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Do you have fears?
Studies show that of the things we fear/worry, 40% of those things will never happen. 30% regard things in the past that we can’t change. 12% pertains to criticism by others, which is mostly untrue. 10% is health-related, which gets worse with stress. Only 8% deals with real problems that we will face (i.e. 92% of fear/worry aren’t necessary).
The stats just shows how fear-driven we can be as human. Personally, I know how that feels. Sometime last year, in the wake of the panic, I discovered how easily shaken I could be by unplanned circumstances around me (i.e. how fear-ful I could be). For a while, I noticed how fear had robbed me of joy, peace, fulfillment and kept me from receiving God’s best. So, I had to stand up in defiance to wage ware against fear, to conquer it before it conquers me.
That put me on a quest to understand this topic of fear. So, I did ample research on the topic (lots of reading) and prayed about it, and I am very grateful to God abut my progress so far. Just to be clear, fear in itself isn’t good or bad it’s how we relate/react to it that matters. (Check out my IG video on ‘How do you respond to fear‘ . )
You see, fear is a killer of joy, hope , peace fulfillment and destiny as it paralyzes us from taking the right actions. (It’s for this reason that I keep reminding myself that – ‘I hate fear’ )
Why do we really get fear-ful ?
1. Wrong focus
What we focus on , we attract. And where attention/focus goes, energy flows. One of the main reason I came to understand that causes us to be fear-ful is that we focus more on the fear than on faith. We tend to be more afraid of failing that we don’t consider the success possibilities as well; and constantly focusing on failure fills us up with fear and paralyzes us.
The other wrong place to focus on is the things we can’t control. (I almost always got caught up in this one.) For me, I realized that I would get so fixated on specific outcomes that I desired and for that reason I’d freak out if things don’t pan out as expected. Definitely, this caused me to get fear-ful. (I’m regularly checking in on myself on this one 🙂 ).
We can’t control what happens around and to us (e.g. by how much will the COVID cases rise or fall? How will this person respond to this important message I am about to share? etc) – but we can control how we respond to it.
Focusing on the wrong things/places can get us fear-ful.
2. Untamed negative thoughts
There was a study that showed that of the thousands of thoughts we think each day, a whooping 84% of them are negative (yea, that’s no typo, 84%) . Shockingly, of those thoughts, 90% of them are repeated. In other words, we regularly have negative thoughts repeatedly hit us each day. In fact, this was termed Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs, for short). These ANTs manifest in the form of the ‘what if’ thoughts that attack us when we attempt to do something new.
For example, you’re about to enter an interview room and you get thoughts pop into your mind saying, ‘What if the interviewer doesn’t like me?’, ‘What if I don’t remember what I prepared to respond?’, ‘What if I am not the best candidate for this position?’ and that goes on and on…. (can you relate ? 🙂 )
When we yield to these ‘what if’ thoughts, we become paralyzed and, hence, get fear-ful. It’s for this reason, that I feel we absolutely should be aware of and controlling of the thoughts that pop into our minds.
3. Lack of surrender to and trust in a Higher power (for me, that’s God)
When we try to control things that are outside of our control and keep failing at it, we can get fear-ful. And so, when we don’t acknowledge, and surrender to a Higher power we can easily get panicked and feel helpless and that definitely can cause us to be fear-ful.
I had come across a thought-provoking quote that says, “The area of our lives that we feel the most fear is most likely the area we haven’t fully surrendered to God.” This hit me right in the gut the first time I stumbled on it because at that time I wasn’t fully surrendered to God. I tried doing a number of things independent of Him, and when things went south I’d enter this panic mode and be like “SOS!! Help God! Help!!!”
Not surrendering and just feeling that it’s all on us can cause us to be fear-ful.
And there’re obviously there are a number of other reasons why we would get fear-ful. What comes to mind for you? 🙂