1. Identify Your Fears
2. Understand Your Fears
3. Assess Your Level of Fear
4. Get Rid of The Guilt Over Your Fears
5. Burn Your Fears
6. Take Small Steps
7. Think Up An Anti-fear Affirmation
8. Change Your Posture
9. Don’t Make Fear An Option

You are not your thoughts, and so you are not your fears. Yet sometimes you can be so afraid of something – no matter how illogical or unreasonable – that it paralyzes you. And the more you feed your fear, the greater its impact on your life.

We prefer to avoid the things we fear. Understandable, but confrontation often works better. It is a pity if you miss fun life events because of your fear.

According to Monica Berg, author of the book Fear is not an option, there is room for new opportunities and growth as soon as you master your fears. Here are a few tricks you can do that will help finally be rid of your fears:

1. Identify Your Fears

The first step to overcoming our fears is to understand their origin. The meditation and self-evaluation that goes into this quest points the way to understanding our inner being and knowing our true opponent.

Where do our fears come from? Fear can come from something we have been told, observed, or from past experiences. Once the cause is identified, we can start working to overcome them. To identify them, it is good to examine the beliefs that cause them. The beliefs that cause us to be afraid are excessive thoughts that are activated without any real threat. During these situations, there is a distortion in our system. This distortion in our emotions is caused by our beliefs.

Once you have noticed the symptoms of fear, go ahead to determine exactly what you are afraid of. If, for example, you are afraid of flights, try to pinpoint more precisely what scares you: is it takeoff, the flight itself, landing, being in a place where you can’t go out, being stuck with strangers in a place you cannot escape, a crash, etc.

In this way, your brain will be able to adapt and adjust its responses according to your anticipation and your objectivity. The goal: to regain self-control. So, you must take that first step to discover what it is you’re actually afraid of and naming it.

2. Understand Your Fears

Few are as frightening as the unknown. You cannot avoid or control what you do not understand. Once you have identified your fear, go a bit further to understand their root causes. No matter how difficult you find it, expose yourself to the danger you are so afraid of and dig deep. Research shows that this is the best way to overcome fear. By enduring the anxious thoughts and the associated tension, you notice that the world is not going to end. The more often you enter into an anxious situation, the more your self-confidence grows. Avoiding danger only reinforces fear. This is the part of the process where you ask the ‘why?’ questions. Why am I so scared of failure? Why am I scared of heights? Why do I hate being in dark places alone? Why do I fear being abandoned?

This inquisition will lead you to dig deep into your past and watch the patterns. No single human is born afraid of something. It is why babies can look in the devil’s eye and smile. Talk to your family, have them explain things to have that may have become foggy in your memory. By going down memory lane, you eventually realize the starting point of your phobia.

For example, a person who is afraid of being in dark places might discover that the fear started when he was attacked in a dark, lonely place. This experience might have happened years ago but the reactions remain ingrained in our subconscious.

Understand it’s the root and only then can you begin your journey to freedom from fear.

3. Assess Your Level of Fear

Now that you know what it is you’re afraid of, and why you’re afraid of it, it is time to know how afraid you are. This is the third step before you consider fighting your ailment. If in the face of the object or the situation of your anxiety, you feel fear, but you manage to remain in control of the situation, although unpleasant, the evil is still mild. If, on the contrary, you see yourself changing your behavior or reacting in a completely irrational way, you have probably reached the stage of phobia.

Thus, you deliberately avoid certain situations so as not to be confronted with a hypothetical danger zone. This is when it becomes really extreme. If you find yourself facing the object of your phobia and you become paralyzed, have an altered perception of reality, or feel great physical and psychological distress, then there’s a problem. You need to know how big the monster you’re fighting is.

There is a level of fear that will only require you to consistently make daily positive affirmations. Then, there is the extreme scenario where professional help is required. Determine which of these levels your fear is on, and you’ll be sure of the next step to take.

4. Get Rid of The Guilt Over Your Fears

After determining if you are suffering from a “simple” fear or phobia, it is important to accept it, play it, down and stop feeling guilty. If you find it shameful to be afraid of the dark after your thirties, remember that it is not your fault and that you are not the first to suffer such! Whether you are afraid of dogs or tight spaces, chase defeatism (“this dog will inevitably bite me”, “I will suffocate you in this elevator”), accept that the risk exists, but that it is tiny.

Accepting the reality of your fears is a great step. You can try to be vocal about it and unashamed. Talk about it to others – your friend, family, and other people you may trust.

Talking about your anxiety will help you move forward.

Don’t hesitate to be vocal about your fears. Do not feel like because you are a certain age or gender, your fears do not hold water. Your fears are valid, and you’re working on them. Let’s move forward.

5. Burn Your Fears

After getting over the guilt of your fear, it is time to go into eliminating this fear properly. You now know what the monster is, so call it up consciously and throw the fear into a fire.

It works like this. Since you have managed to name what you fear, try taking up a piece of paper and write this fear down. Write it down in its entirety, in its rawest form. This is a practical experiment. Ensure you are concentrating and free from distractions. Hold that fear tightly in your hand and be prepared to let go.

Of course you can light the fire pit or the fireplace for this, but imaginary fireworks just as well. Imagine that the fire swallows up fear, thereby erasing fear from your consciousness. Before you scoff at this method, understand this. Everything you fear is all in your mind, all in your head, expanding and taking deeper roots. The first bullet to eliminate it must also be shot in your head. Fight the battles in your mind and experience the bliss that envelopes you when you win. Because you will WIN.

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6. Take Small Steps

No, it doesn’t end there. Now that you have decided to burn your fear, you have to teach your system to respond accordingly and that takes time. So, don’t be dismayed when you burn your fear of heights and still find yourself gasping for air on an overhead bridge.start by making your fear smaller and less powerful. Tell yourself that fear is an opportunity that can help you become the best version of yourself.

This is important because unreasonable fears stop you from doing what you love most and making your dreams come true. But if you take small steps to cope with your fears, it can eventually lead to big changes. You don’t always have to jump into the deep end. What small steps can you take to make your fearless influential? If you have a fear of dark places, you can start by turning off the light in your room while you’re still in it for a few minutes per day. Start with that, and you will see that your anxiety will automatically decrease.

7. Think Up An Anti-fear Affirmation

If you keep repeating your fear in your mind, it becomes stronger. Fortunately, that works the other way around too. So think of a positive affirmation to contrast with fear. For example, do not keep telling yourself: ‘I have to give a presentation, but everyone can see how nervous I am, and I will forget what I want to say.’ Instead, think: ‘I am well prepared and I have an important message that everyone should hear. If I falter, that’s okay. Everybody makes mistakes. What is important is my message, and I am able to fully deliver.’ See how that made you instantly better? Imagine if you spoke to yourself like this each time your fear pops up, you’ll be fearless in absolutely no time.

8. Change Your Posture

You might not know this but fear has a posture. So does confidence. You can tell a lot about how a person lives and relates to other people and the environment by the way they sit, stand, and walk. Read this article on Medium for better understanding. Anxiety makes you slouch, and clumsy.

Standing upright, with a straight back, your shoulders relaxed and your chest slightly forward, you radiate openness and confidence. More importantly, such a power pose can produce more testosterone, which helps you feel more powerful. Also nice, you can do the pose anywhere and anytime if you can use some extra courage and confidence. If you’re going to be fearless, you have to look the part!

9. Don’t Make Fear An Option

It will take a long time before your body is able to respond the way you want it to to the things that scare you. That is a hard, but essential pill to swallow. So since we’ve agreed that it’s not going to go away completely, you have to ensure that you keep taking those small steps. Steps that get bigger by the day, until you discover you’ve totally lost all that fear that you used to feel.

Sometimes, it might get overwhelming but always remember that returning to your fearful self is not an option. Make it a mantra for yourself: fear is not an option. Practice this daily, even when you do not experience fears. The longer you speak these words to yourself, the more ingrained they would be in your subconscious.

Now that you have all the keys to overcoming your fears in your hand, it is time for you to seize your peace of mind. Life is too short to allow fear to keep you from doing some amazing things. Take full responsibility for what happens in your life. Don’t let fear stop you from making choices for your life. Remember; you’re above anything you’re afraid of.

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