Mastering Your Fears
‘Mum you can’t walk to work today, they are about to drop a bomb’.
I’ll never forget the day my son told me this. It was 4.30 pm, Wednesday the 19th of March, 2003 and my four-year-old was playing innocently in front of the TV. Like many others, we’d turned it on to watch the unfolding war in Iraq.
Why was this happening? Because apparently, Saddam was hoarding weapons of mass destruction (which, as we found out later, was a lie, but hey, why let the truth get in the way of a good invasion). Around this time, I decided to do away with the ‘news’. I simply got sick of the sensationalism, shock and horror. And even though there were no bombs dropping on my small country town in Australia, my four-year-old couldn’t make the distinction between here and there, real and spin, lie and truth. His world had suddenly been shaped by fear. Does this sound familiar?
My own personal moment of fear came when I was diagnosed with MS at the age of 24 and I faced a bleak future of life in a nursing home, unable to walk, talk or feed myself properly. But I refused to give in to this. Instead, I devoted myself to finding a cure. I didn’t even entertain the idea of ‘sickness’ or giving in to my dis-ease. It took me ten years to find a way out of my predicament and several times I nearly died attempting to live. The experimental treatments and horrifying side effects didn’t frighten me but the thought of not being able to fully live my life sure as hell did.
Now imagine everyone in the world waking up with a diagnosis of a potentially crippling disease. What would you do? Live fearlessly in the moment, or in constant fear of what might happen? Would you accept your fate as dictated to you by the medical and pharmaceutical establishment or look for better answers and alternate solutions?
If we don’t gain wisdom from the knowledge of the past then we will forever remain ignorant.
It seems to me that one of the major side effects of the whole COVID epidemic that recently swept the world is that everyone now lives in fear, or at least in a heightened sense of anxiety. We were already part way there thanks to an over-hyped media exaggerating all the threats we face every day but now we seem to have taken the #StaySafe mantra to a whole new level. I mean, how many times have you seen that slogan posted on a page where someone’s going travelling or doing a fun outdoor adventure., instead of saying, wohoo go for it!
We bubble wrap our kids, we’re paranoid about our food cleanliness and safety, our houses are sanitised to hospital-like standards, we’re constantly being oversubscribed antibiotics, anti-depressants and other drugs to cure our medical issues and we’re more careful about our social interactions to the point where many people no longer feel comfortable in large crowds.
And this has led to a huge increase in mental health issues world-wide as well as a massive rise in auto-immune diseases, cancer and Alzheimer’s (thanks in part to a hypervigilant, misguided and mistreated gut and immune system).
But did you know that this constant feeling of threat may have other, more insidious, effects on our psychology and health. A recent BBC article noted that the fear campaigns generted about COVID have led us to become more conformist and tribalistic, less accepting of eccentricity, our moral judgements have become harsher and our social attitudes more conservative around issues like immigration, sexual freedom and equality. It has even swayed our political affiliations. And don’t get me started on the myriad health effects fear and anxiety has on our bodies. Blood pressure, cardiac issues, depression, ulcers, headaches, sleeping disorders etc.
Suffice to say, when our bodies react to any stress, real or imagined, there are three predictable metabolic stages it goes through. It’s called the general adaption syndrome:
Alarm: The first reaction to stress recognises there’s a danger and prepares to deal with the threat. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and autonomic nervous system are activated. Primary stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline are released
Resistance: Homeostasis begins restoring balance and a period of recovery for repair and renewal takes place. Stress hormones may return to normal, but there may be reduced defences and adaptive energy left.
Exhaustion: At this phase, the stress has continued for some time. The body’s ability to resist is lost because its adaption energy supply is gone. This is often referred to as overload, burnout, adrenal fatigue, maladaptation, or dysfunction.
So imagine living a life where we are constantly worried, fearful and anxious, where doing anything slightly uncomfortable, challenging or outside our comfort zone sends us into high alert and destroys our ability to navigate and assess risk sensibly. We’d be constantly reliving those three stages over and over and over again. That’s what the whole #Staysafe mantra is setting us up for.
So… I propose a new mantra - #livefearlessly. Not #livedangerously but fearlessly.
Because this is how we are meant to live. When we live fearlessly, we become open to the opportunities and possibilities around us, we are set free from our worries, we are able to live in the moment, for the moment, instead of waiting for a promised future of safety…sanity…. normality. We learn it’s okay to be outside our comfort zone every now and then because that’s where the growth is. This helps us rationalise our fears and our stress response and leads us to the understanding that most of the time, the only real enemy is the voice of fear and doubt inside our own heads.
I propose we all replace #staysafe with #livefearlessly because life is much more fun when lived as a daring adventure, a place where you can push your boundaries, try new experiences and go out on a limb. Because at the end of the day, this is where the sweetest fruit hang.