All of us have fears
Your fears will only hold you back from what you’re truly capable of.
We all have fears embedded into our conscience. These fears often arise from bad past experiences, regrets or failures. Being fearful of things does not make you a coward, nor is it a statement on your capabilities. Fear is just a tendency that proves quite unavoidable, often masking itself as caution towards future trauma or suffering.
First and foremost, I’d like to admit, I am fearful of many things. These fears, whether rational or irrational, play a huge role in my actions, my behaviour and my choices. I say this, to make it clear that fears are not abnormal in any way, and neither are they something to be ashamed of.
The objective of this article is to make it blatantly clear that fears, while being quite a nuisance, can be owned up to as well as overcome. Ironically so, the first step toward overcoming any fear, is acknowledging you have it. The less energy you invest in hiding your fears, the more you will have to deal with them effectively.
All of us have been cowards before, and will be in the future as well. Here, it is noteworthy that cowardice, is by no means an ‘umbrella term’. It can merely be used in situations, but cannot be used to describe people. After all, it takes a whole lot of courage to get out of bed everyday, even if that’s all you manage to accomplish.
Fear and discomfort
Now, here I’d like to digress a little from the ongoing evaluation of cowardice and address another related topic. It is very rarely that one differentiates between discomfort and fears. While discomfort can be a result of short term feelings such as laziness, anxiety, or tiredness, fear is an overall larger concept. On the contrary, fear is a long term feeling. It does not just arise from situational reactions, but it is somewhat engraved into our minds. We derive fears from situations that cause really high discomfort and immediately condition ourselves into being avoidant of those situations in the future.
Coming back to the getting out of bed scenario, that can be categorised as discomfort and not fear. As I mentioned earlier, the more discomfort we associate with a situation, the more avoidant we become of it. And even though it starts out as mere discomfort intolerance, this habit of avoiding a particular anticipated negative feeling accumulates into a long term fear. Keeping in mind the example from earlier;
Getting out of bed every morning does cause inevitable discomfort. We’ve all been there right?
But say one day you decide to let yourself go and stay in bed, to avoid this discomfort. Of course this will induce a good reaction, giving you comfort. Now one day won’t be detrimental. But if you do start seeking this comfort on a regular basis, this small avoidance will grow to pester you. Soon you’ll make a habit out of it, and next thing you know you’ll be so scared of returning to your schedule, or your morning routine that you’ll develop a fear of getting out of bed every morning.
While some may consider this an exaggeration, I’m being awfully serious. Time has a habit of turning things into something you never meant for it to be if you fail to get a grasp on it. Maybe not 2 days, maybe not even a week but I assure you a month into developing this avoidance, the fear will start accumulating making it harder to over come.
Conclusion
Frankly, I think fears are really hard to overcome. The determination, willpower and courage require is exponential compared to the process of facing situations that entail discomfort. Instead it’s more effective if you practice basic discomfort tolerance in order to save you some menacing fears.
Facing your fears is really important, but you cannot take apart a fear that easily. A wall is harder to break than a brick, thus if you don’t let discomfort avoidance accumulate, you’ll build up less walls of fear.
Like I said, the smallest things require courage. Getting out of bed requires courage, going to school requires courage, socialising requires courage, but after all fear and avoidance are just mere reactions to discomfort. Courage is a decision, one that you make consciously and consistently to stop your fears from holding you back from what you’re capable of.
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