The answer to that question always depends on who you ask. As humans, we are completely unique individuals. So, whilst you may be terrified to try something new, your spouse, friend or relatives might get very excited over the possibilities and the unknown. You may be fearful when it comes to speaking in public whilst other people thrive on the attention, and that fact that they have the ability to captivate an audience in the process.

In general though, fear is a type of feeling we get when we feel uncomfortable about, or threatened by something (or in some cases, someone).

Regardless of what causes the fear, the intensity we feel varies from person to person, situation to situation. Fear can evoke a powerful, even seemingly irrational emotional response, which can be especially hard to deal with if your family or friends don’t understand your fears.

Children, like adults, often have some fears varying from the common fear of the dark or that there are monsters lurking under their bed, to a fear that their parent may leave them, or won’t return.

As parents, it’s important to be mindful of our children’s fears and not dismiss them as nonsense or irrelevant. To the child they are very real and often super scary.

Not everyone can just ‘face the fear’ and get through it.  Some people have such a close connection with their fear it can literally feel like it’s a ‘part’ of who they are and so it can control many aspects of their life.

Children and adults alike may need plenty of support and help learning useful strategies when it comes to overcoming fears.

Overcoming Fear

Fears can be short term or very long lasting. Fears can be real or they can be something you have imagined, that then take on a life of their own.

If this sort of imagined fear stops you from doing something like making that ‘dreaded’ phone call, then a great acronym that I often use is that FEAR is just a:

False

Expectation

Appearing

Real

And a useful follow on question to ask yourself could be ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’

In other instances, however, fear may be a learned behaviour which triggers a set emotional and physiological response to a particular situation.

It may be possible to overcome your fear simply by reminding yourself that it can’t harm you. Instead of reacting as you normally do focus on your breathing. Keeping your breathing regulated as well as your heartbeat can help to offset the physiological response that fear evokes.

7/11 breathing whereby the outbreath is longer than the inbreath is a great way of stimulating the parasympathetic response, which in turn calms down that ‘stress response’. If you can reduce the physiological symptoms, through breathwork and reframing your thoughts then they won’t trigger the same level of fear response as before.

Sometimes it isn’t only the person or object itself that causes the fear, though the situation surrounding it can do so too.  

For example, you were in a car crash and the passenger of the other car was wearing a red coat.  Even though the red coat is irrelevant to what happened, the brain remembers there was a red coat in this ‘scary’ situation and stores this memory. From then on every time we see a red coat the brain pattern matches it to the car crash and evokes the emotion ‘fear’.

In such cases strong emotions focus and lock attention, keeping people trapped in problem behaviours. In these cases therapeutic change cannot happen until the emotional arousal is reduced. Guided imagery and visualisation can be used to reduce emotional arousal quickly and can be used to reframe life circumstances through metaphor, and rehearse in the imagination any changed behaviours and/or feelings so that the thought no longer triggers the ‘fear’ emotion. Finding a therapist trained in such work can release people from such trauma.

Words: Helen Prosper

If you would like any help to create steps to help overcome your fears as mentioned above, lessen your anxiety or improve your general wellbeing, then please contact Helen on 07545 227272, email helen @livewellandprosper.uk or visit Live Well and Prosper