Free Yourself from Fears (4 page)

The body responds in the same way to both unreal and authentic fear. The same chemicals are released; the body is prepared for fight or flight in the same way. The difference is that in the case of unreal fear, there is no immediate and real danger to react to. The fear response is good for immediate danger, not everyday life. When you have unreal fear, the body is left in a needless state of alert. This is a classic cause of stress. It elevates your blood pressure, disturbs your digestion, and suppresses your immune system. It impairs your thinking because blood is flowing toward the large muscles and away from the rational centers of the brain.

Some people suffer greatly from stress and anxiety. This constant stress gives rise to chronic symptoms like headaches and dizziness, blurred vision, backache, palpitations, and indigestion. Chronic stress is not good for you. It is like driving with your foot hard down on the accelerator whatever the traffic conditions. It is important for your physical health to eliminate unreal fear.

In order to explore your physical feeling of fear, you need to know your unique experience of it. NLP allows us to explore feelings in detail through submodalities, which are the smaller building blocks of our thoughts. For example, a mental picture has color, depth, and location. Sounds, either real or imagined, have pitch, volume, and rhythm. Feelings have a location and a size. These distinctions are examples of submodalities.

The next skill uses kinesthetic submodalities to explore your feeling of fear in detail. You need to know the feeling as it is now, so you can know when it decreases as a result of the techniques in this book.

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FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

Skill for freedom

How do you know you are afraid?

Think of a situation in the past when you were afraid.

Whereabouts in your body are the sensations?

How hot or cold are the feelings?

How much space do they take up?

How heavy do they seem to be?

What shape do they seem to be?

Pay attention to all your feelings.

For example, our attention is taken mostly by the feeling in the pit of the stomach, and we do not realize that the hairs on our body have become more erect (most often on the back of the neck, but in other parts of the body too).

We miss the surge of strength we feel in our body.We also can miss the increase in the rate and depth of our breathing.

Fear is much more than a bad feeling in the stomach.

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Fear—Friend or Foe?

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft
might win, by fearing to attempt.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF FEAR, authentic fear and real fear.
Authentic
fear is stimulated in the present moment by immediate danger. It spurs us to take action to avoid the danger. It is an important natural response and its intention is to keep us safe. Authentic fear is useful.

Unreal
fear is stimulated by our imagining of what might happen.

It is usually about something we do not want to happen in the future.

It has the same positive intention—to keep us safe. It is not useful, however, except insofar as it can motivate us to take action to avoid the future scenario or to make it less likely. Sometimes unreal fear is more a vague apprehension, or a generalized anxiety because we are not completely aware of the situation we are imagining.

When a situation evokes authentic fear we will always have some thoughts and imaginings about it, but they come afterward.

Authentic fear is stronger, sharper, and cuts deeper than unreal fear.

The fourth law of fear:

There are two types of fear: authentic and unreal. Authentic fear is a natural reaction to present danger. Unreal fear comes from our imagination.

The visceral feeling of fear is equally real and immediate whether it is authentic or unreal. It makes no difference whether it is a reaction to FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

real events or imaginary events. Both feelings are real. Our brain does not distinguish between the two. We know this because when we are asleep, we can have intensely frightening dreams that are completely within our imagination.

The fifth law of fear:

The feeling of fear is always real—whatever provokes it.

Positive intention

Both types of fear have a positive intention. In other words, they are trying to accomplish something of value. Authentic fear is a strong reaction that has been built up through evolution. Its purpose is to keep us safe. The feeling is unpleasant and this provides a powerful motivation to do something about it. Our mind and body get prepared to counter any threat through fight or flight.

Unreal fear is also trying accomplish something, it is usually trying to protect us, make us pay attention, alert us to something wrong, or make us analyze the situation. However, it is not doing it in a useful way. We create the danger through our imagination and then we create unreal fear as a response. While this book is about freedom from unreal fear, we need to respect the positive intention of the fear.

There are many better ways to be safe, analyze the situation, and be alert than creating unreal fear.

The sixth law of fear:

All fear has a positive intention.

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FEAR—FRIEND OR FOE?

Authentic fear

Authentic fear alerts us to sudden danger. It is evolution’s way of saying: “Be careful!” It feels unpleasant, but has the positive intention of keeping us safe, secure, and alive. We usually learn from real fear, to avoid future danger or to find ways of coping with immediate danger.

Authentic fear can be a problem if it causes you to freeze instead of run or fight, although often your intellect does not have time to inter-fere and you do the right thing automatically. You may experience authentic fear when there is no real danger. For example, you are walking on the street and you see a shadow that makes you think something is falling on you. You feel fear and jump out the way. In fact it was nothing, just a shadow across the sun. However, the fear was genuine, because you believed in the moment that there was a real danger. This is about your
perception
of an event. If you went along the street fearful that something might drop on you, then this would be unreal fear.

We do not want authentic fear to paralyze us like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights. We want to take action and stop the danger. We will deal with authentic fear, how it works, and how to use it to keep yourself safe in Part III of this book.

Authentic fear

Comes from immediate danger in the present.

Keeps us safe.

Is a natural reaction to the situation.

Is a useful reaction to the situation.

We learn from it.

Stimulates us to take immediate action, although it can paralyze.

It is not always clear when there is real danger. It sometimes needs analysis.

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FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

Unreal fear

Unreal fear is a problem. It can paralyze us, make us feel less resourceful, and cannot be argued with, because it is based on imagination and not reason.

Imagination is stronger than reason. For example, imagine biting into a juicy lemon. Feel the fruit on your tongue; imagine the smell and the color in your hand. Your reason says the lemon is not there, so why are you salivating? Our mind conjures up a lemon real enough to evoke saliva, and it can conjure up imaginary scenarios that are real enough to evoke fear.

Often unreal fear is not about what has happened (past) or is happening (present), it is about what could happen (future) but has not.

Uncertainty is disturbing. Without information, we fill the void with imaginings, and these are what frighten us.

Our imaginings are as lurid and frightening as the worst reality.

Logic does not help. Many people are frightened of traveling by airplane. Air travel is statistically one of the safest forms of travel. But if we are frightened of flying, statistics will not reassure us. Statistics are about other people, not about us. Logic is in the service of emotion and can justify anything. Logic can be used to make any conclusion reasonable. “Don’t be silly,” says a well-meaning friend. “Air crashes hardly ever happen. This airline hasn’t had a major crash in 20 years.”

“Oh,” we may think, “I’d better not use that airline, sounds like it’s due an accident soon.”

Unreal fear

Does not come from immediate danger, is usually a response to our imaginings of possible unpleasant futures.

Is not about the present moment.

The danger is not immediate.

Is not useful, makes us less resourceful.

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FEAR—FRIEND OR FOE?

Is a learned reaction to the situation.

We learn little or nothing from it.

Limits our life.

Always has a positive intention.

Types of unreal fear

There are different types of unreal fear. They range from the very intense feeling of a phobia or panic attack, through anxiety to worry.

There are also social anxieties that come from the pressures of living, especially in a fast-paced, achievement-oriented society.

Phobias

What is a phobia? The word comes from the Greek
phobos
, meaning

“fear,” but a phobia is more than an ordinary fear. It is a sudden, irrational, and overwhelming fear about a situation, animal, or thing that is not immediately threatening. Common phobias are of snakes, spiders, enclosed spaces, and heights. Someone with a phobia cannot argue themselves out of it. They feel compelled to avoid the source of the phobia. If they cannot, they are so fearful that they have to remove themselves immediately from whatever is causing their fear.

A phobia is not fear of a real threat; the situation or animal that a person is phobic about does not pose a serious threat. Someone with a snake phobia would not be fearful because a snake was poisonous, but because it was a snake. People with a severe phobia may even be uncomfortable thinking about the situation, reading about it, or seeing pictures or films about it. Some people are phobic about flying, wide-open spaces, or being enclosed. Other common phobias are of lifts, dentists, and crowds. All these might conceivably be dangerous, but with a phobia you just avoid it and avoid thinking about it.

Phobias range from mild to intense. For example, many people are mildly phobic of heights and can’t go near the edge if they are on top of 25

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

a building. Some would find it difficult even to look out the window of a tall building. People with an intense phobia of heights would not risk going into a tall building in case they had to look down. The thought would be uncomfortable. If by some chance they were to be high up, they might have a panic attack and try to get down to ground level.

Someone with a phobia always knows they have it. They know there is no real danger, although they may try to justify their fear afterward. Phobias are not open to reason or argument. People may understand the phobia, know how it operates, even know how they acquired it, but still be unable to stop it.

In extreme cases, phobias can severely limit a person’s life. For example, some people suffer from agoraphobia, or fear of open spaces. This makes it difficult to leave their house, even to go shop-ping. Every time they go out, they feel panicky. In the end, they just stop going out, and get someone else to go out and do everything for them. They will not have much social life and they construct their life around their phobia. This book does not deal with intense phobias, which require a specialized approach from an NLP therapist.

Mild phobias
can
be dealt with by techniques in this book.

The key points about phobias

A phobia is an intense, unreasoning fear.

It is possible to be phobic about almost anything.

The object of the phobia poses no real threat or danger.

No one learns from their phobia.They have the same response every time.

A phobia is not reasonable at the time—although the fear can be justified afterward.

A phobia is specific.The sufferer is aware of what causes the phobia.

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FEAR—FRIEND OR FOE?

Anxiety

Mild phobias shade into anxiety. Anxiety is fear with a blunt edge and is usually about the future. It may be linked with some specific situation, for example a coming public presentation. It can also be linked to a pleasant event if you are afraid of making a fool of yourself.

The derivation of the word “anxiety” is interesting. It comes from the Latin verb
angere
, meaning “to choke.” This choking feeling is part of the physiological response to fear that happens through the amygdala. We often say that someone “choked” (usually in sport) when they lose at the last minute, and this is usually due to anxiety about winning (or losing).

Sometimes people may feel anxious for no reason they can articu-late, it is just a vague feeling of fear, not attached to any situation or person.

The key points about anxiety

Anxiety is usually about a future event.

It can be about a specific situation or it can be a vague feeling, where it is hard to pin down the cause.

We can be anxious about a pleasant situation, if we fear that something could go wrong.

Anxiety may come for a good reason (e.g., having a dangerous surgical operation). It can also often come from our imagination where there is very little if any danger (e.g., air travel).

Worry

The word “worry” comes from the Old English word
wyrgan
, meaning “to strangle.” So it embodies the same idea as anxiety. Both worry and anxiety do not let you breathe freely. Worry is very similar to anxiety, but usually less intense. Worry is anxiety on a treadmill: you go 27

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

around and around, thinking of the same problem, getting nowhere.

Worry is usually about the future, ruminating on what could happen.