How to Overcome Fear
Fear is your body's response to a situation where you feel threatened or endangered. It's unlikely that you will eradicate fear from your life, and you shouldn't want to as an essential survival mechanism. Therefore, how to overcome fear is more a matter of harnessing your responses to fear and using them to your advantage. Let's look at some methods of how to overcome fear:
Understand Fear Can Be An Advantage
It can be challenging to understand why you are experiencing fear. Take time to sit alone, quietly, and think about your fears, identifying the crux of what is causing your anxieties.
Create Goals and Adopt a Growth Mentality
Fear can emerge when you are feeling directionless or drifting along without a purpose. Establishing SMART goals will give you focus and help stymy your worries. Fear and anxiety can prevent you from achieving what you want. It can cause you to question yourself; "what if I fail?" Setting goals will help you create a growth mindset by focusing your mind on the task. Ultimately, you'll become more comfortable doing things you are unfamiliar with, or find challenging. The more you continue along these lines, the better equipped you'll be with how to overcome fear.
Recognize Your Excuses
Procrastination is often a symptom of fear. Using a lack of time, energy, or resources as an excuse to put things off might simply be you witnessing the fear of failure. Recognize when you use such excuses, and be honest about why you're using them. Saying "No!" to your excuses and getting on with things might be you facing your fear and overcoming it.
Gain Insights Through Your Fears
Nobody enjoys experiencing pain, but you can gain insights about yourself through fear. Of course, you will have to endure the pain that fear brings, but you should view this as an opportunity to grow. Changing your perception of fear from one of pain into a chance for growth lessens its impact. Moreover, you'll get greater control of your life.
Accept Failure as an Inevitability
Society tends to avoid talking about failure, instead focusing on success. However, everyone fails at some stage. Thomas Eddison famously stated that he didn't fail 10,000 times, but he'd been successful in discovering 10,000 ways his lightbulb didn't work. He accepted failure as inevitable, reframed it, and used it to his advantage. Your failures can be positive if you accept them rather than allow them to deter you from achieving your goals.
Conclusion
Everyone experiences fear to different degrees and with varying frequency. Hopefully, this article will help you to recognize, understand, and harness your anxieties and, ultimately, how to overcome fear.