4 WAYS TO OVERCOME YOUR BIGGEST FEARS

 

I’m afraid of a lot of things. Scratch that. I’m afraid of everything. Here’s the current Top 10 List of My Biggest Fears, in no particular order. I’m sure that some of these could be grouped into a single general category, like “fear of pain” or “fear of loss of control” or “fear of death”, but since when I think about any one of them happening, they all cause a unique form of mental anguish – none of them are quite like the other – I’m listing them here individually.

1. Plane crashing (with me on it), especially into the ocean

2. Anything to do with hypodermic needles (i.e. shots, blood draw, IV drip, etc.)

3. Getting beheaded by a member of ISIS

4. Getting kidnapped and drugged (especially via a hypodermic needle)

5. Getting tortured (especially if it involves flying on an airplane and getting stuck with a hypodermic needle)

6. Any of the above happening to one of my kids

7. Any of the above happening to my wife

8. Contracting/Getting diagnosed with an untreatable terminal illness

9. Going to Hell

 

10. Going to jail and being forcefully abused

Most of these – hopefully none of these – will ever happen to me, but that still doesn’t stop me from scaring myself with lots of vivid, gory images of how they’d play out if they did occur.

How I became a scaredy-cat

When I was 14, I went to live with my father, his wife, and my two-stepsisters. We went for counseling every Wednesday to see a woman named Phyllis. She would meet with the 5 of us in her large living room, first individually and then all together.

One time, I entered her office after she had been meeting with my Dad. She excused herself for a few moments to go upstairs, leaving her clipboard with her notes from the session with him in plain sight for me to see. The top paper had my name on it and said, “Generalized Anxiety Disorder.” I didn’t even know what it meant at the time, but I do know that I permanently contracted the disorder after reading her diagnosis of me.

G.A.D. is like having your own Horror Channel on Demand inside your head that only shows movies that you personally find frightening. If I don’t catch myself quickly, I can find myself obsessing about these fears at random times throughout the day, and especially at night. Over the years, I’ve developed some copings systems. Here are my:

Four go-to ways to deal with FEAR.

Barrel through:

Feel the fear and do it anyways. My least favorite method. This is the back-against-the-wall-and-nowhere-to-turn-to, absolutely last resort because nobody’s coming to save you method. I relied on this method when I was dead broke and needed to jump start my video business by cold-calling or DIE.

I gave my sales trainer a check for the last $200.00 I had to my name and told him to cash it on any day that I couldn’t prove to him that I made 20 cold calls to drum up business for myself. The anxiety was nearly insurmountable. I couldn’t sleep the night before and I couldn’t eat until I completed the calls the next day, which sometimes wasn’t until 3:00pm. But I couldn’t not do it. I did this day in, day out, for nearly a year and a half. It was torture; it didn’t kill me, and it didn’t make me stronger, either.

Some fears run so psychologically deep that no matter how many times you confront them, you never become desensitized to them. You barrel through because you have to. You kick and scream and lose your dignity in the process and when you come out on the other side, you’re left dazed and weakened and demoralized, with nothing to show for the experience. If there’s a choice, always choose a more peaceful method.

Redirect:

This method is like practicing Judo against the object of your fear. Instead of fighting force with force, you lead the momentum of the fear, catch it off balance, then counter-attack.

A few examples:

1) I once interviewed a street guy who told me that he was walking on the Lower East Side when somebody started following him. As the stranger got closer, the guy realized he was about to get mugged and his street-instincts kicked in and he spun around and smiled, “Hey Vito! Long time no see!” and he started slapping the stranger on the back and reminiscing about all the fictitious crimes they had allegedly committed together.

The stranger was thoroughly confused, but the street guy kept it up. “You don’t remember me? Joey, from the jewelry store and the bodega on the Upper East Side…Whaddaya mean you don't know me? Joey…Ortega!”

At this point, the would-be mugger didn’t know what to do anymore. What’s he gonna do? Mug a mugger, and one who claims to have been his partner in crime, to boot? You just don’t do that. So he excused himself and left, and the quick thinking street guy got a break.

Another example:

2) In the 1996 movie “Ransom”, Mel Gibson plays a wealthy airline magnate whose son is kidnapped for 2$ million ransom. The kidnappers have him running around them in circles, playing with his mind and stripping him of all his power. The turning point comes when he realizes that the kidnappers never intended to return his son in the first place, even if he does pay. Instead of begging and pleading with them and offering even more money, he turns the tables on them.

He gets on live television and displays all of the 2$ million in cash he had reserved for the ransom money and tells the kidnappers, point blank,

“No ransom will ever be paid for my son. Instead, I’m offering this money as a reward on your head. Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter. Do you know anyone that wouldn’t turn you in for two million dollars? I don’t think you do.

Congratulations, you’ve just become a two million dollar lottery ticket…You return my son, alive, uninjured, I’ll withdraw the bounty. With any luck you can simply disappear.”

Another example:

3) There’s a great book on magic called, “How to Play with Your Food”, by Penn and Teller, where Penn describes a threatening encounter he experienced at a diner located at a roadside truck stop in the middle of nowhere.

He was sitting on one of those swivel stools at the diner counter. He had just ordered a milkshake and was chatting up the pretty waitress while he was waiting for it to arrive. Before he even realized what was going on, he was surrounded by a bunch of nasty-looking truckers who wanted him to step outside where they were going to kick his &^% for the unpardonable crime of hitting on their leader’s girlfriend. He looked around the diner for some sympathetic stranger who might intervene on his behalf and talk the truckers out of it. Everyone turned the other way.

As they closed in on him, it was clear there was no way out. Just as the leader grabbed Penn by the arm, the milkshake arrived. Penn picked it up and promptly poured the whole thing over his head. While he was standing there, with streams of vanilla ice cream flowing down his glasses and his face, he put on a menacing look and lifted up his fists and said, “Ok, who wants to go first!”

Every time he moved towards one of the truckers, they’d start backing away from him, scared to engage with a crazy person. Who knows what he might be capable of doing?

Apparently a true story.

“Redirect” is my favorite method of dealing with fear, and it can’t be beaten for its classiness, but it requires a shift of mindset and some creativity and it’s not always an option.

 

Disarm:

Many times in life I’ve found that when you shine light on your fears, either by speaking them out to other people, or even just writing out the details of them on paper (like my list above), they scurry away into the corner like cockroaches in a dirty kitchen, looking for a more conducive host environment to feed off of.

A few examples:

There is a scene at the beginning of one of Richard Pryor’s stand-up comedy specials where, in a beautiful moment of openness and vulnerability, he candidly confesses to the audience:

“I’m so nervous up here. I really want to do a great job tonight, and I know you guys really want me to do a great job…”

It was a risky move for a comedian, someone who’s expected to be anything but serious, and it worked wonders to completely disarm the crowd and win them over to his side for the rest of the show.

Another example:

David Sandler, the godfather of 20th century sales training, used a similar technique to help him get over his fears of discussing money with prospects during the selling process. He’d candidly share his fears with the prospect, and found, to his advantage, he was disarming his prospects and endearing them to him with his openness and vulnerability. You can listen to him describe the process here.

Another example:

About two years ago, while searching online for a medication and therapy-free solution to “sales anxiety”, I stumbled upon “The Work” of Byron Katie and I thought to myself, “Eureka”.

It’s hard to really nail down who Byron Katie is and what “The Work” is without watching a few videos of her facilitating her “inquiry” with somebody, but I’ll give it a shot here.

The story goes like this: Kathleen Byron, “Katie”, was a raving madwoman in her forties who lived in Barstow, CA (remember Barstow from the first line in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”).

One day, in February of 1986, she woke up and a cockroach crawled over her toe, and at that moment, she realized that by inquiring into her negative, troubling thoughts, contemplating them meditatively to determine if they were really true or not, she was able to release them, or rather, they released their hold on her, and she became free again to experience the joy and perfection of reality.

Inquiry is a way of identifying and questioning the negative, troubling thoughts you’ve been automatically accepting and acting on as truth up until now and seeing if they still stand up as fact under the scrutiny of a four disarmingly simple questions:

1. Is it true?

2. Can I absolutely know that it’s true?

3. How do I react, what do I get in return for believing the thought?

4. Who would I be, what would life be like in the same situation, without the thought?

This has worked wonders for me. It is an extraordinary method to “undo” your troubling thoughts, particularly in the department of anxiety producing thoughts. Instantaneously, you become aware of your blind spots – though it can often take some time, practically, for you to operate from your new, freer headspace. If you’ve ever suffered from “thought-attacks”, or can’t seem to shake your illogical paranoid theories about other people and the world, “The Work” is a systematic process that effortlessly restores you to emotional health and brings you safely back home to clear thinking.

 

Medication:

The only way I think I could ever shake my needle phobia is if I develop a positive association with needles, like becoming a heroin addict. Short of that, I’m doomed to suffer with this all my life.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that it occurred to me that I could take a Valium or Xanax to be able to handle the situation. So when I had a life insurance exam scheduled where they were going to send someone to my house to do a blood draw, I had a doctor friend write a prescription for me for some anti-anxiety pills to help me get through it.

I wasn’t sure how much to take, so I did a “test run” the night before. I took one pill, and then kept gave myself a “scare test” by conjuring up the image of a needle being inserted in my vein. If the thought still freaked me out, I’d know I hadn’t medicated myself enough. I ended up taking 3 pills before I passed out, and the next morning I took 2 more pills…just to be sure. I was so far gone that when the life insurance agent took my arm to draw blood, I watched on curiously as she stuck me three times and even bruised me, without it bothering me in the slightest.

Then, with my judgment so impaired I didn’t realize it was impaired, I drove down my street to the supermarket, making sure to stay all the way on the other side of the street so I wouldn’t bump into any parked cars on the right. I was pulled over by a policeman and given a ticket, and then while he was still behind me, I hit a car at a red light.

Then I proceeded to sleep the rest of the weekend and woke up Monday morning with an angry wife who had been burdened with watching the kids by herself for 3 days, and 2 pink summons tickets in my back pocket. And nearly zero recollection of anything, like the people I met in the supermarket and invited over that I forgot to tell her about.

Just call me Bernie.

The next time I had to fly, I was out of pills (my wife made me flush them down to the toilet after the above incident) and I called up a friend of mine who is a nurse anesthesiologist. He said, “I can’t do anything for you, but if you know anyone who is either very calm or very nervous, chances are they’re on some type of medication for anxiety and could help you.”

That’s how prevalent prescription pill-taking has become. And I’m continuously surprised each time I discover someone close to me who takes pills on an ongoing basis. It’s weird, and I wonder if under other conditions, i.e. sans pills, we might not be such good friends.

I really feel I could benefit from anti-anxiety pills on an ongoing basis, but there’s a part of me that takes pride in roughing it through life unmedicated, especially since taking any chemicals long-term can’t be healthy. So except for those rare panic-inducing episodes like flying and needles, I try to stay away from all drugs. But I don’t make any judgments against anyone in this area since I know firsthand how crippling anxiety can be.

That’s it. 2500 words later-you have my manifesto for beating fear. I feel better already. Wait a second. Oh, no! What was that noise?

Please think of somebody you know that would benefit from these ideas and SHARE THIS with them.

ABOUT ME:

In January 2012 I started Ohio Business Video, a production company focusing on creating video and animation stories for marketing businesses on the web.

By January 2014, I was completely broke, burned out from having to hunt my dinner every night, and for lack of any other idea of what to do, I started to write about things I love (d), lost, and/or learned since 1973.

My blogging efforts at TheRealDanielSteinberg.com led to a book, led to my current position as Marketing Director for Viewabill, led to several ongoing writing gigs. You might say I scratched my way out of my own grave with a pen.

Deeply candid and full of practical advice, this 152 page book is a record of the counterintutive, zero-dollar, transformative system that I developed to nurture myself back to financial health after struggling with living paycheck to paycheck and being completely broke for years. AVAILABLE HERE.

 

-Daniel