It seems to me that fear has become the new black for self development bloggers.

It’s now de rigueur to be running a post listing ways to completely eradicate fear from your life.

Or better still, offering a course that you charge people for to help remove their fear, not forgetting to use fear as a marketing ploy of course.

Ironic huh, that people telling you they can help you remove fear, first want to make your fearful about missing out on their great offer?

Unfortunately, there’s one major drawback with most of the advice I’ve been reading lately.

It’s bullshit!

And I don’t care how many comments I read saying ‘great suggestions’ and ‘this really resonated with me’ or ‘wow that really does work I’m off to stick my dick in a Tigers mouth to prove I have no fear’

It’s still bullshit!

Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but fear is an integral part of your life.

Without any fear whatsoever you’d probably not be reading this post because you’d more than likely be a bit dead.

Fear is a hard wired response, and a very necessary one for your survival. Without it you’d be very poor at driving, crossing roads or being aware in any potentially dangerous situations.

That in and of itself is a good enough reason not to spend your entire life trying to remove fear, but there’s another reason.

Stress is Fear

Think of stress as being fear (because it is).

When you say you’re stressed by this or that, what you really mean is that you’re fearful of the potential consequences of this or that.

Being stressed about not getting a report in on time, means you’re fearful of what you think may happen if you don’t.

So what happens as the deadline approaches is your stress/fear increases until it gets to the point where putting off doing the work creates more stress than actually doing it.

That’s why almost everybody thinks they work better up to deadlines.

Because they do.

The FLOW state of optimal performance isn’t an absence of stress (fear), it’s having just the right amount to help you focus and perform to your highest ability.

However, it’s very easy to go too far over the FLOW bell curve and generate too much fear.

At that stage fear impedes cognitive ability as your heart and respiratory functions move up several notches and your amygdala, the part of your brain that spotted the fear and started the cycle to begin with, starts to take over your pre-frontal cortex.

That’s why when people are really scared they struggle to think clearly or logically and they can often exacerbate their situation.

Your Brain Has Been Hijacked By Your Brain!

They literally cannot gain access to the right part of their brain to make a logical decision as the amygdala and entire limbic system are in overdrive and not prepared to let go.

Advice like, expect good things to happen, change your thoughts, or realize you’re doing the best you can is about as useful as pushing a man out of an aircraft and yelling after him to aim for the mattress factory.

Have you ever seen somebody have a panic attack, or indeed had one yourself?

The person involved often feels like they’re having a heart attack. When I saw my sister have one about 20 years ago, I certainly thought that was the case and it was a very distressing sight.

There are a number of ways you can deal with an impending panic attack to reduce the intensity or even stop it occurring.

However, if you don’t know what they are and I tell you now, that information is next to useless if you’re hit by your first ever panic attack next week.

And the reason the information would be useless is because you wouldn’t be able to recall it.

And the reason you wouldn’t remember it, is because the information would be stored in your short-term memory which would be immediately hijacked by your pumped up amygdala.

Practice, Practice, Practice!

There’s a reason Governments put their military under intense pressure when they’re training them.

It’s so that when they come under attack in real time their responses are automatic and they don’t run around like headless chickens.

If you want to manage your fear better, then that’s cool, but you have to practice doing so.

You have to expose yourself to fearful situations again and again and again and not just read lame blog posts.

That in and of itself sounds scary and doesn’t make for a great blog post headline, but therein lies the dilemma.

You have to expose yourself to fear to control fear.

If that is all to much to bear then I can offer you an alternative method that can help massively.

Visualize Your Worst Fears

If you can visualize what scares you and replay seeing yourself deal with it successfully over and over again in your mind, then you’ll start to build new neural pathways. Then when the real thing does occur you’ll be much better able to handle it.

But that’s the best I can offer you because there are no mantras, affirmations or short cuts to dealing with fear and be suspicious of anybody that tells you otherwise.

By the way, I’ve written a book called Don’t Panic, which is aimed at helping people combat fear, especially social anxiety.

It normally sells for $9.99, but I’ll send a free copy to anybody that leaves a comment telling me they’d like it before the end of play on Tuesday 10th April. (This offer is CLOSED!)