How Fear Controls You

Note that the image above was generated by ChatGPT GPT-4 DALL-E

Fear is the number one emotion that controls people. I define fear as an instinctive emotion that comes about when a person perceives some kind of danger brining great distress to the person depending on the level of fear felt.

A lot of questionable decisions by man can be attributed to fear. Fear of death, fear of what others think, fear of our close’s ones being hurt by others etc. Fear leads people to acting in silly and childish ways because fear clouds judgement and reason. People take action in the moment out of fear and look no further than the present moment. People don’t pay any attention to the long-term consequences of their own actions, because they are so focussed on the fear they are experiencing right now.

Marketing companies, world leaders, and anyone with a fair amount of intelligence recognise how to exploit people’s fear for their own benefit. They create the problem (something that makes you fearful), and then sell the solution (something that takes away that fear).

To lessen the fears that you face, there are some techniques and things that you can do. The first being meditation, because with meditation you learn to become more self-aware of your disposition at any given moment, and so when you notice you’re fearful you can snap out of it and say to yourself “I’m fearful right now, and therefore I know that decisions I make now will likely be based around this fear”, in other words learning to recognise when you are fearful and paying attention to how you feel in the present moment will lessen the effects of fear on you. I find that most people don’t know when fear is dictating their actions – they just act upon that fear.

Another technique for fear is taking action. This was recommended in this book I read called “The Magic of Thinking Big” published in 1959 by David J. Schwartz. In the book he looked at fear in men training in the military who needed swimming lessons. The technique used in the military was to have the men dive in the water from a 15-foot-high platform to conquer their fear. The men were naturally fearful of diving in the water, but Schwarz noted that after they had dived into the water from the platform, there fear of the water had lessened drastically. The point he made however was that action conquered fear. Therefore, if you’re fearful in some way, look to take the actions which will take away that fear.

Another thing is often the fear of something is actually worse than the thing you are fearing. This isn’t always the case but most times. An example is spiders. Most spiders are harmless to people, yet these small 8-legged creatures bring a lot of fear to some.

I’ll also say that people also mistake fear as being apart of them. In that they identify with ‘fear’ they think that fear is what makes them who they are. You don’t need to have fear be the emotion you identify with. fear is a very low vibrational state when compared with higher emotions such as love, peace and so on. Point being here is that emotions don’t identify who you are, therefore don’t think that you are “losing” who you are by becoming less fearful.

Conclusively aim to rise above fear so that you can allow higher emotions to influence your behaviours and reach more of your potential as a human being. God bless.