UNDERSTANDING FEAR
AND THROUGH THAT, BEING ABLE TO MANAGE AND CURE IT
To fully understand this, one needs to get rid of a number of false beliefs about how things work. I'd recommend you digest these as a base:
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STRICTLY MECHANICAL
Fear is strictly a mechanical process that engages our body's resources to protect against a threat. (This ability would, logically, tend to increase over time with evolution, since those people with a more effective mechanism would survive more to pass on their genes! And those who react more quickly, without thinking or pondering, got eaten a lot less often, so our "non-thinking" responses are shortcuts that worked in Caveman days, so it became imbedded in our genes - though we think, somehow, that we should above that "weakness". But it is simply a mechanical thing!)
The fear process is programmed (wired) into us to react to a perceived danger. Fear (the emotion) itself is always "real", as it is felt in the real world, in the body. It is an "emotion", a chemical event that is felt by the body - but we make it into something bigger than the mere mechanics of it.
However, the perception and then the interpretation of what a threat is are often erroneous (and not "real", not matching reality).
Fear, then, instigates and is part of the fight/flight/freeze response that has helped us survive very well as humans.
However, it is imperative, for our emotional well-being, that we eliminate the erroneous beliefs so that we do not trigger the fight/flight response unnecessarily. We have so many erroneous beliefs that we are constantly triggering the response - and then we hype up the alarm system, which reacts even more to even marginal stimuli.
THERE ARE TRADE-OFFS
In caveman days it was relatively clear what danger was. It was strictly about the threat of physical harm (which includes pain as a signal of possible harm). Although pain is a signal, it is also something we fear ahead of time, as we tend to anticipate what the future feelings will be and then actually imagine them, so that we end up feeling emotional pain even when there is no actual physical pain. We bring it into "the now", to our great emotional harm.
Nowadays, we "make up" threats and then we anticipate them happening, in our imagination, and, then, we experience fear even though nothing actually happened.
WE ADDED TO THE DESIGN
If we don't activate our higher brain intentionally, we will be left with false threats and lots of resulting unnecessary pain/discomfort!
Fear (and its related cousins, anxiety and worry) is an emotion that will disappear (dissipate) within 90 seconds. However, we will experience it as continuous if we keep perceiving a threat, as that keeps on activating the fear emotion. We do not need to do this, in most cases, so we need to learn to reinterpret the situation more accurately and appropriately. (Watch the brief video Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, 2:56.)
Note that such a powerful mechanism is virtually impossible to overcome - meaning we cannot get enough force on the other side of the struggle to overpower the great force generated by fear. (And, no, willpower is not nearly powerful enough - you will lose often, even if you think you "shouldn't", but notice how you do lose often! And then we make ourselves wrong for not being able to do the largely impossible.)
If we can't overcome it, then we must seek an alternative way to "cure" the problem.
The alternative is to stop the fear from occurring by stopping the stimulus.
Other than that there is no magic way I've ever found in my reading of 1,000's of books.
THE PROCESS
The process is always:
Something occurs --> seen, believed to be a threat --> fear
Something occurs --> seen as not being a threat --> no fear
The first process, unfortunately, besides misperception and misbelief about a threat, can also involve a vague belief that allows one to also "mis-size" the threat - and that results in a little, teeny minor "perceived" danger being given the same weight as something really big and important. We become non-discriminative, not using our thinking capability, and thus we inflict lots of extra pain upon ourselves, for no legitimate benefit.
What occurs (the happening) cannot cause fear by itself directly. Since it doesn't cause the fear, the solution must lie in altering the belief so that it reflects truth and reality. Operating in irreality, at the extremes, is insanity; operating often in irreality is unsanity; seldom operating in irreality is good sanity; really thinking it out and eliminating the irreality beliefs is high sanity. We are all happier when we are operating in high sanity. (See Going From Some Unsanity To High Sanity, Into A Whole New World Of Happiness And "Being".)
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The solution to "ongoing problems" and feeling bad as a result of them lies ALWAYS in seeing it all through "reality" lenses. Correspondingly, all ongoing problems are a result of our believing in something that is irreality. Line your beliefs up with reality and all fear, beyond a brief mechanical reaction to protect ourselves again physical harm, disappears.
BuddhaKahuna
See also the quotes in the sidebar.
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If fear is a problem for a person, the highest form of cure for it is always curing the first part of the causal chain - for, then, the whole rest of the process is not even started and simply does not happen. That is called "curing the cause". (See the relevant comments in Cause And Effect.)
However, we can do some "curing of the symptoms" that will make us feel better also.
CURE THE CAUSE
But it is always better to cure the cause: the erroneous thinking (beliefs). For then, we do not have to experience the symptoms and do not have to spend the time and effort and emotional energy to deal with the symptoms.
We actually lengthen the causal chain and add more misery to it, because we do not follow FDR's advice. We exacerbate the situation by adding "ain't it awful" and "this shouldn't be" and "I'm afraid of fear", etc. and etc. - all from misbeliefs and the lack of understanding that they are based on. ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," referring to the economic depression. In other words, just handle the reality and don't add alot of bullbleep to it!)
The simple chain of an animal:
Lion after us --> fear --> run like hell, period, until safe --> stop fearing, calmly eat grass
The complexified chain of the human:
x happens --> believe it's real threat --> fear --> add a --> add b --> add c...
We "escalate" and add to the actual situation and extend, adding to, the need to fight or flee.
We add what is not actually real. We make it up and we pile it on. Pretty soon we are fearing fear - and then making it up that fearing fear is another threat to fear. Then we further engage our imagination conjuring up images that "seem real" but aren't. Then we feel more fear or anxiety or worry...
But all of that is just "made up", simply out of our adding beliefs into the chain, beliefs that are not based on reality - and the result is that we make ourselves more miserable. (And we also fail to instigate the "recovery" stage to burn off the bad chemicals, we just keep on experiencing all the related crappola and accumulating the toxins!)
SEE, REALIZE, UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE MAKING IT UP
In the philosophical disciplines, they often handle this by having the person see that he/she is making it up and teaching them to see that the reality is, in the physical world, that nothing has actually happened (the feared damage didn't happen out there in the real world). (However, an emotion, once instigated, itself can cause damage to the body, whether the threat is real or not!) I repeat: In reality, nothing actually happened!!!
We set up a whole system to protect ourselves, of course, but we want to have it serve us rather than crush us or hurt us. Our caregivers, our society, and ourselves (mostly as a child) have overdone it, for a naturally understandable reason: to make damned sure that we are safe.
But now it is time to reexamine the beliefs that hold up the system - and to correct them to match reality.
ELIMINATE A VAST NUMBER OF FEARS
The undifferentiated, hyped alarm system will strike fear in us for every 100 of 4 actual threats.
An indication of our negative bias or cautiousness bias and/or an indication of how often we are wrong is included in these popular quote: "Economists have predicted 10 of the last 4 recessions." It is similar for what we do with threat perception.
The solution is to fine tune our beliefs, since they are the cause of the alarms being set off. By doing that, we "disappear" many of the false beliefs and thusly the fears!
This is a part of the basis for my seemingly ridiculous claim that we can eliminate 95+% of our fears (and unhappiness).
More "fake fears" can be eliminated via changing our ability to predict much better.
INCREASING THE ABILITY TO PREDICT ACCURATELY!
Another group of fears can be reduced or eliminated by upgrading our ability to predict what will, or won't, happen.
Our ability to predict is notoriously inaccurate. We predict threats or problems that don't actually occur, ever, so we set off the alarms unnecessarily.
Getting in touch with reality, and learning, will help provide a more sound basis for thinking and predicting - and thereby to not trigger the experience of fear or anxiety.
ELIMINATING FALSE DEPENDENCY AND THE NEED FOR APPROVAL
Another source of fear is "false dependency".
If we do not see that we can handle life ourselves on our own, we will tend to see ourselves as being dependent. This causes us to tend to revert to beliefs and behaviors that are those of a child (or of one who perpetuates the idea of still being a child - which often has the adult playing "victim"). [One cannot be happy in life if one holds oneself as a victim.]
A child, in his mind at least, MUST have approval, he believes, or, if he is not loved, he will perish since he is dependent on the big people to feed him/her.
We know a person is living in this fiction simply by observing the evidence: he lets his life be run by seeking approval and avoiding disapproval. Essentially, the person loses his life, living into the agenda set by others, a victim of their needs and demands and not a steward of one's own life.
By learning what reality is and then operating within it, one will no longer live in the fear of having others see his/her mistakes or failures or shortcomings. He will then give up perfectionism, pleasing, and all the anxiety that goes with those.
The fears of what the disapproval of others could "do to" him only exists in his mind.
Letting go of the false dependency will cause a whole set of "derived" fears to disappear, thereby smashingly reducing a great number of the fears that the person is living in.
A VAGUE SENSE OF "SOMETHING" IN THE SHADOWS
And then we also live our lives as if there were all these ghosts of fear around us, but there are none, other than in our imagination. We cower, as a child does about the imagined monster in the closet.
INCREASING OUR ABILITY TO BE EFFECTIVE
Also, we fear not getting the results we want. (Plus we exaggerate the consequences and underestimate our ability to cope!)
Of course, if we increase our ability to produce that which we want in our lives, we will cut down on undesired results - and thus not live in fear of so many bad things happening. If we increase that ability, we increase our confidence and trust in ourselves - and thus we move further along the road to fearlessness (freedom from faux fears).
BEING FEARLESS - THE POSSIBILITY
I am, at this point in my life, virtually fearless, not stupidly so, but living in reality. Of course, as even the Dalai Lama acknowledges, we will all have some 'garbage' thoughts being delivered by our undiscriminating primitive brain - but those can be immediately recognized as not being the truth - and then it will be as if they never occurred, for they never develop into a chain of unhealthy thoughts. (See The Skill Of Fearlessness - you might find it beneficial to click through from that page to my base statements of fearlessness and perhaps even My Proclamation.)
IS THIS ALL ACHIEVABLE?
Absolutely! Most certainly!
Since we constructed (put together all these bits of data, piece by piece) these misbeliefs in the first place, we can systematically replace each of them, as there is no inherent lack of ability in any human. [There are, in truth, those who have had something go wrong with their basic systems, so they cannot execute these same strategies, and need others to help them construct what works for them. But you are not one of them if you are reading this.]
The only question is whether you will engage fully in the process.
What does it take?
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Fear is the opposite of happiness. Inappropriate stress is distress. Yet we choose to do that which keeps us in fear, anxiety, and stress, totally wasting a huge portion of our lives - and making life so much less than it can be!!!!!!
