Chapter 8 - Fear and Emotions
Fear: a choice, not an accident
Fear is your decision. It doesn't appear out of thin air; it's not something uncalculated or uncontrollable. It arises following a reasoning process, when you establish certain data, and based on that analysis, the brain alerts the organism to be afraid. One of the most common reasonings for fear is an incomplete one. Someone comes along and scares you with a loud, nearby noise. Your hearing detects the noise and sends it to the rational brain for decoding, which then has to make a decision.
The dialogue between the mind and the unknown
Since you had more or less some knowledge of what was happening in your immediate vicinity and did not anticipate the possibility of a loud noise, the brain's response is: "I don't know, therefore fear must be activated." This response comes coupled with the intensity of the noise, which demands a rapid reaction. If it had been a soft noise, you would have had time to think: "I wonder what that is?"
The incredible power of your body
Thus, fear is activated to increase the heart rate with the goal of filling the muscles with oxygen, preparing and tightening them for effort. 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 through your nose. Separately, the stomach will stop digestion and intestinal movement, tightening up to protect internal organs and to ensure availability for a violent and rapid effort.
Your ally for survival
Vision will begin to blur at the edges of your focus, while the focus area itself will be very tense and clear. All this preparation is a readiness for both fight and flight. More accurately, it would be called 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.
A new perspective on our instincts
To help you understand better, we will use the term "survival instinct" instead of "fear." You can replace it everywhere: the survival instinct activated, accelerating the heartbeat, temporarily blocking digestion… Does that sound better? Definitely. This is how human society is built—through manipulation. Fear is not bad; it is very useful.
The difference between analyzing and reacting
A fearless person standing next to you when a grizzly bear steps into your path won't be very happy. Why? Because they will look at the bear and evaluate what they should do, wasting precious moments. Meanwhile, you, with your survival instinct already activated, are testing 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 as powerful as can be.
Invented or correct fear
When fear becomes your true ally
There are no problems when we speak of correct, healthy fear with real causes.
The problems lie in imbalances—too much or, conversely, too little fear. This
is where the rational brain steps in. The rational brain needs data and
processes data. A bear confirms instantly that choosing fear is a good choice.
The difference between danger and lack of confidence
On the other hand, if an aggressive gander comes toward you, we are talking
about unjustified fear. Why? Because if you give the gander a couple of slaps,
it will fly away. And if it persists, you turn it into a roast. A lack of
confidence is a very common cause for this erroneous decision.
The power to leave the past behind
However, often the error of correlating with past situations is made—like when
you were little and might have been attacked by a gander. Although no event
ever repeats itself identically, you have a memory, and you must control it and
understand that you are no longer small; you have grown physically and/or
mentally.
Choices
The power to choose stillness
I'm coming 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 through nose breathing. Because the oxygen intake is limited, a racing of thoughts that triggers the survival instinct cannot occur. Therefore, thoughts will continue rationally, through analysis.
The magic of your senses
The second magic lies in activating your sense of smell and dampening the visual and auditory accelerator sensors. As we've discussed, this is because smell is the only sense decoded in the central lobe—the part responsible for reason. You might not remember, but when you were a child and were afraid, you would close your eyes, wouldn't you?
Rediscover what you already knew
The eyes are the primary emotional accelerator for decisions. They provide focus, but also the blurred vision that gives you a false state of dizziness. So, you've known since you were little how to diminish fear; you just forgot. Or maybe you knew, but you weren't consciously aware of it. Now, things will be different. As a small tip, it is very useful to practice breathing exercises. We have discussed this topic before, and we will repeat it for better mental recording.
The art of breathing under pressure: How to regain your control
The art of conscious breathing
Breathing exercises... you'll probably wonder what on earth breathing exercises are, since we all breathe and we "practice" it all day long. Let's explain a bit. When nose breathing won't work, when the fear impulse is triggered, when everything must be done now! now! now!, breathing will be very hard to master.
The struggle for inner control
So, you will struggle to breathe through your nose, feeling like there is too little oxygen and that you are suffocating. You will breathe through your mouth every now and then, and you will struggle to keep inhaling only through your nose. The standard exercise says to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth while counting to 3. On the fourth time, breathe entirely through your mouth.
The recipe for your calm
Then, repeat the set of inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth while counting to 3. Through this struggle, you will calm your body down. You will control it and allow it to do only what you permit it to do. Even when you release your breath and use only your mouth for 2 or 3 breaths—which you must count—that too is a controlled release.
The power of repetition and the stillness reflex
You must practice this exercise so often that it becomes a reflex. You will see how much it matters then. I cannot explain it any other way. For this entire system of inhaling, exhaling, and counting, you must establish a key phrase. For example, count and say in your mind: "Only the breath matters."
A simple truth for hard moments
You say it every time because it is a truth—to survive here, now, you need nothing else but to breathe. Separately, you must clear your mind of any other thought and focus on the key sentence. If you have training, you will also have stamina. How many times should you perform the necessary breathing to calm down: as many times as it takes. You repeat it until you calm down.
Your shield against panic
For intense fear, it might take 20-30 sets to bring things under control. The good part 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 trigger. With time and the repetition of these exercises, you will control fear even in extreme situations.
Brief summary
First steps to regaining your peace
It might be useful to have a brief summary. If you feel fear beginning to surround you, close your eyes and sniff the air around you, then name the scent you detected. If you've moved past this phase, apply the breathing system until you can return to activating your sense of smell. If you've cleared that stage too, fight to take control of your breathing and clear your mind of any thoughts because, in fact, only the breath matters and you must fight for every breath. This is how you control the instinctive through the rational.
Understanding and accepting your entire range of emotions
Let's move a bit into the side of emotions. Emotions are positive and negative. We know about the negative ones because we have already discussed one of them: fear. Also among the negatives are sadness, anger, jealousy, and guilt. The positive ones: love, joy, hope, gratitude, and enthusiasm. In the somewhat neutral category, we have curiosity and restlessness. Why are they somewhat neutral? Because they are transitory; they wait for more data before a decision is made. There are many lists available on the internet for every single emotion, and it is quite a long list.
The veteran who learns to overcome any fear
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, like terror or panic—because they provide an extra boost of confidence after you face and conquer 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 terrifying fears and won. This is worthy of respect. This makes you human, makes you evolve, and at some point allows you to say: "Bring on the next opponent!"
How to free your mind from limiting promises
The road from fear to self-understanding
After you overcome the sensations, you will ask questions to find out why it happened. Depending on how you ask the questions, you can either create traumas or free your mind. The most common error is to erase everything, telling yourself it was too intense, too dangerous, too violent, and that you never want to experience something like that again. This is the first step in activating a protection system; you reinforce it through habits, and over time you will notice that only the habit remains—the one you are afraid to break—but you no longer know why and it doesn't even seem like a rational principle.
How the rules that limit us are born
A common example is related to the suffering of hunger accompanied by terrible pain. Perhaps you had a project you were involved in for many days, working from morning until night, forgetting to eat. From physical or mental exhaustion, you began to feel dizzy and then fainted. You woke up terrified and established the following principle: that not a single day must pass without eating. Over time, you developed a fear of skipping any meal. This is the mental process in which you end up being afraid if you miss a meal, without even knowing why.
The power to examine your own memories
Rationally, going a day without eating shouldn't involve any physical problems. On the contrary, intermittent fasting has proven health benefits. We could choose many such examples, but I would rather leave the initiative to you to search throughout your life and discover the initial factors based on which you developed flawed reasoning. This could actually be called the first step: to know the initial fear. To understand where your reasoning started, what those reasonings were, and what you promised to do as a result of that fear.
Observe your story with new eyes
Correctly phrased, it would be: what you promised never to do again. Does it seem easy? All you have to do is flip through your memories and bring to the surface all the moments when you felt fear. Afterward, begin to recall that experience. You must recall the complete experience and analyze everything that happened. Look at the details of the memory—the colors, the light, the smell—as well as what happened before and after the event. Observe yourself as if you were a character in a movie. Analyze what you felt, how you reacted, and what symptoms the fear was giving you.
The thread that leads you to freedom
Absolutely all details are important. After you review everything in detail, you must track the changes in your "never again" promise over time. What did you add to the promise, and how did you modify it? Once you follow the thread to the very end, you will receive the answer to why you do—or don't do—one activity or another.
Build and tear down: How to tear down the shrines of fear to reclaim your freedom
The power to face what seems forbidden
If it is still difficult for you to repeat the activity, find another similar activity to do and imagine that it is, in fact, the activity considered forbidden. And finally, face exactly the activity you established as forbidden. To do this, you must keep two important things in mind: 1. Nothing is ever the same; every experience is unique in time and context. 2. You have been through the experience once before and, even though it was hard, you survived.
Discover where your fears are hiding
All the stages are difficult, and perhaps the hardest is finding the mental thread, especially if many years have passed over it and many reasonings have been built on top of one another. To find what you need, you must look where you are a prisoner. I'm referring to the activities that restrict your freedom. Common activities that you perform day in and day out. Take everything you usually do in a day and analyze it, and for a few days, do not repeat that habit.
Small experiments for big answers
If there are fears beneath that habit, you will realize it immediately. For example: you drink coffee in the morning. Go 2-3 days without coffee and without any other substitute. Or you watch TV in the evening—don't turn on the TV at all for 3-4 days. All these experiences will bring you answers. And those answers are, in fact, data you can work with. The more data you have, the more correct and complete the reasoning becomes.
Release the past from your mind
Perhaps this is how you received the answer as to why one thing affected you terribly, while another similar thing passed as if it never even existed. You let it enter your mind, but you didn't let it leave, and all your actions called "never doing this again" are, in fact, a shrine of remembrance. Remembrance means you keep the fear locked inside you and don't release it. Analyze yourself to find where it comes from, how it appeared, and what you have built upon it.
Make peace with your own subconscious
Then face what remains. You will realize it is useless to face it once you observe and analyze all the motivations along the mental thread, but you must do this for your subconscious. You prove to yourself that you have removed the wrong idea, that you have corrected the reasoning, and the old shrine of remembrance no longer exists, so it can fade into oblivion.
Forgiveness
Making peace with yourself
The final stage that must be completed, either before or after facing your fear, is forgiving yourself. This is important because, by following a logical thread in your analysis and the habits you've built, you will inevitably reach the conclusion: "How foolish I was!" Because of this thing, I couldn't live this or that experience. While life was right there beside me, asking me to take advantage and enjoy it, I was stuck thinking about fear, waiting only for bad things to happen.
Freeing yourself from the burden of the past
It's true—you willfully gave something up, and you built your entire life around the idea of not fully enjoying any experience just to avoid reliving the trauma. I speak of a trauma in the singular, but it is never just one. Once that same edifice is built, it will rise again in other difficult situations, and it becomes very easy to reach a point where all your decisions are based on what you shouldn't do.
The power to choose a new beginning
This is how you reach stages of complete negativity, where you are afraid to make any decision for fear it might lead you into one of the many flawed and negative reasonings you've recorded. This is why you must forgive yourself and set out on a new beginning. Regardless of whether you find the specific thread of fear that generated the trauma or not, it is vital that, from the moment of your new beginning, you do not add any new fears.
Transforming into your strongest version
Observe every situation and every reasoning and, whenever it happens, let go of the feeling without building anything upon it and without letting it affect you. If you do this, the old you will remain the same, while the new you will become stronger with every experience lived. At some point, you will become so strong that the old you will seem small and insignificant.
Patience, time, and an open heart for life's experiences—this is one of the best remedies. To reach the point where you feel that time is passing, but it is passing in your favor.
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