Chapter 8 - Fear and emotions

Fear is your decision. It does not appear out of the blue, it is not something uncalculated or uncontrollable. It appears as a result of reasoning when you establish some data and after analysis the brain alerts the body to fear. One of the most common reasonings for fear is the incomplete one. Someone comes and scares you with a loud and close noise. Your hearing detects the noise and transmits it for decoding to the rational brain which must make a decision. Since in the immediate vicinity you had more or less knowledge about what was happening and you did not anticipate the possibility of a loud noise, the brain's response is: I do not know. So fear must be activated. This response comes combined with the intensity of the noise which requires a quick response. If it was a light noise you would have time to think what it was. So fear is activated to increase the heartbeat with the role of filling the muscles with oxygen, preparing them for effort, tensing them. The brain is flooded with oxygen to process everything faster and better. To increase the volume of oxygen quickly you will breathe through your mouth and not your nose. Separately the stomach will stop digestion and bowel movements and will tighten to protect the internal organs and to ensure availability for a violent and rapid effort. The vision will begin to become sharp on the side of the focus and in the focus area it will be very tense and clear. All this preparation is a preparation for both fight and flight. It could be called a complete survival preparation. So fear is not bad in itself but very useful. However, you have been manipulated to see it as something negative, unworthy and shameful. To understand better we will use the survival instinct as a term instead of fear. You can replace everywhere: the survival instinct was activated by accelerating the heartbeat, temporarily blocking digestion ... Does it sound better? Sure. This is how human society is built through manipulation. Fear is not bad but very useful. A fearless person who is next to you while a grizzly bear comes out in your path will not be too happy. Why? because he will look at the bear and evaluate what he should do, wasting precious moments. During this time, you, with your survival instinct already activated, will test your speed limit to run as far away from the bear as possible. Because that's what fear does: it makes you faster, more reactive and maximally strong.

Problems are not when we talk about a correct, healthy fear with real causes. Problems are in imbalances - too much or, on the contrary, too little fear. This is where the rational brain intervenes. The rational brain needs data and processes data. A bear instantly confirms to you that choosing fear is a good choice. On the other hand, if an aggressive bird comes towards you, here we are talking about an unjustified fear. Why? because if you slap the bird twice he will take flight. And if he insists, you will roast him. Lack of trust is a very common cause for this erroneous decision, however, many times the error of correlation with past situations is also made when maybe you were little and you were attacked by a bird. Although no event is repeated identically, you have a memory and you must control it and understand that you are no longer little and you have grown physically and mentally.

I come back to the part where fear is your decision. You can choose to activate it or you can choose to deactivate it. How? Activate the rational brain and fear deactivates. The rational brain is activated by breathing through the nose. Because the oxygen supply is limited, a speeding up of thoughts that requires the activation of the survival instinct cannot be achieved. So thoughts will continue rationally with analysis. The second magic is in the activation of smell and the reduction of the accelerating sensors of sight and hearing. As we have discussed before, since smell is the only sense that is decoded in the central lobe - responsible for the rational part. Maybe you don't remember, but when you were a child and you were afraid, you closed your eyes, right? The eyes are the main emotional accelerator of decisions. They give focus but also the vision in the fog that gives you a state of false dizziness. So you knew since you were little how to reduce fear, you just forgot. Or maybe you knew but didn't realize it. Now it will be something else. As a little hint, it is very useful to practice breathing exercises. We have discussed this topic before and we will repeat it for good mental recording.

Breathing exercises, you will probably think what the hell are breathing exercises, how to breathe, we all breathe and we have exercise if we do it all day. Let me explain a little. Breathing through the nose will not work, when the fear impulse will be triggered, when everything must be done now now now breathing will be very difficult to control. So you will fight to breathe through your nose, feeling that there is too little oxygen that you are suffocating. You will also breathe through your mouth from time to time and you will fight to continue breathing only through your nose. The standard exercise says to breathe in through your nose and exhale through your mouth while counting to 3. The fourth time breathe completely through your mouth. Then resume the set of inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth counting to 3. Through this struggle you will calm your body. You will control it and allow it to do only what you allow it to do. And when you release your breath and use only your mouth 2 or 3 times that you count, also then it is a controlled release. You must do this exercise training so often until it becomes a reflex. You will see how much it will matter then. I cannot explain it to you otherwise. For every inhalation, exhalation and counting method you must establish a key phrase. For example, count and say in your mind: only breathing matters. Each time you say it because it is true – to survive here now you only need to breathe.

Separately you must empty your mind of any other thought and focus on the key sentence. If you have training you will also have duration. How many times do you need to do the breathing in order to calm down: as many times as necessary. Repeat it until you calm down.

With intense fear, you may need 20-30 sets to get things under control. The good thing is that if you do this, the possibility of a panic attack disappears. Without a large and rapid volume of oxygen, a panic attack cannot be triggered.

With time and repetition of the exercises, you will be able to control your fear even in extreme situations.

A short summary might be useful. If you feel fear starting to surround you, close your eyes and smell the smell around you, then say what smell you detected. If you have passed this stage, apply the breathing system until you can return to activating the smell. This is how you control the instinctive through rationality.

Let's go a little further into the emotions. Emotions are positive and negative. We know about the negative ones, as we have discussed one of them: fear. Also included in the negative ones are sadness, anger, jealousy, guilt. The positive ones are love, joy, hope, gratitude, enthusiasm. Somewhat neutral ones are curiosity and restless. The reason they are somewhat neutral is because they are transient, more data is expected in order to make a decision. There are many lists available on the internet with each emotion separately, and it is a fairly large list. What matters is what they all do: they all make your heart beat faster, they all bring back memories (good or bad) and they are all worth experiencing, even the most difficult ones, terror-panic, because they bring an added confidence after you face them and defeat them. Facing them is easier after the first encounter, or as I like to say, only the first hundred encounters are harder, then things become simple because you will be a veteran who has fought terrible battles with the most terrible fears and defeated them. That is worthy of respect. That makes you human, to evolve and at some point to say: let's go with the next opponent.

After you defeat the sensations, you will ask the questions to find out why it happened. Depending on how you ask the questions, you can create trauma or free your mind. The most common mistake is the one in which you erase everything, you tell yourself that it was too intense, too dangerous, too violent and you don't want to live such an experience again. This is the first step in which you activate a protection system, strengthen it through habits and over time you will notice that only the habit that you are afraid to break will remain but you no longer know why and it doesn't even seem like a rational principle. A common example is related to suffering from hunger with terrible pain. Maybe you had a project in which you were involved for many days and on which you worked from morning to night forgetting to eat. From physical and or mental exhaustion you started to feel dizzy and then you fainted. You woke up terribly scared and established the following principle: not a single day should pass without eating. Over time you a fear of skipping any meal. This is the mental process in which you end up being afraid if you miss a meal and you don't even know why. Because rationally , going a day without eating shouldn't involve any kind of physical problem. On the contrary, intermittent fasting has proven health benefits.

We could choose many such examples, but I would rather give you the initiative to search throughout your life to discover the initial factors based on which you developed wrong reasoning. This could actually be called the first step. To know the initial fear. To understand where your reasoning came from, what your reasoning was and what you promised to do as a result of fear. Correctly formulated would be: what you promised to never do again. Does it seem easy? You just have to browse through your memories and bring up all the moments when you felt fear. Then you start to recall that experience. You have to recall the complete experience, analyze everything that happened. To see the details of the memory, the colors, the light, the smell as well as what happened before and after the event. To observe yourself as a character in a movie. Analyze what you felt, how you reacted, what symptoms your fear gave you. Absolutely all the details are important.

After reviewing everything in detail, you must track over time the changes in your promise to stop doing something. What you added to the receipt, how you modified the promise. After you reach the end with the thread you followed, then you will also receive the answer to: why you don't do an activity or another activity.

It is useful, if you find it difficult to do the activity again, to find another similar activity to do and imagine that it is actually the activity considered forbidden. And finally, to confront exactly the activity that you have established as forbidden. To do this, you must keep in mind two important things: 1. Nothing is the same anymore, every experience is unique in time and context. 2. You have gone through the experience once before and even if it was difficult, you survived.

All the stages are difficult and perhaps the hardest thing is to find the mental thread, especially if many years have passed and many reasonings have been built on top of each other.

To find what you need, you have to look where you are a prisoner. I mean the activities that restrict your freedom. Common activities that you perform every day. Analyze everything you do normally in a day and for a few days do not repeat that habit. If there are fears under that habit, you will realize it immediately. For example: you drink coffee in the morning. Stay 2-3 days without coffee and without any other substitute. Or in the evening you watch TV - 3-4 days do not turn on the TV at all.

All these experiences will bring you answers. And the answers are actually data that you can work with. The more data you have, the more correct and complete your reasoning is.

Maybe that's how you got the answer to why one thing affected you terribly and another similar one passed as if it had never existed. You let it enter your mind but you didn't let it leave and all your actions called "I'll never do that again" are actually an altar of remembrance. Remembering means that you keep the fear locked up inside you and don't release it. Analyze yourself to find out where it comes from, how it appeared and what you built on it. Then face what's left. You will realize that it's useless to face it anymore after you notice and analyze all the motivations on the mental thread but you have to do this for your subconscious. You prove to yourself that you got the wrong idea out, that you corrected your reasoning and the old altar of remembrance no longer exists so it can be forgotten.

The last stage that must be completed before or after facing fear is the one in which you forgive yourself. It is important to do this because by following a logical thread to the analysis and the habits built, you will reach the conclusion: what a fool I was. Because of this thing I could not enjoy this or that experience. While life was with me and asked me to take advantage and enjoy myself, I was thinking about fear and I was only expecting bad things. It is correct, you gave up something voluntarily and your whole life you have built it taking into account not enjoying any experience completely in order to avoid reliving the trauma. I speak in the singular about a trauma but it is never just a trauma. The same edifice once erected will be erected in other difficult situations and so it is very easy to end up with all your decisions being made based on: what you should not do. This is how you reach stages of complete negativism that you are afraid to make any decision lest it lead you into one of the many wrong and negative reasonings that you have registered.

This is the reason why you must forgive yourself and start a new beginning. Regardless of whether you find the thread of fear that generated the trauma or not, it is important that from the moment of the new beginning you do not add any new fear. To observe every situation and every reasoning and whenever it happens, to let go of the feeling without building anything on it and without it affecting you. If you do this, the old you will remain the same while the new you will become stronger with each experience you have. At some point you will become so strong that the old you will seem small and insignificant.

Patience, time, an open heart for life's experiences – this is one of the best remedies. To reach the moment when you feel that time passes but passes in your favor.