Why almost all your fears are 'fake' (and how to get rid of them today)
Fortunately, most fears are learned. And do you know why that’s fantastic 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 actually quite healthy, and (most importantly) how you can get rid of them for good.
So, spare a few minutes in your calendar. Going.
Watch the video:
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?
- Loud bangs: If you suddenly hear a huge bang, you’ll be startled immediately. That’s 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 our primal brain harbors a deep, ingrained fear of spiders or snakes (and the saber-toothed tiger).
Incidentally, scientific opinions on this category (spiders and dogs) are quite divided. And you’ve probably noticed this in your own surroundings as well. Maybe you have a dog yourself and think, “Well, Edwin, it really doesn’t bother me at all—I love that animal.” Or maybe you walk up to a tarantula whistling, while your neighbor jumps onto the kitchen table screaming.
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 still very young at the time, the impact was enormous. Perhaps the people around you even laughed about it a little afterward, but in your inner world, a small trauma was stored at that exact moment. It was imprinted in your brain—a process also known as “imprinting.”
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, as a two- or three-year-old child, you were startled by that barking dog, that pattern is burned deep into your brain’s “hard drive.” You probably aren’t even consciously aware of it anymore, but from that moment on, you’ve been afraid of dogs. And that mechanism applies to almost every specific fear.
The toxic cocktail of the panic attack
In addition to those sudden, intense moments, there’s another way anxiety arises: through a buildup[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’ll lose your job.
- Your relationship is falling apart.
- A loved one passes away.
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? Not so much . And when those intense moments start piling up rapidly, the bucket fills up. It overflows.
To release that enormous, pent-up stress, it has to come 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 of fear, which arises from a specific moment. These usually occur before the ageof 5. For example, because a caregiver screams at the sight of a spider. The child may then adopt that 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 the stages of grief (sadness, anger, and ultimately acceptance), that emotional burden remains in your system. And that burden can eventually turn 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’re not currently aware of—your heartbeat, your digestion, the tension in your muscles—is controlled by your subconscious. So those fears and old traumas aren’t just thoughts in your head: They’re in your neck, in your stomach, in your chest. Your entire body stores that information. If we want to resolve that fear, we also need to work with the body.
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 one-time imprint method is, in theory, the easiest. We go back to that moment in the past, we change the imprint, we look at it with an adult’s perspective, and (voilà)—the danger has vanished from your mind. The emotional charge is gone.
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 sensation) is incredibly challenging. Because as soon as you slip back into the story (“What has been done to me? Why is this happening to me?”), you immediately add fuel to the fire. Then the emotion just keeps circulating. Let the feeling be there, purely as energy in your body.
Step 3: Let the emotions transform
If you stay in touch with your feelings, you’ll notice that sadness can suddenly turn into anger. Do you suddenly get incredibly angry? Just let that anger be there. Let it flow, without blaming anyone else in your head. 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
Working your way through those deep emotions on your own is an option, but it’s the long, bumpy road. Fortunately, there’s 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 best part? Because we program directly at the level of the subconscious, you can feel incredibly liberated in just a single session. Then you walk out of the session and notice that that old trigger has simply lost its power. The fear is gone. That’s how fast it can happen when you communicate with your own system on the right wavelength.
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 masterclass to get started.
Or register directly for one of our events and trainings.
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