How to Live Your Life in Fear

Sometimes it helps to understand what not to do in order to have a better idea of what is the right thing to do? This article gives you some hints and tips on how to live a life full of uncompromising fear. Although I'm not sure doing the opposite is actually going to change your life dramatically, it should eliminate a few of the reasons you feel so terribly neurotic. Proceed with caution!

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• lack of common sense

1. DRINK A LOT OF COFFEE: Okay, we'll start with the obvious. Ingesting large amounts of stimulants (like many of us do) will help to increase your sense of urgency prompting an equal desire to complete tasks as quickly as possible. The only problem is that Life does not stream forward like a high-speed internet connection. Things take time. Some things take a lot of time. If you try to complete tasks as fast as possible, you're going to make mistakes and you're going to get frustrated. Couple this with your body trying to cleanse itself of the toxins you're introducing into its system (excessive urination and diarrhea, heavy sweating, the jitters), ingesting stimulants such as caffeine is the single most effective step you can take to increase your anxiety level and sense of fear. This step could easily send you to the hospital.

2. INSIST ON PERFECTION: Due to centuries old cultural conditioning, doing things right the first and only time is comparable to Godliness and heaven. Good people do things right! Right? Again, not true at all. When you insist on perfection (and only perfection), you lose an important part of the growth process, that is: we learn more from our failures than our successes. In essence, you have to fail multiple times in multiple ways before you become skilled at what you are trying to do. Insisting on perfection ignores this vital process. Step 2 alone will completely destroy your self-esteem.

3. CREATE A LOT OF DEADLINES: When we make deadlines for our various projects, what we are basically saying is that the project must be completed by that date or else it is no longer a valid project. Why then are we working at something which isn't important enough to see all the way to the end even if it takes twice as long as first anticipated? Deadlines were instituted so that people getting paid money would complete the project efficiently. It was meant to eliminate wasted time and effort. But your project is different than that! You want to complete it because it's important to you as a person. Every single time you miss your deadline because your busy balancing your life, you tell yourself that it's not worth the effort or YOU'RE NOT WORTH THE EFFORT! Make a lot of deadlines and I can almost guarantee that you will never finish anything.

4. KEEP ABREAST OF THE NEWS: Read a lot of newspapers, watch the evening news, always tune in to the television tabloids, and keep on the look out for fresh gossip. More than likely, you are not in the information business, that is, you don't need all of this information in order to earn a paycheck. If you keep listening to news and information you'll never be able to use, you will grow frustrated. Ingest information you can apply. Knowing something without implementing it in some way indicates your unwillingness to truly understand.

5. STAY HOME: Cabin fever is a very real syndrome that helps to create more neurotic inclinations than is admitted. What happens is that boredom with your surroundings sets in. You're now in danger of hurting yourself in order to stay distracted. Excessive drinking, illicit thoughts, and generalized mental stress are the norm. Get out the house and experience something new! This helps to refresh your mental chatter and make you more likely to include yourself in healthy socialization. Remember, neurotic people are typically pathological and anti-social.