This is Your Brain on Fear!

Been awhile, I must say, since a blog has bubbled out of me, but it’s time!  Haha

Have you ever seen the bumper stickers that say, “No Fear?”  Great advice for living, but saying it and living it are two totally different animals.  Fear is perhaps the most detrimental thing that can happen to a human being and in order to succeed in life you have to learn how to overcome it.  I’ll say it again, you have to learn how to overcome it!  If you don’t learn how to overcome it, your life will be a fraction of what it was meant to be.  You will never enjoy the peace God envisioned for you to have in your mind.  You will unknowingly bring hardship and difficulty upon yourself.  You won’t say what you oughta’ say or do what you oughta’ do.  (Yes oughta’ is now a word!)  You will always settle for less than you deserve and you will be a slave to what might happen next and what might go wrong later!  The hardship involved with being a slave is that slaves are subjected to forced labor and don’t have any say about what happens next!  Slaves don’t decide anything.  Slaves do what the master says and if they don’t they get whipped and forced into submission.  If you have fear you have a master that decides for you what your life will be like.   So, it seems only reasonable that we should want to learn how to overcome fear; not deny it exists, ignore it or puff up and vow to fight it, but actually overcome it.

Part of my job involves teaching a course on Mandt.  Mandt is actually the name of the gentleman that developed the course.  Mandt training is all about learning to develop strong relationships that help us in de-escalating situations that lead to aggressive behavior in the customers we serve.  Part of the material I go over talks about fear.  Fear is described as a normal human emotion.  Further it is described as something that was built into humans to help them defend themselves.  I always struggle with that part of the presentation because there is nothing normal about fear.  When I am afraid I don’t think clearly.  I choose expedient options not necessarily the right options.  Caution is helpful, fear is not!  I am cautious about bears because they have the potential to kill me.  But if I let my mind get overcome with fear during my dreaded bear encounter, then chances are I’m going to lose.  So, just how exactly can I learn to overcome fear?

To understand fear you have to understand the basic spiritual competition that all people are in that live in the world.  In the beginning, back in the days of Adam and Eve, originally there was no such thing as fear.  Fear came after the fall of man when man decided by his own free-will to believe something contrary to what God said.  In essence, man chose to believe his five senses reasoning over what God said was reality.  Whenever you and I choose to believe our five senses logic over the logic of God’s Word, fear is a-comin!  The adversary, that dark opposer of all that is good, uses man’s logic against him in order to produce fear.  He can do this because his logic is smarter than man’s logic.  So, he works out circumstances and situations that seem to contradict what God says and those circumstances and situations are damn convincing!  And since we are pretty smart folks, we start to believe something that isn’t true and if we persist in that thinking, bring into our reality the thing we were so dang afraid of!  Then we say, see I knew it!  (As if it was true all along)   That being said, fear isn’t always so obvious.  Most fear is very, very subtle.  People are afraid of not succeeding and will unknowingly sabotage their own efforts.  They may even be presented with an opportunity that would lead them to success, but they turn it down due to the 35 reasons they came up with (and 34 were based on fear).  People are afraid of everything.  Oh there’s no criticism from me, however.  I personally have been the scariest man on earth!  Instead of criticism I have empathy for people.  Empathy because it is so sad what happens to people when fear gets involved and if you are over two years old, fear has gotten involved.

So, fear is a present day reality that we all have to deal with and had better learn to overcome!  So how are you supposed to overcome fear when fear is such a formidable, frightful feeling?  The key word here is feeling.  Newsflash!  Our feelings have nothing to do with whether or not something is true.  Oh our feelings can function as a barometer to clue us into something like hmmm maybe I shouldn’t go there….but at the end of the day (favorite cliché included on purpose) feelings are no guarantee for truth.  In fact, your feelings are what bring that fear to life!  You consider some dreadful possibility, your heart speeds up, you piece together the facts and they all add up to one thing~it’s true!!!  Hidden in that last sentence was another clue.  You considered it.  You’re smart, I’m smart, we consider!  Ahh but that is precisely where we go wrong.  Considering a negative or a fear is like taking a little nibble on the bait.  It looks so inviting.  It is hard to resist (i.e. thinking about it). But that is exactly what you HAVE to do.  Back in the beginning, the fall of man started with a tiny consideration of an idea that was not what God had said.   But the defeat didn’t come there, it began there.  The consideration is the bait.  Don’t take it!  Don’t entertain it!  Don’t try to reason it out!  Don’t!  Instead of taking the bait (and you know this already if you have ever tried to reason with fear) immediately replace that idea with something true that God said.  If your health is being threatened, what does God say about your health?  If your finances are being threatened, what does God say about your finances?  Your happiness, your future, your needs?  What does God say about those things?  That is the key my friends! Refuse the lies by finding the promises.  Oh I know what you might be thinking.  Are you saying I should just ignore life?  Put my head in the sand?  Pretend like bad things don’t exist?  No, no and no!  Don’t ignore life, ignore fear which is NOT life!  Put your head up and put your feet in the sand by finally relaxing.  Don’t pretend anything because you know bad things exist; just decide they don’t exist for you!

Now that you are clear about your responsibility to refuse to consider those fears, is replacing them by God’s promises enough?  Believing is a verb and a verb connotes action.  When you believe, you act.  Act on what God said!  If God promised to take care of you, walk out like someone who is taken care of.  Do your life.  Have your fun.  Get up out of that “worry” chair and live!

Unscramble your eggs man!  LOL  Say what I always say!  If you “got me” why you spending so much time trying to convince me that it’s true?  No-one has to put up with fear and it’s certainly not God’s will.  Don’t go by your feelings.  Don’t take the time to consider it, no matter how tempting it is.  Act on the promises of God and you learn something new.  Peaccccccccccce…

This is Your Brain on Peace!