Fortunately, most fears are learned. And do you know why that's great news? Because it means you can unlearn them, too. It's a huge opportunity for you to take back control of your life. In this article, I'm going to explain exactly how those fears creep into your system, why a panic attack is secretly very healthy, and (most importantly) ways you can get rid of them for good.
So, spare a few minutes in your calendar. Going.
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The few fears you were born with
Yes, most fears are learned. There are basically only a few fears that we come into the world with purely by nature. This has been extensively researched.
What are we born with?
- Hard bangs: When a gigantic bang is suddenly heard, you are immediately startled. This is a biological alarm system.
- The fear of falling: If you lose the ground under your feet, biology intervenes.
- The fear of certain predators: It is sometimes said that in our primal brain is a deep, ingrained fear of spiders or snakes (and the saber-toothed tiger).
By the way, the category (the spiders and the dogs) is the subject of quite divided opinions in science. And you probably recognize this around you yourself. Maybe you have a dog yourself and you think, "Well Edwin, I'm really not bothered by anything, I love that animal." Or maybe you walk whistling at a tarantula while your neighbor jumps screaming on the kitchen table.
There we see the proof already: if a fear were biologically ingrained, everyone would be terrified of it. It isn't. If we go back to the core, to the moment when such a specific fear arose, we see that it was almost always preceded, or combined with, an intense situation[1].
How an 'imprint' for anxiety is created in your brain
Say, you are now like death to dogs. Why is that? Chances are something happened to you in the past. Maybe you were once bitten, or you were incredibly frightened when you were very small. A giant dog ran at you, it barked loudly, it attacked you, or at least, you thought you were being attacked.
Because you were very small at the time, the impact was huge. Maybe the people around you even laughed a little about it afterwards, but in your inner world, a trauma was stored in that exact moment. It was imprinted in your brain, also called an imprint.
The mechanism is simple: Your brain wants to keep you safe. Because your brain, of course, is you. You want to survive. That's priority number one in life: survival.
Anything that looks like danger (with the emphasis on looks, because it doesn't have to be a danger at all in the here and now) your brain wants to run away from that immediately.
So if you were startled as a child of two or three by that barking dog, that pattern is burned deep into the hard drive of your brain. You probably don't even consciously remember it now, but from that moment on, you are afraid of dogs. And that mechanism applies to almost any specific fear.
The toxic cocktail of the panic attack
In addition to those sudden, violent moments, there is another way anxiety is created: through accumulation[2]. This is usually the culprit behind panic attacks.
When people suffer from panic attacks, history almost always sees an entire period of intense stress and intense life events preceding them. Think of a toxic cocktail like this:
- You lose your job.
- Your relationship is on the rocks.
- A loved one dies.
Imagine all this happening in the space of six months. That's a huge blow to our system. Why? Because we simply never learned how to deal with it.
Did you learn how to handle a relationship breakup in elementary or middle school? Well no. Were you given a manual on how to grieve a death? Neither did you.
We learn math and language, but emotional management ho hum. And then when those intense moments pile up at a rapid pace, the bucket gets full. It overflows.
To discharge that huge, pent-up stress, it has to get out somehow. Your body intervenes and slams on the emergency brake. Bam. A panic attack.
So actually, such a panic attack is a very healthy mechanism of your body. If your body did not discharge that stress in that way, you would succumb to the pressure, so to speak. It's a survival strategy. Except. it does feel like you're dying.
Should you have ever had one, you know exactly what I mean by that. You're sweating, your heart is pounding in your throat, and you think it's over with you.
Fear of anxiety: throwing oil on the fire
In principle, a one-time panic attack is not necessarily a problem. It only becomes a real problem when you start throwing oil on the fire. And that's what most people do unconsciously. They become afraid of the next panic attack.
You get fear of fear. You start avoiding situations, constantly scanning your own body for strange signals, creating the very stress that triggers the next attack.
Roughly speaking, then, we are dealing with two flavors of anxiety:
- The imprint anxiety, which arises from a distinct moment. Usually these arise before age5. For example, because a caregiver screams about a spider. The child can then adopt the fear.
- Accumulation, which is caused by chronic stress from successive intense events. You cannot process or grieve this and then a panic attack can occur.
People often think of bereavement only in terms of death. But a relationship breakup is also a death of a future. A move or losing your job is also a loss.
If you don't fully go through those stages of grief (the sadness, the anger, and eventually the acceptance), that emotional charge remains in your system. And that charge can eventually transform into pure panic.
Your unconscious is your whole body
Before we look at the solution, I need to make an important side-horse. People very often think that the unconscious is somewhere in their heads. Like it's some kind of hidden room in your brain. But that's a misconception.
Your unconscious is your whole body.
Everything you are not currently aware of (your heart rate, your digestion, the tension in your muscles) that is controlled by your unconscious. So those fears and old traumas are not just in your head as a thought: They are in your neck, in your stomach, in your chest. Your whole body stores that information. So if we want to resolve those fears, we have to work with the body as well.
Step-by-step plan to get rid of anxiety
Whether you're dealing with a one-time imprint or a huge mountain of accumulated stress, the route to resolution is fundamentally the same. You have to go back to when it originated.
The variant with the one-time imprint is, in theory, the easiest. We go back to that moment in the past, we change the imprint, we look at it with mature eyes, and (voila) in your mind, the danger is gone. The emotional charge is off.
With that accumulated stress, we need some more depth. We have to identify all those situations and start working through them piece by piece. That's pretty challenging on your own, but it can be done. This is how you do it on your own:
Step 1: Map out your situations
Write down for yourself where the stress started. What unprocessed breakups, losses or stressful periods are still in your body?
Step 2: Feeling without a story
This is the most important step of all and the most difficult. You have to allow your body to feel through the emotion, live through it and release it. But you have to do that without the story around it.
It usually works like this: you think about the death of a loved one or your ex, and you immediately feel grief rising. What you then need to do is stop thinking about that person or situation, and go purely to the physical feeling of that grief in your body. Where is it? How does it feel?
That disconnect between the thought (the story) and the emotion (the physical feeling) is incredibly challenging. Because as soon as you shoot back into the story ("Whatever has been done to me, why is this happening to me?"), you immediately throw oil on the fire again. Then the emotion just keeps pumping around. Let the feeling be there, purely as energy in your body.
Step 3: Let the emotions transform
If you continue to feel purely, you will find that sadness can suddenly turn into anger. Do you suddenly become incredibly angry? Just let that anger be there. Let it flow, without blaming anyone else for it in your mind. Let it go.
Doesn't work out the first time? Absolutely fine. Doesn't work the second time either? Also fine. Keep practicing. Give your body space to work out that old, stored junk.
The highway: Why hypnotherapy is so powerful
Hacking through those deep emotions yourself is an option, but it's the long, bumpy road. Fortunately, there is also a highway: hypnotherapy[3].
In hypnosis, we bypass that critical, analyzing voice in your head that constantly wants to create stories. We descend directly into the unconscious, that is, into the body. We go back in regression to the very first moment when the problem arose, or to the period just before all that miserable stress started piling up.
From that deep state of relaxation, we can create a new timeline, so to speak. We restart time in your unconscious, as if that violent imprint had not yet taken place, and we work through it all at once in a healthy way.
The beauty of this? Because we program directly at the level of the unconscious, you can become incredibly liberated in just a single session. Then you walk out of the practice and find that that old trigger has simply lost its power. The fear is gone. That's how fast it can go when you're on the right wavelength communicating with your own system.
Anxiety is not something you are, it is something you started doing because your brain thought it was necessary for survival. And anything you taught yourself, you can also let go of. The choice is yours.
Now, did you find this an interesting article? Then please leave a comment below, I really enjoy reading it!
Learning hypnosis to help people with anxiety
Helping people with anxiety is one of the most enjoyable things to do as a hypnotherapist. When you see someone drive away happy after a session for driving anxiety, that feels incredibly good. There are a lot of people in the Netherlands with fears for which there is no time in regular health care, or which they do not consider serious enough to do something about, while people do suffer from them.
That's why we need you and other hypnotherapists. Do you want to help people? Knowledge of hypnotherapy is incredibly valuable. Come to a free master class for an introduction.
Or register directly for one of our events and trainings.
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