Calm Your Fear Reactions

If you don't make it your business to overcome fear, you'd better believe it'll try to overcome you. Fear in this article is defined as the emotional response to danger, no matter whether it's perceived or real, and the subsequent biological, or physical responses that harm your well-being and reinforce general emotional unhappiness. What underscores fear in all its permutations is the feeling that you won't be all right. You can lessen these feelings by harnessing your biological reactions and trying to minimize them, or even retraining them.

Steps

Taking Quick Action

1. Practice calm biology. When your body senses stress, it responds with a “fight or flight” stress response. To short-circuit fear and turn off this stress response, you'll need to train your brain to send chemicals to counteract them. Otherwise, fear and its hormones will keep you feeling crazed. In contrast, with a calm biology it's easier to find courage. Many of the following techniques are aimed at providing a method by which you can quieten your system by encouraging the endorphins to take over from the cortisol and other fear-induced chemicals, so as to calm your usual reactions to fear.
2. Focus on your breathing. Breathing properly calms the sympathetic nervous system, or your "fight-flight" response. Perceived threats don't come from rabidly hungry beasts for most people anymore; they come in the form of deadlines, angry bosses, unsettled coworkers, and belligerent online users. This can mean that we don't burn off the flight-fight response, instead allowing the stress chemicals and hormones like cortisol to become elevated and swim around our body unabated. And the breathing becomes stressed too: short, sharp, stabs of breathing over which you have little focus. Signs that you need to turn your focus to better breathing include a tight neck, bunched-up shoulders, shallow breathing, a tight chest, and a tension headache.
   • By starting to breathe slowly, you will signal your brain to relax, as you slow down the release of adrenalin and cortisol, and increase the release of endorphins. You will also fully oxygenate your brain and body, allowing your heartbeat to slow and your blood pressure to stabilize.
   • Read Breathe Deeply, Meditate on Breath, and Breathe Like a Yoga Master for more details.
   • Read Do Mindful Meditation for details on how to practice mindfulness meditation, which has been shown in studies to shut down and even reprogram your body’s stress responses.
3. Do something physical and positive that has tangible results. Clean your room. Run down to the store on an errand. Try yoga, stretching, or other exercises. Letting your body do something that uses the "fight or flight" adrenaline energy will reduce the amount of toxins building up in your muscles and helps burn out the immediate emotional reaction. A sense of satisfaction from accomplishing something physical like chopping firewood or scrubbing the bathroom can raise endorphins and your confidence in general.
   • Social fears don't usually have an effective physical response the way natural disasters and physical threats do. That's what your body's prepared for, though. So literally running around, picking up things, moving them around and doing something tangible uses the adrenaline and gives your body the satisfaction that you've dealt with the threat - you're still breathing. A threat to your status or long term relationships is something best handled in a calm frame of mind. This is good for cooling off from emotional fights too.
   • If you have a habitual response to situations that involve fear for you, your body will remember this and repeat it each time a similar fearful (for you) situation arises. For example, your regular response to someone yelling at you or informing you unkindly that you're wrong and responsible for damage might be to curl up under the blankets and want to hide yourself away on the emotional side, while on the physical side, maybe your mind goes blank, your heart rate starts to increase, you sweat, and feel your body turn tense, etc. All of these biological responses seize your mind and try to take control of the situation, making it much harder for you to think straight. They are instinct responses to physical threats, not effective ways to handle social and emotional threats. If this becomes a standard response for you whenever anything goes wrong, however mild or major, you will probably find yourself unable to break the fear response cycle without knowing some specific techniques to work around it.
4. Look to your diet. Dietary choices can provoke and increase a sense of anxiety and worry if you're lacking in healthy nutrients, have blood sugar swings, and you're fueling up on unhealthy foods most of the time. Caffeine and sugar are culprits in fueling your flight or fight responses. Decreasing anxiety through food can be achieved by increasing your intake of complex carbohydrates, eating smaller, more frequent meals, drinking plenty of water, and limiting the intake of caffeine and alcohol. Be careful to avoid food sensitivities as these can heighten your sense of anxiety and fear if you have a reaction to them.
   • Increase your intake of foods that are high in tryptophan. Tryptophan helps boost your brain's calm mood and relaxes you. Try such foods as bananas, soy, oats, milk, cheese, poultry, nuts, peanut butter and sesame seeds.
   • There’s a difference between choosing healthy foods to help quell stress responses and “stress eating”. If you notice that you’re turning to “comfort foods” to relieve stress, be mindful. Comfort eating should not become (or remain) a habit and the long-term goal must be to eat a healthy diet, ensuring that your nutrients are balanced and moving your desire to comfort eat into yoga, meditation, breathing, and other more constructive outlets.
   • Blood sugar swings will feed fear because you lack strength and energy as a result of them, causing you to feel physically weaker. As your blood sugar soars, you feel exuberant but as it crashes, your sense of fear will return and leave you feeling irritable, unresolved, and worried.
5. Use Progressive Muscle Relaxation. When you feel fear, your body responds by tightening your muscles to prepare you to run away. This tension can cause muscle aches, fatigue, and headaches. PMR helps relieve this muscle tension. The technique suggested here can be used in a quiet spot in the office, at home, in the lunchroom, in a park, or anywhere that you can escape to when you feel the fear mounting:
   • In a comfortable position, sitting or lying down, take a few deep breaths while letting your body go as limp as possible.
   • When you're ready, begin by tightening the muscles in your toes... hold to a count of ten... then relax.
   • Enjoy the relief of tension melting.
   • Do the same by flexing your foot muscles, and move slowly through your entire body: calves, legs, stomach, back, neck, jaw, face, contracting and releasing each area.
6. Have a relaxing bath or shower. Immerse yourself in hot water to relax muscular tension as soon as possible, even if this means doing it the moment you step back through the door into your home.
   • Some studies have shown that physical warmth is very soothing for many people and can help relieve stress.

Making Lifestyle Choices

1. Avoid the fear generators. People who push your buttons and put you into fight and flight mode regularly should be avoided until you learn stronger coping mechanisms. For some people, this may mean avoiding them long-term. All the same, it may be unrealistic to avoid all fear generators, especially if they're your boss or a family member, so practice very non-committal responses when these people begin to create fear situations and quickly and politely remove yourself from their sphere of influence. Don't explain yourself, just simply make excuses to get going.
   • Balance the fear generators with emotional nurturers. For every fear generator, find an emotionally regenerative and calming person you know that you can turn to and unwind around. People who are good listeners, healers, carers, and good humored are generally excellent antidotes to the nastier, darker personalities out there. This isn't a time for trying to find the good side to the person who has generated your fear; deal first with calming down and building yourself up again.
   • Use your eyes and not your heart. Look at people to judge their real intentions and behavior. By learning to better translate body language, you will learn that much of what people say is counteracted by their body, giving you far greater insight into their real motives and even their own fears.
   • Studies have shown that emotion is contagious. How the people you spend time with feel rubs off on you. Fortunately, this works both ways; while spending time with people who are anxious and fearful can provoke your own fear responses, spending time with people who are calm and balanced can foster those feelings in you, too.
2. Ration the sources of fear. When terrible things happen, there isn't a reason to force yourself to participate. Watching endless repeats of violent newscasts or disasters will increase your fear greatly and offer nothing in return than awful images and worries. Realize that doing this doesn't help the victims of such crises and it makes you feel more helpless.
   • If a disaster does set you off, get proactive and plan how you'd be prepared for a disaster if it happened, instead of worrying your socks off.
3. Use the 4 A’s. The four A’s are Avoid, Alter, Adapt, Accept. Different stressors require different responses. Using these techniques, depending on the situation, can really help you fight your fear response.
   • For example, if traffic increases your fear levels because you're worried about time, accidents, and noise, you can choose to Alter or Avoid this source of stress. Find an alternate route to drive to work that decreases your chances of being involved in traffic jams. Read Cope With Rush Hour for more details. Or, see if you can take public transportation or carpool to work instead, and avoid that stress altogether.
   • If conflict provokes your fear response, you can Alter how you handle it or Adapt to have different expectations.Learn to Develop Strategies for Reducing Hostility by managing it. Instead of avoiding it, find constructive ways to cope and to assert yourself around others. Always remember that you don't have to provide explanations for excusing yourself or for standing up for yourself. You do not have to tolerate abusive people or situations.
   • Some sources of stress you may just need to Accept. For example, you can’t control how other people react to stress. If a person in your workplace gets all flustered over missing a big deadline and spreads that stress around your office, you can try to soothe her, but you can’t control whether she changes her behavior. You can look at this situation as an opportunity for you to grow as a person, instead.
4. Take calming mini-breaks. If you're highly sensitive and tend to get overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and activity around you, until it builds up into a fearful crescendo, make an effort to take regular breaks to restore a sense of inner calm. Sit outside for a bit, go for a walk, do a short meditation, etc. In this way, hopefully you will alleviate the build-up of fear that can be triggered through any event during the day that upsets you.

Tips

• Another thing that will help is to stop taking yourself so seriously. Think about the people you know who always take themselves seriously; do they seem happy and do they react well when placed in a situation where fear is a normal response? Generally the answer is no.
• These practical changes, which allow you to take control of your body, can be tremendously effective in restoring calm. You don’t have to be passive while battered by fear. The victim mentality takes many forms. It requires courage to assume control, to say, “I’m going to be responsible for my biological self-care.” Educating your body how to respond makes you emotionally free.
• Journal what happened. It's a lot easier to identify the major stresses in your life by what events are constantly repeated in your journal than by something that happens only once. If you're stressed by a constantly critical family member and a friend unintentionally says something that stresses you, you may be cutting off the wrong relationship to drop the friend. Wait till you're calm to decide what to do for the long term, as in, who to distance yourself from.

Warnings

• If any of these techniques for relaxation give negative results, such as despair or a flare of chronic pain, don't use them. Chronic pain diseases can make some relaxation techniques impractical.
• When someone is rude to you, the best answer is to relax, not to enter fight and flight mode. Remember, it's just one person's opinion of you; think so what, and get on with your life knowing that you're doing your best and making good choices. You're also more likely to think of a witty or effective response when you're calm.
• If you are in physical danger, run or fight. Don't stop to work out the abuser's motives or worry about whether it was your fault. Get away and get help. Counseling can help you overcome the aftereffects of abuse, which include extreme reactions to social threats like yelling, criticism, insults and habits that lead you to engage with other abusive people.

Related Articles

• Overcome Fear
• Relax Using the Feather Method
• Overcome Your Fears Through Visualization
• Build Confidence by Facing Your Fears
• Face Your Fears
• Transform Negativity With Spiritual Light

Sources and Citations

See also

• Overcome FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
• Overcome Fear of Failure
• Get Over Rejection
• Stop Worrying and Start Living
• Be Laid Back
• Handle Changes in Your Life
• Face Your Fears
• Overcome the Fear of Death
• Stop Fearing Rejection
• Overcome the Sunday Night Blues

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