Don't Let Fear Take Over Your Life

6/19/2019

It’s not that easy to live a positive and happy life when you’re constantly reading, hearing, and watching stories of how doomed humanity is. Don’t let that stress and fear take over your life. Instead, focus on the positivity around you by following a simple plan.

Once you understand, high level, how the human brain works you’ll understand why there are so many negative conversations around us. This will make it easier for you to stay in your center in spite of everything that’s happening in your surroundings.

Your amygdala, cells, and thoughts

Fear of running out of money, food, shelter; fear of being thrown out of the pack, getting hurt, and killed, are normal fears. When you constantly see, read and hear about these threats, your brain focuses on protecting your body and sends the order to the amygdala to release stress hormones to your cells which make you alert and ready to fight or flight.

When the brain is constantly sending signals to the cells in your body that it is in danger, the cells retro-aliment the brain with the same energy until it creates a loop of constant stress and fear. Since the brain reacts to your senses, emotional memory, inner programs, beliefs, and thoughts, just by changing one of these your loop starts getting disrupted.

Since your brain cannot differentiate between something you’re experiencing or imagining, the easiest thing you can do to get out of your negative loop of stress and fear is to imagine new good feeling thoughts. This for sure breaks the negativity loop and the brain begins to send new positive information to all the cells in your body and the cells back to the brain.

The news and all that noise

All the news and marketing companies know very well that we have this tendency to look at the negative around us. They use it to create titles and headlines to get us interested in their stuff. Once you have the slightly belief in what they say, your brain begins to send the signals of stress, and maybe even fear.

You’ve seen and clicked on so many links that have made you believe that you’re going to get more information about what the title or headline promises. Only to realize that the rest of the information was not, or had nothing to do, with the headline. But by then you’re probably already hooked in the negativity loop.

Once you know how your brain and the marketing companies work, you’re empowered to only pay attention to things you’re truly interested in from companies you find reliable. I’m not saying you shouldn’t stay informed, stay informed but focus on keeping your brain at ease.

How to focus on the positive

Now, the easiest way to not let fear take over your life is to not focus on it. That’s right, don’t focus on things real, remembered, or imagined, that cause you to feel stress or fear. Yes, they will come to your attention at one time or another, but it’s always up to you to stay focused on them or not.

Now, how do you stop focusing on things that cause you stress and fear? First, you learn to recognize how the emotions feel in your body so you’re aware when they’re coming –the negative-feeling emotions. Then create a plan to feel better once the negative emotions come and leave.

This plan is very simple: When you see the negative-feeling coming, just focus your attention on something else so it doesn’t get to you. If it's too late and the negative-feeling arrived, allow yourself to feel the emotion for about 90 seconds. When the emotion is leaving you, focus on something else again to get your mind off of the negative-feeling emotion you just experienced.

Are you reading something that causes you negative-feeling emotion? Put the book, magazine or phone down. Are you watching something that causes you negative-feeling emotion? Turn it off or get away from the images. Are you listening something that causes you negative-feeling emotion? Stop it, change the station, or move away. For those times when you cannot escape focus on the positive side of your situation, appreciate the experience, or see it from a higher and different perspective.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

The main thing I want you to get from this is that you have to be aware that YOU HAVE A CHOICE to feel good. You always have a choice. You’ve always had a choice. Nothing and no one should make you listen, read or watch things you don’t want to.

You can politely explain that you are focusing on feeling better and that doing that particular activity is not helping you. I’m sure they’ll understand, and who knows, maybe they’ll learn from you to put themselves first.

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