Find Yourself and Safety: Quick overview of FEAR-less Emotion Management followed by strategies of self-awareness and becoming conscious of your immediate physical safety.
Find Yourself and Your Safety (Step 1 – Week 1)
The first step in FEAR-less Emotion Management is to recognize whether your body is activated into a fear state (commonly called Fight, Flight, or Freeze) and at the same time notice if you are in immediate physical danger. It is common for many people to go hours, days, or even months and not realize they are activated into a fear state even though they are not in immediate physical danger. Chronic activation of the body’s fear response is painful and contributes to the development of anxiety, depression, suicide ideation, and other medical disorders. When you begin to notice if your body is activated in a fear response and notice you are physically safe in the moment; these two behaviors activate your brain’s frontal lobes where the conscious YOU is located. This is important because when your body is in a fear state, resources like blood and oxygen, that allow you to think more clearly, are shunted away from your frontal lobes to your large muscle groups. This makes sense because when you are in immediate physical danger you don’t need to be smart; you need to be strong, you need to be fast, or you need to be invisible. As blood is shunted away from your frontal lobes, your behavior becomes increasingly based on self-preservation rather than on your values. This is the reason many of us violate our own values when we’re afraid (because we are quite literally “losing our mind”). When the fear response is repeatedly happening when you are in fact physically safe then you are experiencing anxiety and/or depression. When you notice your body is in a fear state and notice you are safe, blood can begin to return to your frontal lobes and this helps YOU return to yourself: this decreases anxiety and depression.
Write your own plan to practice Find Yourself and Safety for the next week:
“If I _________________________________________________________________,
(Common behavior like eat, read, use my phone, etc)
then I will notice __________________________________________________________________________________________________
(sensation that indicates a fear response; like clenched jaw or knots in the stomach)
and look around for 10 seconds and notice that I am safe.”*
(Slowly and deliberately repeat this plan to yourself several times each morning for the next week.)
* Notice this is written in an ‘If-then’ format, this is purposeful, to know why see Peter Gollwitzer, Ph.D., http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/