Fear: Success Enemy #1
Episode #1 of the course How to overcome your anxiety by Eileen Purdy MSW, M.Ed.
Has a well-meaning friend ever told you, “It’s just your imagination. Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of”? Did your fear go away? Of course not. We’re rational beings—we know there is nothing to really be afraid of. But we still are. And our anxious bodies follow suit, as if something real is threatening or something bad is going to happen. Right here and now.
Thanks to these “false alarms” in our minds and bodies, we and millions of others fail to accomplish our goals and live the lives we want. Let’s change this.
How, you ask? Be a buffalo. Wilma Mankiller, the first ever female chief of the Cherokee nation, once said, “Cows run away from the storm, while the buffalo charges toward it—and gets through it quicker. Whenever I’m confronted with a tough challenge, I do not prolong the torment, I become the buffalo.”
In a totally counterintuitive twist of fate, avoiding things that make us anxious actually makes our anxiety worse. Repeatedly connecting avoidance or running away with things we fear strengthens our brain’s interpretation that there really is something to fear. Dr. Hebb’s neuroscience research helped explain this connection when he found that “neurons that fire together wire together.” Simply, what we repeat strengthens.
So let’s start making different connections and transform our anxiety. Let’s learn to be the buffalo.
To do so, we need to approach it head-on.
1. We need to label all our anxious, pessimistic, and worrisome thoughts false alarms and
2. Grab the controls of our breathing and do it anyway—whatever the “it” is that we want to avoid.
As it turns out, our breath is one of the only major systems in our bodies that we can take control of. And the good news for us is that our breathing majorly calms our anxiety. Seriously, once we realize that we can take control of our breathing, we have at our disposal THE most amazing anxiety system hack!
So, after labeling, focus on taking slow, deep belly breaths. That’s it. The slow exhale sends a signal to your nervous system that everything is A-OK and aids in our confidence to go head-first into our great big life.
And this will work in every situation that is holding you back, because with practice, it will retrain your brain out of sending you those irrational and paralyzing messages. Be the buffalo and you got this!
Recommended book
“Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” by David D. Burns
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