Fear paralysis and how to deal with it

Imagine this scene that you have surely experienced at least a couple of times in your life:

It’s a beautiful sunny day, just perfect temperature. Everything in his world couldn’t be better. In fact, all things seem perfect. You even find yourself singing your favorite song.

Then, out of nowhere, a flash of thought crosses your mind. Something that worried you a lot the other week and that you had stopped thinking about, quickly returns. You didn’t have an answer for this at the time, and you couldn’t keep thinking about it, so you choose to forget it. Now it comes back to haunt you, and immediately a sinking feeling hits your stomach. An avalanche of thoughts rushes into your mind, bringing a very negative shadow of fears and doubts.

Now you feel terrible, your body starts to tense up, you can’t even think about the words of the song you were singing earlier, and you’re not even sure if the sun is still shining.

What happened? Nothing in your circumstances changed.

A small intermittent thought changed the whole day for you. How? When you remove that worry from your mind, you simply transfer it from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind. Along with the thought, the emotions you felt at that moment were stored in the same “file folder”. This folder in your mind was just waiting to pounce and haunt you at any moment to ruin your day, and that’s what it did.

Facing Our Fears.

I’m sure you are familiar with Job from the Bible. Job was the one who went through some severe trials and ended up with double what he had once it was all over. In the midst of his tribulations, he made an interesting statement: What I feared has come upon me.” (Job 3:25) Wow.

Unfortunately there is living proof of this truth within my own family, I had an uncle, my Father’s only brother whom I vaguely remember (he was 3 years old when I last saw him). His only fear in his life was getting sick with polio, which at the time was an epidemic. He died of polio at the age of 21.

So fear is a dangerous thing to allow to stay in our lives.

Molly Gordon describes fear as Fantasy expectations that seem real. Michael Pritchard cites fear as something “that little dark room where negatives are developed.”

Negative fantasies incubated in the dark room of our conscious and subconscious minds create fears.

So how in the world can we uproot these fears from our lives?

The first thing to do it is taking a few moments in a quiet place, with a clean sheet of paper and a pen/pencil. Write down all the things you fear. Write fast and write down everything that comes to mind, whether you think you’re afraid of it or not. When you type fast, it helps your mind not have a chance to “challenge” with the thought, “no, I’m not really afraid of that.”

Now read them one by one and face them. There are times when you can do something to avoid the “worst case scenario”, and if this is the case, do it! (If you read the Bible you will know that James tells us that faith without works is dead, in other words, real faith, or the law of attraction has to have ACTION to be complete), It will not work without ACTION either.

Situations that are out of your control will require faith to remove. However, there is SOMETHING you can do. You can make sure that your thoughts are free from fear.

Fear is an emotion that results from a series of fantasy thoughts that dramatize the negative outcome of a situation. You can deliberately conquer these thoughts with the power of your will.

This power of will (or decisions) is first applied to thought patterns. The decision to change thought patterns must be made BEFORE any high pressure incident occurs. This will ensure that we are not “jumped” by sudden thoughts that bring fear and doubt that change our emotions before we realize what has happened.

One of the best ways to achieve this mindset shift is to get into the habit of taking time each day to meditate on something positive. Read a chapter from the Bible, a devotional book, or a motivational book.

Think about what you have read.

Ask yourself: “How can I apply what I have read to my day to day?” “If something difficult happens today, how will I handle it?”

You’ll find that your day goes much better after some quiet time at the beginning, positive reflection, and even a little planning for the day.

Let’s get out of the world of fantasy expectations and start creating a positive reality.