tba , draft, most of the basic ideas...
Fear is just a signal, to get you into action when your life or limb needs to be protected. It evolved to have us survive.
Fear is a mechanical process instigated by the thought of a threat, so that you can respond to protect yourself from the physical danger. Often it is known as the fight/flight/freeze response.
The control of fear relies on controlling/changing the thought, often by using coping statements or by engaging the higher brain by asking "Is this a true threat or imaginary?" (99% is strictly imaginary, existing only in the mind.)
Fear is not "suffering". Suffering is simply a way of repeatedly anticipating some imagined consequence and/or adding "ain't it awful" to some undesired feeling or circumstance. But hardly anything is "of consequence". Until we learn enough, we fail to "proper size" the consequence, for 99+% of it is, in fact, "inconsequential"!(See The Reality Of "No Actual Effect".)
Our fear and warning system mechanism is our greatest gift - but misused it is our greatest damager.
Unintelligent, misdirected, useless fears are what create our stress and unhappiness.
Complete the whole process on this site for understanding and eradicating fear (except for the legitimate signal which is not at all miserable, but lifesaving).
THE REAL FEARS
Our basic fears are wired into us as survival tools.
The two we are born with: fear of loud sounds and of falling. Fear of fire, roaring beasts, and such are built in.
These are real fears we are talking about, not such things as loss of social status or even loss of financial status. Be happy to have these fears, for they are tools. But you own them and should not let them own you.
Real fears are always in the physical world. If it is not about the physical world, then it is strictly madeup and existing only in the mind, as a "mind construct" but not a real thing - more like a dream or a movie, where it is foolish to believe there is actual danger.
HOW TO TREAT FEAR
Treat fear like you would a smoke detector – listen and then look to see if there is a real danger. That's your job #2, to screen out what comes your way and to determine what to do. (Job #1 is to create what you want for yourself through the use of directed thinking.)
However, note that you will actually react in fear for a real danger before you are conscious of it. Everything else is not an emergency, so you have time to screen them.
But know that the fear emotion that is in the recordings in your brain have no realness to them.
If we don’t know what fear really is, then we might allow it to be a handicap.
We can create it as if it is a mood, a general feeling – but a feeling that is based on nothing concrete, nothing real, nothing in reality. It is more like a sense of foreboding or feeling something could be wrong. We carry this "thought-feeling" around with us, unless we think it out.
We have the idea, the belief, that if something happens the consequences will be much greater than they actually end up being. This misestimation is shown to be dramatically exaggerated in multiple studies. That means most of it is nonsense and not a matter of much concern.
And, on top of that, it has been shown that we underestimate how well we will handle things when they come about. We usually handle them and then they soon drift back into the recesses of distant memory. (Think back about how you thought things would be terrible and how those things drifted into virtual nothingness later in life - for indeed they were virtually nothing, but a nothing grossly and falsely exaggerated.)
And then we fail to build in the phenomenon of adjustment accommodation , where even if we suddenly become paraplegic we adjust to our normal happiness level with a year! Seem unbelievable, but that is what is so. Your projection of Armageddon is totally wrong. There are very, very few consequences that would take away our ability to make things actually make our lives great.
Yet, because we don't think it out, the vagueness of it all allows us to believe that which creates over and over false fears that upset our functional balance
(homeostasis) and set it up to incur damage solely because of our erroneous thinking and the reactions they cause - not because of the actual consequences which are totally handleable!
You should study this fear section until you totally understand this and realize there is virtually nothing to really fear, nothing to upset yourself about or to "tense yourself in anticipation of."
WE CONTROL WHAT IT TAKES TO BE HAPPY
We control the creation of so very many good things that we can virtually guarantee that we can create a good life. Check out Nick Vujicic who has “no arms, no legs, and no limits” (see Look At Yourself After Watching This.mp4 and then his charity’s site www.lifewithoutlimbs.com ). He, like W. Mitchell who lost so much, recognized that there were still many, many things he could still do, more than he would have time to do – which means he could not reach the limits of all he could do.
Though all emotions are "real" (actual physical sensations), the thought-fears are almost always not real or not suitable. But the fear itself is merely a physical sensation resulting from an electrochemical signal based on reacting to a fear-thought to cause us to go into action. And after the action, the chemicals are burnt off and we rest, with the danger gone.
Well, that is what our ancestors of a long time ago did. Their BIG FEAR resulted from encountering things that might kill them, so their chemicals juiced them up to get the hell out of there or to fight the threat. And in so doing they burnt off those bad chemicals and also rested to restore the body.
However, we react to non-real "believed threats", get juiced up, don't burn them off and then we don't rest to restore the body. Instead of surge, rest, surge, rest, we surge, surge, surge...and we train ourselves to be hyperalert and hyperreactive. (Read Stress and get it down to a frequency of almost none each day.)
We actually wire that into our brains, where the pattern is automatic and repeated virtually on its own based on just small stuff our brain associates with some believed threat, even remotely so, because we have so deeply programmed it (actually grooved it in through repeated activation of the neuronal circuit).
YOU ARE ACTUALLY ABLE TO CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS BY...
Since emotions are caused by thoughts (conscious or not) and since we cannot "get into the gap" between our thoughts and our emotions, we often think we cannot control our emotions. But we fail to notice that they were caused by our thoughts. And since we can control our thoughts, then we can control the whole causal chain, meaning that we control what causes our emotion - and therefore we have control over our emotions.
Sometimes we don't catch the thought quickly enough, but the second we notice, we can then create a thought that will stop the emotion. (Emotions last a maximum of 90 seconds on their own and will only continue if we keep on stimulating them.)
So, it is you who can control your response to your emotions..and therefore stop them.
YOUR FEARS ARE OFTEN BASED ON SOMETHING NOT ACTUAL
We fabricate such fears as "fear of":
They, and their sisters and brothers, are all fake, all just small stuff or "nothing stuff", not worth sweating over at all. Read Don't Sweat The Small Stuff...And It's All Small Stuff, by Richard Carlson.
Limits are also illusionary and/or are not actually limiting. You can learn, you can devise, you can work with experts, get advice, and you can create more than enough in your life without running across the actual limits out there.
TO REPEAT...
Fear is a motivatior, a sign, merely a discomfort signal – but it only will last 1 and a half minutes, unless we repeat a fear thought.
For anything that is actually big enough to not just go with, we can do preparations to produce the important results we want or to prevent something we can anticipate.
We'll have a few things not go our way, since we can't control everything, but seldom are the outcomes anything we cannot adjust to and "handle" - and then live a good life!
Nail this area down - and don't stop until you get to the point where you have virtually zero stress in any day. I repeat: Do not stop until then. All of your learning and efforts to understand this will have a huge payoff in your life - and your happiness and effectiveness in life will soar - and you'll no longer be wasting energy on stuff with no benefit plus you'll not be incurring self-harm and you'll be freeing up your mind to think better and your time to be devoted to creating more happiness for you!!!!
