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Where Does Stress Come From
and Why Does It Even Exist?
Part II
by Robert Turner
Fear and Limitations
Key Insights from Part I
- Your stress arises from ongoing fears and limiting beliefs
- Most of your fears are irrational as they are fear of things that cannot physically harm you
- Fear is an emotion. Our emotions are triggered by our thoughts and our thoughts are triggered by our beliefs. Since you can amend or choose your beliefs, ultimately, you can choose whether or not to feel fear or stress. For this to be apparent may require some work on your limiting beliefs
- You can overcome fears and limiting beliefs with the right strategies
- Ultimately, stress is a choice. It can take a bit of work to learn to make a different choice but it is possible.
Everything you want is on the other side of your fear.
If your beliefs about the world are fearful, then your emotional reactions will lead to stress. In this case, you need to examine your beliefs.
Your beliefs trigger your thoughts and your thoughts trigger your emotions. Your imagination follows your beliefs.
As you think so you feel, not the other way around.
Fear and Loss
There are many types of fear however all fear boils down to the fear of loss. If you have nothing to lose, then it is relatively easy to move through fear. If you perceive that you have something to lose, then you will be more limited by fear. If you perceive you have something to lose, you might not act on an inspired idea, on an idea that is aligned with where you’d like your life to go.
If you fear that your desires will not be achieved without a specific action, then you will fear not taking that action. So much of the fear you experience is felt either when acting or when choosing not to act. There is the fear of doing something and the fear of not doing it, a kind of FOMO. The fear of not acting is felt when you are inspired to do something, but the fear of loss is too great so you don’t act.
You think that the action could lead you to a place that might be less desirable than where you are now. You might fear failure, criticism or change. You could fear losing money, status, respect, appreciation and even love from others.
However, these fears, like all others, are false. Inspired action will always move you closer to where you truly want to be. It is action that will lead to the life of your dreams. Inaction will only lead to inner conflict.
There are three types of fear: loss, rejection and death. You could say that these three types of fear all boil down to fear of loss of different things, but it is useful to think about them separately.
Fear of rejection is an ancient fear from times when being rejected and expelled by the group or tribe meant death. Ostracism (i.e. rejection – getting kicked out) is a well-documented means of social control in tribal or small scale societies, but it doesn’t work in our modern world! Nevertheless, we carry this same fear today as a fear of rejection or negative judgement by others – e.g. worrying what people think of you.
We’re not going to explore fear of death here as that is a huge subject in its own right and your fears of death and feelings about death are very much a function of your belief system. However it is interesting to note that many people lose their fear of death in their later years even if they were fearful of death when younger. This is despite, in many cases, having a religious or spiritual belief in the hereafter, eternal life or reincarnation. Those beliefs alone do not necessarily help people overcome fear of death.
Why might people lose the fear of death in later life? What changes in their thinking?
All fear stems from the fear of loss of something. Everything you truly want is on the other side of your fear.
Moving Past Fear and Building Confidence
When you fear anything, you create your own self-imposed limitations, because you will avoid that which you fear. By succumbing to fear rather than moving through it, you make the fear stronger. Your limiting beliefs become intensified.
By processing the fear, analysing it, by doing the work to reduce its intensity, you make it much easier to move through it in the future. You build self-confidence and faith. You build strong and new beneficial beliefs that will aid you in the future.
Moving through fear builds confidence. At first, the fear will seem so real and so scary, but if you can move through it, you will feel exhilaration and perceive your reality from a new perspective. The act of pushing past fear raises your perspective. When your perspective is raised through the act of pushing through fear, you will gain a new perspective on that fear.
Irrational Fear, which is fear of something that cannot physically harm you, can only be triggered by limiting beliefs. Without limiting beliefs, you could not experience fear, but everyone has some fear and some limiting beliefs.
Next Steps
What’s next? Next is identifying and overcoming fears, limiting beliefs and stress. Here are three ways to approach this:
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