How to Overcome Fear

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is John Bosworth. I'm a licensed mental health counselor in St. Pete, Florida. I'd like to talk about how to overcome fear. It's kind of a loaded question because our - I'd like to like break it down in a couple areas. Our brain literally has been wired to feel fear. So a lot of times when people come to me and say, I want to reduce my fear. I say, well, do you really want to reduce your fear or do you want to reduce your anxiety? The difference is, fear is a natural kind of evolved response in the human brain to a real threat. So we're going to try to break it down so you can get a better idea of maybe how to help yourself. Fear would be let's say, you're walking across the street, okay? You're hanging out with a friend and you walk across the street or you're walking down a garden path and all of a sudden you see a long slithering object, and you automatically think snake, I better jump out of the way. That's fear, okay? Now when you look further and you realize you get closer to it that it's a rope. Okay? You see that it's a rope on the sidewalk. Your brain and your limbic system and your parasympathetic nervous system kick in and it reduces that fear. Think what most people mean by reducing or overcoming fear is how to overcome anxiety. Now anxiety is a different ball game. Anxiety might be, we'll use the same example. Walking down the street or down the sidewalk, you see a coiled up object and you think it's a snake or you thought it was a snake at first. Now you're on guard for everything that's similarly looks like a snake and then maybe you know, laying on the side of the road. You know, you're walking this way and you see it and you jump this way. But really what you're doing is your your mind now is tricking your brain into thinking that that is a snake when it's really not. So when you get all the information and you get the data and the proof, you realize that's just a rope and it's not a snake. So anxiety is more our mind doing a what I call a "what if." We're projecting ourselves in the future, what if that is a snake or what if that is going to harm you, okay? So there are some evolutionary components to that but we want to make sure that the anxiety response or the fear response doesn't interfere with you know, major life areas, work, relationships, things like that. So how to overcome that is to become aware of some of your "what if" thinking and some of your off a lies which is basically predicting that a catastrophe would happen if that was a snake on the sidewalk or that you might get bitten. So how to overcome fear or anxiety is usually a simple, simple manner of kind to tune it in, checking in with yourself, going upstairs so to speak and thinking about what you're thinking about. Okay? And with anxiety it's usually some form of future projection with a lot of awful-izing or catastrophizing attached to it. So if you'd become aware of that and challenge that, you can help yourself overcome a lot of anxiety or fear. My name is John Bosworth and we're talking about how to overcome fear."