Zone
Last week we were looking at how to make good choices in our lives and pick the positive side and learn through the negative aspects of life. Today we want to explore fear zones and how we can get stuck in these limiting patterns and not feel able to move out from behind the walls we have built up around us. Often, we have decided in our minds that this is a place of comfort and that we choose this small circle to live in, but this not often the case. It more for that fact that we fear what is outside of the walls we have built around us and have decided to not even try and move out of it. Not only is there nothing comfortable about hiding behind those barriers we have built around us but also the messages this sends to our minds are riddled with fear. The fear will be making us so anxious and we might not even know that this is the case, denial can be a defensive pattern in our minds and will be limiting our ability to see things in their true perspective. Moving out of our fear zones is never our first choice but taking the time to understand things will make this much clearer for you. If we stay as we are, hiding behind that invisible barriers we have put in place, this will have a very limiting effect on our whole lives in the process.
These fear zones can also be behind our anxiety and we just didn’t put the two together, the messages we are sending to our minds are to hide and this will be making our nervous system get set on red alert. This will mean that our underlying level of anxiety will have heightened and as long as we hide behind the wall, our inner mind and primaeval mind, just won’t be able to switch off from this red alert setting. Over time we won’t just be hiding behind the invisible wall we have built, it will often start shrinking, with the wall moving further in towards us, making this fear zone smaller and smaller. Here’s an example for you, if you have been struggling with driving issues and you have started to not feel as comfortable driving then you may have begun to limit what you do. Maybe you start saying I can’t do long journeys or drive on the motorway, then after a while, you might start to notice that bigger dual carriageways become a problem. Then maybe you start worrying about the speed of the other road users and only like dual carriageways with low-speed levels. As you continue to spiral away from being a confident driver, your barriers recede backwards and you find you can do less and less. Eventually, for some people, any level of driving has become an issue and whenever you think about expanding this out, you just feel the fear and struggle to push through this.
This can happen in any and every situation all we have to do is to start limiting what we do and over time our mind just does the rest. The reason your mind is doing this is not for the fact that it has to, but because of the messages, you are sending to your mind. Each time you avoid something or set limiters upon what you can do, your sending the message that this is a very scary thing and you should NOT be doing it. Our mind takes these messages super seriously as your mind can’t rationalise things like we can it just a computer and it listens to what is being imputed and outputs what it thinks it needs to do to keep you safe. The more messages of fear we send into our minds, the more messages of fear our mind sends back out to us. If you are struggling with something at the moment and feeling more fear than normal, then it good to take the time to reflect on the issues. If on reflection you see this very decreasing circle of fear and avoidance then this is what has happened, you have sent the messages of fear and created this fear zone. For many of us, the pandemic has created these ever-decreasing fear zone not by our own choice but by what we have had to do to stay safe. This can mean we are triggering more anxiety at the moment as you try and get parts of your life back to normal and start trying to push through the fear barrier that the pandemic has created for many of us. Your mind, because of this fear zone will be sending strong messages of fear and anxiety making it harder for you to get back to feeling more normal in how you are living your life. The best way is to not rush out, but to spiral back out by doing the easiest things you can think of first and as they start feeling more comfortable you move to the next things you have been struggling with. Steady steps are the best way forward and consistency is the key to this, little and often will send lots of mini safe messages to your mind. The pleasure with this is that your mind sees every step as a step forward and doesn’t look so much at how big it was, just that you are now doing it and no longer avoiding things. If you take one big step out and don’t feel comfortable and step straight back to the fear zone, then the message will be a negative one and this won’t help you to breakdown the fear zone barriers it will just make them thicker.
Sometimes it good to put pen to paper and make a bit of a plan of action and start to think about what seems the easier thing to challenge yourself to do and they could go under the green section, things then that maybe you might be able to do, but not quite yet, are orange and the ones with lots of fear are the red ones. As you work through the green ones you will start to notice that some of the orange ones are now becoming more doable and are moving into the green zone and also over time the red ones will move to orange then green. Seeing this in your plan will help your mind move forward more quickly as it will take on board all this progress in very positive ways. Take the time to challenge yourself as much as possible and the steadier steps you take the more messages of safety and security you will be sending to your inner mind.
Keep stepping forward ……………thanks for dropping by Sara x
