THINKING AND FEARING

While the pandemic of the cornavirus from China has been problematic, an equally problematic pandemic that’s spread around the world is the fear pandemic. And while doctors, nurses and lots of front-line people have rallied to deal with covid19, almost no one has rallied to address the unreasonable and irrational fears that have spread like a virus around the world. When fear is pandemic it will immobilize your life.

As an emotion, fear is not only very useful, it is an essential state for surviving and thriving. Of course, it has to be properly understood and used. Otherwise it can become irrational and thereby destructive. Our nervous systems are designed to register things dangerous and things overwhelming. These are the things that then activate the general arousal syndrome enabling us to fight or flee (or freeze).

This system works just fine when we face true dangers or overwhelm. Then our neurology prepares us with the energy to shift focus, pay attention to the danger, and take effective action to either face it with care or avoid it altogether. This is also known as the stress response.

However this system goes wrong when what we define as “danger,” or when we fail to recognize the presence of overload or overwhelm. This is where thinking plays a fundamental role in the experience of fear. If you falsely define something as dangerous, you send a message to your body to respond as if it were dangerous. But it is not. Now we have an unrealistic fear. Yet thinking and believing it real— your body doesn’t know any better than to go into fight or flight. You will automatically respond and feel the same as if it were real.

This is where you can go into a spin. You mis-label something as dangerous, your body and unconscious mind gives you the experience and feel of fear, you then use that as evidence or proof that the fear is true, and so your fear is amplified. Then the more you fear, the more your fear grows. And the more your fear grows, the more you relate the state of fear to other things. This makes you more and more fearful and anxious. It’s a vicious circle.

Irrational, unrealistic fear feels the same as real and authentic fear. There’s no difference at the feeling level. The difference lies at the thinking level. That’s why an objective exploration of the fear is a great way to begin to manage the fear.

What are you fearing? How is that object dangerous? What specifically is the danger? How much are you fearing? If you gauge the fear, where is it from 0 to 10? How realistic or unrealistic is the fear? What is realistic or not? Do all people fear this? If not, then what resources do they have that enables them? Is this a fear to flee from or to face with courage and resolution? If it is to avoid— what are the best ways to avoid it?

If it is to face — what are the best ways, methods, strategies for facing it?

Not only are there thinking processes that create fear where there is no danger or overload, there are also thinking patterns that unusefully amplify the fear. Among these are over-generalization, personalizing, awfulizing, emotionalizing, imagining the worst case (playing “what if...” tapes), etc. These cognitive distortions greatly increase the experience of fear.

Over-generalization occurs using all-or-nothing language, using universal quantifiers (all, every, none, etc.) and blowing up one’s description leaving out exceptions and conditions. Personalizing turns a danger into a personal problem instead of an external circumstance to be dealt with. Awfulizing is describing things with words like awful, terrible, horrible, end-of-the-world, etc. Emotionalizing is confusing what you feel with the facts of reality. It assumes to feel something means that thing is real. Imagining the worse is tunnel vision, worst-case scenario pessimistic thinking that plays “What if...” tapes. It borrows imagined problems from the future.

All of these are childish ways of thinking that are sure to create and amplify a state of fear. Therefore when you changes these distorted constructs— you manage the fear and make it appropriate.

How else to manage fear, especially irrational unrealistic fear?

Ridicule the fear so that you can laugh at it and lighten up about it. Command it. You fear that you will faint? Okay, do that now. Here. Accept it. Okay, so you are afraid. What do you want to do? Accept the symptoms of fear. Sweating, shaking, etc. Externalize the fear. Give it a funny name.