. All of these things were not accomplished without substantial fear. But the fear was mixed in with the strength and ambition. Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza once said, “There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.” And Robert Anthony said, “We fear the thing we want the most.”

Stay With It

Our first response to fear is to run from it. Our primal instincts demand that we do. But there is another alterative: to stay with it. “What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear,” wrote Indian speaker and writer Jiddu Krishnamurti, “that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.”

To live with fear means to become comfortable with the unknown, of being out of control, of not knowing what is coming next. We must toss out our predictions, our planned trajectories, our 10-year budgets, even our daily planner. “It’s not about slaying the monster,” writes Dennis Merritt Jones in “The Art of Uncertainty,” it’s about learning to lead the dance.”