Face Your Fears and They Fade Away

This is one of the ultimate challenges in life. Fear is in your thinking and in your mind. You have to control fear rather than have fear control you, and I'll tell you right now that for most of my life fear had the wheel. I had panic attacks and night terrors, and I braced for the next catastrophe so constantly that I thought bracing was just what being alive felt like.

Here is what I finally learned. Fear is an illusion. It's a convincing one, with a heartbeat and sweaty palms, but it's still an illusion, and here's why. We make up the thoughts that live in our minds. We decide what gets a fear response and what doesn't. Our thoughts rule our mind, and if you allow fear to live in a fertile environment, it will grow and continue to grow and expand until you never have a moment's peace.

In the rooms of recovery there's an old acronym for it, and it's stuck with me for decades: False Evidence Appearing Real. That's all fear is: evidence that looks real and isn't.

Think about what fear actually does. We tell ourselves stories we make up about how a situation might play out. In the story, the phone call goes badly, the test comes back wrong, and they leave. Then we react to that story as if it already happened, with a racing heart and a knot in the stomach, over something that exists nowhere but in our own heads. Really notice that you're reacting to a story.

Now choose to think differently. Make up a story where there is a good ending, and I mean this literally, because you are already making up a story, so you may as well make up one you can live in. Then live that story, and walk into the room as the person the good ending happened to. Allow yourself to gain control of your fear thoughts and replace them with thoughts of prosperity and abundance. Use faith thoughts and affirmations instead, not because positive thinking is magic, but because your mind is going to run a story either way, and you get to pick which one.

Faith-based thinking and fear-based thinking can't occupy the same seat at the same time. Every time you choose faith, fear loses a little ground. It will take time and discipline. You didn't learn to be afraid in a day and you won't unlearn it in one either. But I have watched people who couldn't leave their houses go on to lead full lives, and I was one of them.

Face your fears and they fade away! That's not a slogan; it's the most reliable thing I know. The thing you're dreading gets smaller the second you turn around and look at it, and it keeps getting smaller every single time you do.