How To Overcome Fear In Our Lives

Lions, and tigers and bears. Oh my! Oh yeah – and also corona virus, cancer, poverty, getting old, being alone and what other people think. Today, as you might have guess, we are talking about FEAR!  And how to overcome it in our lives to live our best life! So, let’s talk about How we can Overcome Fear in Our Lives.

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How To Overcome Fear In Our Lives
How To Overcome Fear In Our Lives

Why I Started Thinking About Overcoming Fear

I recently started thinking a lot about how we can overcome fear in our lives. And while a ton of people out there are fearful right now about a virus. The inspiration for my thoughts around fear lately don’t stem from this pandemic. They stem from a personal situation I’ve been going through.

As most of you know, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer about a year ago. This is her 3rd time being diagnosed with various breast cancer diagnoses. Long story short, she decided to pursue alternative forms of healing instead of traditional medicine. A lot of people always ask me right about now, how I feel about the alternative route. Honestly, I feel that everyone should have a complete say what they do or don’t do to their body. If that is what she wants to do and that is the path she wants to go on, then that is what she should do.

Things took a pretty dramatic turn recently. She discovered the cancer had spread to her spine and became paralyzed from the chest down. Needless to say, it was extremely devastating. My sisters and I rushed to her aid and found ourselves in a very exhausting and challenging role of caregiver. I won’t go into all the details but it was extremely taxing both physically and emotionally.

It’s unclear what will happen next, but it’s something we’re processing as a family.

Asking The Tough Questions

All that said, on our way back home from flying out to be with my Mom during this time, my sister and I were talking about cancer. There seems to be A LOT of fear that a lot of us have around illness. And I know for me, cancer seems to be everywhere. In my family, in my friends families, etc. It’s just feels really scary mostly because we don’t know where or how it comes about.

You start to question your own lifestyle and you wonder am I living the most healthy life I can be living? Should I be working out more or less? Should I be drinking turmeric, taking more vitamins, sleeping more, etc? You start to ask yourself those hard-hitting questions that sometimes we try to avoid. Like, why are we even here? Why do things like this happen to some people and not others?

Fear of the Unknown

The biggest reason why we fear illness – like Corona Virus or cancer is because of the unknown factor. We fear the unknown because we don’t know what’s going to happen next. And that’s super uncomfortable to our brains. Our brains like to know what’s predictable and what’s coming next. With these types of illnesses, there are so many unanswered questions. We don’t know why some people gets sicker than others, or even HOW you get it. So it’s scary. It’s easy to get caught up in it and become obsessive.

So, let’s talk more about how we can overcome fear in our lives.

Understanding Our Fears is How We Can Overcome Fear in Our Lives

In Napoleon Hill’s Book, Outwitting the Devil, he describes the six most effective fears as, fear of poverty, criticism, ill health, lost of love, old age and death. Look at your own life, and what you’re fearful of on a day-to-day basis. I would guess there’s not one fear that doesn’t trace back to one of those six fears. The book also says that, “fear of the thing which does not exist is just as useful to me as a fear about which does exist. All forms of fear extend the space I occupy in the human mind.”

This means that most of the time, we fear and worry about things that don’t even exist. What are you worrying about? What are you fearful of? Has it happened yet? So many of the things I stress about never happen! For example, crashing in a plane, my child getting harmed by someone or something, losing my job and my house and my belongings.

Fear is Brain- Based

There’s a great quote that says, “Fear doesn’t stop death. It stops life.” Because so often, we live our lives so scared to make the wrong decisions or that something bad is going to happen. This is literally stopping us from living.

FEAR DOESN'T STOP DEATH. IT STOPS LIFE

We think we’re protecting ourselves, but it’s literally stopping us from pursuing our biggest dreams and living our best lives. As usual, we can pretty much blame our brains for feeling this way. Fear comes directly from the unconscious reptilian brain. Our reptilian brain is programmed to help us survive in a prehistoric world. We’re programmed to fear anything that might be associated with a threat to our survival. Makes sense, right?

When our brain recognizes a threat to our survival (i.e. when we think of getting cancer or we’re scared of what people will think of us, or we’re thinking about losing our job), the response is fear. Fear signals our brain to be anxious and to get that adrenaline pumping in hopes that it’s going to save us from a tiger or a bear. However, in reality, we’re just sitting on our couch freaking the F- out for no good reason. Right?

The irony in all of this is that this kind of constant state of fear, anxiety, and worry, is actually training the body to constantly live in survival mode. And when we maintain stress in our lives over long periods of time, we get exhausted and our resources become depleted. This kind of living not only makes us unhappy, but it can make us physically sick. Which is ironic since somethings that’s exactly what we are most fearful of.

Living From Fear Vs. Love

In another one of my favorite books, Conversations with God, it says, “All human actions are motivated at the deepest level by two emotions – fear or love. In truth, there are only two emotions. Every human thought and every human action is based in either love or fear. There is no other human motivation. There are only different twists on the same theme.” This means we have a choice. We can be motivated by fear or by love.

So I have a question for you. What are you choosing to live from today? Are you choosing to think thoughts that stem from love? Like being courageous, creative, helpful, productive, supportive? Or are you choosing to think thoughts that are rooted based in fear, guilt, worry, or thoughts of doubt, lack or scarcity?

Supporting Others In Hard Times While Avoiding Fear

Don’t confuse this with a lack of compassion or empathy. There are plenty of ways that we can still have compassion and help others or ourselves during hard times without getting into fear. When it comes to our friends and families’ health issues, these things are out of our control. However, we can support those people physically, emotionally, or financially. We can give our time or our influence We can raise money and we can donate and volunteer. But beyond that? In our minds and in our bodies, we have to find peace. Peace of mind so that we can celebrate our lives.

Finding the Peace is Key

We wonder why so many people are sick and have so many issues. That’s why we have to ask ourselves how often we’re living from fear in our lives. And it’s not just the “BIG” things. It’s the little things that put us in this state of mind. For example, we’re constantly in traffic worrying about getting home or to work on time. We’re at the office worrying about what our coworker said to us. You come home and you have arguments over nothing. These things may seem little, but each of these things puts us into a state of fear.

I have some questions that you can ask yourself to help you evaluate and overcome your fears. I would encourage you to write them out, since getting your thoughts onto paper is SO important.Remember, 95% of our thoughts are on auto-pilot. Even though you think saying them out loud will help you work through them, you’re going to benefit so much more by writing them down. Grab these free questions here!

The next time you’re feeling anxious, take yourself through these questions to move through the fear and get to the next point?

How We Can Overcome Fear in Our Lives = Gratitude

When all else fails, gratitude. Gratitude is the key to celebrating in this lifetime. Even when everything around us feels scary, weird and uncomfortable. We need to find the joy in our lives right now – today. There is something to be grateful for. And if you can put yourself in that energy of gratitude, your day will shift. Things begin to open up for you and you can more easily let go of fear. Remember, you can grab my free gratitude printable to start celebrating your every day, right here.

Let’s Connect!

Lastly, thank you so much for taking the time to read about How We Can Overcome Fear in Our Lives! I hope this gives you some ideas about releasing fear in your life! I love to help you celebrate life through party decorations and personal development! But above all, I’d love to connect with you. Reach out to me on Instagram and let’s chat. You can also get started on celebrating your life with your FREE gratitude journal printable or by subscribing to my podcast, The Celebration Effect Podcast! I can’t wait to connect with you more.

xox

Lindsay