Fear and anxiety go hand in hand, if you want to learn more about anxiety specifically, check out my post from last week. A well-known reaction to fear stimuli is to fight, flee, or freeze. It is hard to know how we will react until presented with a situation. Fear can be in response to real or imagined triggers. Some of our fears are ingrained in us for survival such as a fear of heights or a fear of snakes. Below are a few dreadful ideas shared by many.

Common Fears:

• Fear of death – Most people enjoy being alive, even if life is being particularly cruel. Fears of people, places, and things develop either internally or through external experiences. Some test the boundaries of their fear by engaging in dangerous activities that could be fatal such as jumping out of airplanes or race car driving.
• Fear of abandonment – Humans have an internal draw to be part of a community and losing that can be devastating. Extreme fears of abandonment stem from the development of insecure attachments with parents during key developmental stages as children. This can present as character defects as adults leading people to become clingy or desperate to hold onto a relationship no matter what.
• Fear of failure – This is a paralyzing fear that many succumb to and it prevents people from reaching their full potential. I will use entrepreneurs as an example, so many aspire to own their own business to free themselves from being overworked and underpaid by larger corporations. The idea of not knowing where the next paycheck will come from, how rent will be paid, or how food will get on the table can be overwhelming to some people, and as a result they do not take the risk of venturing out on their own.

A major danger of avoiding fear is becoming trapped. Whether it is inside struggles or outside stressors, if we do not face our fears, they can have too much power over us. My aunt describes fear well, she says everyone has monsters under their bed and we can choose to hide under the covers in fear or rip them out from under the bed and arrange them how we want.

Courage is being afraid and doing taking the risk anyway. We must accept mistakes are okay and give ourselves permission to fail, risk being unliked, and remember we could die tomorrow from an anvil falling from the sky.

What will you have the courage to do today?