Fear can be caused by real or imagined danger. But there are ways to help yourself reduce and even overcome the fears you feel. If you don’t, they can rule your life, causing you to retreat into a comfort zone that isn’t much bigger than a hula-hoop. Once you have shrunk away from a life that much, you will find that your dreams, relationships, and life, in general, will start to become mundane, boring, uneventful. I guess it’s fine if you want a small, tiny life. But, for most of us, a life worth living is a life with adventure, new experiences, and fun. One way to keep your fears from diminishing your life is to starve them. Challenge yourself to starve your fear as often as possible.
5 Reasons To Challenge Yourself To Starve Your Fear
1. Develop More Trust
Once you stop living in fear, you can start to trust more. You can start to listen to reason and work through issues intelligently rather than be led by your fear.
2. Take More Risks And Get More Rewards
When you have less fear, you take more risks, and this can be very rewarding to you.
Think about something you do that could provoke fear if you let it. For instance, do you go for a walk outside? There are all kinds of things that could potentially happen to you on your walk, but the chances are good that you don’t fear them. You allow yourself to enjoy your walk because it’s a risk that you want to take. It gives you the reward of fresh air, nature, exercise, and maybe even socialization.
3. Expand Your Comfort Zone
You become bigger in life when you starve your fear. You have more experiences and are comfortable with more things.
For instance, if you fear socializing, the more you starve your fear, the more you can develop a sense of confidence and familiarity around being social. This helps you to meet new people, open up new opportunities, and have more experiences.
4. You Feel Better About Yourself
Starving fear can help you to feel better about yourself at the end of the day. You will feel more productive and alive. You will feel more confident and purposeful. You will feel better because you try things and take action instead of shying away and avoiding.
5. Your Physical, Mental, And Spiritual Health Will Improve
If you let fear get out of control it can affect many aspects of your physical and mental health.
It can affect your immune system, endocrine system, automatic nervous system, sleep cycle, eating habits, mood, relationships, faith, and happiness.
Fear can cause you to develop phobias, which can lead to more issues.
Fear can cause you to develop anxiety and high levels of stress, which are both bad for the body in many different ways.
Fear is not good for your health unless it’s helping you spot risk and keep you from taking a chance that has a high potential of causing harm to you.
How Do You Starve Your Fear? Don’t Give It Any Of Its Favorite Food
This is the challenge. You want to starve your fear by not giving it the food it craves.
1. Fear Loves Time
The longer you wait, the harder it is. Sound familiar?
The more time you give your fear to play with your mind, the more likely it is that you won’t confront it. It becomes more and more scary and uncomfortable with each passing day, and as time goes on it will be much more tempting to stay inside of your comfort zone and avoid it.
You can stop giving your fear so much time. You can starve it and do what you need to do so that you can have the experiences you want or reach the goals you want.
In short, when you feel fear, jump in with both feet quickly and do what you fear before it gets a chance to take hold.
2. Fear Loves Negative Thoughts
The more negatively you think about something, the more fear can work itself into your life.
For instance, if you think negatively about your talents, fear can help ensure that you don’t do anything that will showcase how much talent you really have.
It’s very important to flip your negative affirmations into positive affirmations (negative statements into positive statements).
You may need to listen to yourself to catch all the negative affirmations you currently hold as they can be so automatic that you may not recognize them anymore.
For instance:
- I’m not worthy of this or that.
- I’m stupid.
- I’m not capable.
- I can’t have what I want.
- Nobody wants to be with someone like me.
- I always fail in some way.
These are all negative affirmations that can get stuck in your belief system. It’s very important to recognize them and then replace them with more powerful, positive affirmations.
You can do this in a few ways.
- Every time you realize that you have a negative affirmation living in your mind, engage in personal development in that area. Ignorance is not always bliss. Sometimes educating yourself around your fear is the best thing you can do for your fear. For instance, if you feel like you are not good enough, read a book or take a course that outlines why you are good enough. Or if you are fearful of flying, read up on how safe flying is and educate yourself on the entire topic of flying. Read other people’s stories. And get the knowledge and affirmations that help you reduce your fear of flying enough to get on a plane and experience safety for yourself. As you work on personal development, you will find your negative affirmation starts to dwindle and get replaced with more empowering thoughts. The more personal growth you engage in, the better.
- Use positive affirmations. You can listen to subliminal affirmations, create your own affirmations, or use someone else’s affirmations (we have affirmations for a wide variety of life’s topics). The challenge is to say them all the time, especially to counteract a negative thought that pops up. The more you say something, the more you believe it, so stick with it.
