Free Yourself from Fears (12 page)

“news” has to be new. And it has to pack more punch than the last news, otherwise it is boring repetition. The first shooting is news. A second is not. Yet every shooting is real and painful and tragic for the real people that are involved in it. The media sentimentalize the news, they cannot help it. News is always about other people.

The media add to our burden of fear. A personal tragedy hurts. A thousand personal tragedies are too much to take in and are passed on to a government agency to take care of. Terrorists are taking more drastic action to get attention.

Social anxiety and stress

The results of this are twofold. First, we become less sensitive to pain and tragedy. We are used to it. We build up psychic scar tissue to defend against it. Secondly, films, television, and stories have to push the boundaries in order to get a reaction. We laugh at the horror tales that once stirred our parents. Films like
Se7en
and
Saw
set the standards now. At the deepest level, we still have the fear reaction that evolution has given us and it is constantly being stimulated.

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Biological evolution cannot keep pace with social evolution: we still have the fear response of our cave-dwelling ancestors, who experienced everything first hand and not through a television screen. So we suffer constant low-grade anxiety and stress. Like a chronic illness, it saps our strength, but doesn’t show up on a test.

Stress is a metaphor. It comes from the field of physics and describes the force applied and also the resulting damage. We are stressed when we are pushed repeatedly beyond our natural ability to cope.

We described the physiological reaction to fear in Chapter 1 (see page 17). The fear reaction is meant to be a short-term response to immediate danger. When this reaction becomes chronic, we suffer stress; this state of arousal becomes normal. Some people become addicted to stress, they like the biochemical cocktail, it makes them feel more alive. They need a greater and greater level to attain the same high. But stress increases our blood pressure, raises the heart rate, disturbs digestion, and impairs our thinking. The body needs time to recover and to replenish the supply of hormones and neuro-transmitters that are used in the fear response.

Dealing with stress

How can we deal with this low-grade anxiety and stress? First, know the difference between your area of concern and area of influence.

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In the area of concern are those things we care about. In the area of influence are those things we can do something about. The area of influence is much smaller than the area of concern. Trying to influence the whole area of concern leads to a lot of stress and an increased risk of heart disease and gastric illness. The other extreme is feeling helpless and failing to do anything in situations that are within our area of influence.

When you feel stress, you may either be worrying about something you cannot influence, or feeling helpless in the face of too many demands.

Perhaps this was best summed up by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, when he wrote: “God give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.”

Skill for freedom

Dealing with stress

1 Acknowledge the stress you feel. You may feel you “should not” be stressed, but observe what is there without judging yourself.

2 Focus on what stimulus you think is making you feel like this. Go through all the possibilities. Pay attention to what you have seen on the television and in the news recently.

3 What can you do about it?

Is it in your area of influence? If not, let it go and move on.

If it is in your area of influence, what can you do? There may be very little: giving a donation or taking part in an election may be the only thing. But at least you have done something.Then let it go.

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Things do not change—we change.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

WE FACE MANY UNSPECIFIC FEARS IN DAY-TO-DAY LIVING, and they can be stressful. We will deal with some of the common ones in this chapter.

Change

Change need not be threatening, but the high rate of change in modern society is hard to deal with. We have to run to stay in the same place. We walk toward the future with no light to guide us; this means uncertainty and uncertainty means fear.

There is a joke about the difference between US and Japanese business. American business adopts a “Ready?… Fire!” approach.

Japanese business instead uses “Ready?… Aim… Aim… Aim…

Aim… Fire!” Now all businesses are trying a third approach: “Ready or not… Fire!” There is no time to aim.

Our biology does not equip us to deal with this fast and unprece-dented rate of change. Our minds leap ahead, but our bodies are still in most ways the same as when they evolved some hundreds of thousands of years ago. We do not have the biology to deal with jet lag, a diet of fast food, a polluted atmosphere, or cramped living spaces.

Computer technology enables many things that were unbelievable 20 years ago. We can do more, and faster. It is a short step to say that we
should
do more, and do it faster.

I remember my first personal computer, which I bought in 1984.

It boasted a huge (for that time) 32MB hard drive, which now would FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

not even store this book in my wordprocessing program. Programs came on cassette audiotapes and could take up to 20 minutes to load.

If there was something wrong with the audiotape (and we know how temperamental they can be), the program would stop and I had start again from the beginning. I tolerated this because I enjoyed using the computer and that was the way it worked. Gradually everything got faster. Floppy disks were a big improvement on cassette tapes. Then came CDs, then detachable hard drives. Each computer I bought was more powerful and faster than the last. Now, I sit here and load programs in a few seconds. And I am used to that. So if it takes five seconds rather than two seconds to load, I notice. If it takes ten seconds then I start drumming my fingers in frustration. We become accus-tomed to the new fast pace—not the absolute speed, but our
perception
of the speed. However quickly computers work, we soon become used to it and become frustrated when it doesn’t happen.

The same principles apply to the internet. When the World Wide Web first appeared, most people using it had a modem. Now a modem seems ridiculously slow compared with broadband.

Nevertheless, there is no convincing research to show that faster computers let us work faster. We can do more, but there is more to do.

Computers
create
work. They provide many more possible distractions (web surfing, chat, games), and many businesses are less productive than they were. We will look at change in detail and how to deal with it in Chapter 10.

Time pressure

It seems the faster we do things, the more we find ourselves under time pressure. Everything should have been done yesterday or sooner.

Time has become a precious, scarce resource, and there are huge numbers of time management courses and books. These fail unless they take into account two things: people’s beliefs and the way they view time. Many people use time management techniques successfully to free up time in their day, but then they feel guilty and fill that 94

SOCIAL FEARS

“free” time with something else. Then they feel under pressure again.

At the end of the time management course they are still doing too much.

We all face deadlines in our life and work. As they inexorably approach, some people are paralyzed by indecision, and the deadline is disturbing, not motivating.

Others need a deadline to motivate them and they wait until the last minute before finishing. This strategy puts a lot of stress on those who want to do the work early. A partnership where one person wants to finish the work in plenty of time and the other does it at the last minute is heading for disaster unless both parties understand each other and manage the situation. They will not want to collabo-rate again except under duress.

The reason people think differently about deadlines is because they have different attitudes to time. NLP proposes that we experience time as distance—as a timeline. We use distance to measure time: a day is measured as 24 times the circumference of a clock. We talk of the distant past, the far future, being close to things. How you think about time is the most important element in how you deal with deadlines.

Skill for freedom

Dealing with deadlines

What do you think of deadlines?

Think of a deadline that you have to meet, or imagine that you have a deadline.

What does it look like to you?

How big does it seem?

Where in space does this deadline seem to be compared to now?

How far away does it seem to be?

How does that distance correspond to time?

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(For example, if your deadline is a week away, how far away does it seem when you picture it in your mind? What distance corresponds with a week?)

Mentally move the deadline further away. How do you feel about that?

Are you more or less motivated?

Now imagine moving it closer. Move it very close. How do you feel about that? Is it more motivating? Is it more stressful or disturbing?

Move it to a distance that feels comfortable.You have not changed the date in reality, but you may feel less stressed about it because you are thinking about it differently.

The people who are most stressed by deadlines are those who imagine them very close on their timeline—regardless of how far away they are in reality. The deadline may be weeks off, but in their mind it looms large and close. One good way to stop the stress of a deadline is to make sure you picture it in a pleasant color at a comfortable distance.

Experiment with how you imagine the deadline until you find the distance that works best for you. Of course, you still have to do the work, but the way you think about the deadline will be making you feel good instead of stressed.

Appearances

Here is a fear that never goes away—the fear of not looking good.

There is tremendous pressure on everyone to appear at their best all the time, and this pressure is worse for women than for men. The stereotypes for beauty are more severe and less forgiving for women and women are judged more on their appearance. Looking back in history, the most influential women were often thought to be so because of their beauty. Men are judged by their power and influence, women by their beauty.

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SOCIAL FEARS

Fashion and the media set standards and they are mostly unrealistic. In the UK and Europe, top fashion models and icons of beauty are often thin to the point that they look anorexic. Photographs are altered so that the models look even more perfect. No one looks like this in reality, but the images have power. In a recent survey in the UK, a large percentage of teenagers said that they were dissatisfied with their bodies and were actively considering plastic surgery.

In Brazil there is also a strong focus on outward appearance, although Brazilians do not consider a very thin body attractive. For them an attractive body has muscles. In the UK the gyms are full of people who need to be there: they are overweight and unfit. In Brazil the gyms are full of people who look like they shouldn’t be there by British standards—they are muscular, fit, and look great. But they feel that the pressure is there to keep looking this way, especially women.

In many different cultures appearance has become mistaken for identity: people think if their appearance is not good, people will not like them as individuals. If they change appearance, they change identity. If a politician wants power, they get a makeover. This leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where physically attractive people generally get more opportunities to make money and have a good career.

It is a culture for chameleons, not people.

A friend gave me an example. She is normally smartly dressed and buys clothes every week. One day she came to work well dressed and with a gold necklace. Her boss, who generally likes her and values her work, told her that the necklace was not appropriate. She felt uncomfortable and that she had lost some credibility at work.

The underlying fear is of people not liking us. It can mean loss of a job, of money, of a relationship, or of self-esteem. Pressure comes from everywhere—the media, our friends, our boss, our colleagues.

We feel afraid if we cannot meet the standards they set.

Look your best, be healthy, make the most of yourself, but do not be anxious about unrealistic comparisons and judgments. Your best is good enough. You are not defined by how you look.

It is possible to use NLP to deal with some of the unreal fear that judging by appearances can generate.