Whether you experience constant driving fear and driving anxiety – or suffer from fear and anxiety concerning just about everything – you could be addicted to fear. Fear addiction can be defined as being so wrapped up in anxiety and fear that they reduce your ability to function and negatively impact your relationships.
Fear Addiction Symptoms
Symptoms of the addiction can include:
- Worrying about everything, all the time
- Over-analyzing and over-thinking situations
- Fretting about negative things that could happen
- Drowning in perpetual anxiety
- Being unable to stop all the noise in your head
- Listening to all that negative noise
- Believing all that negative noise
- Knowing your behaviors are limiting your potential
- Believing your own shoddy excuses to justify the way you behave
- Being unable to move forward
- Giving too much of yourself
- Feeling frustrated things aren’t going right
- Having something wonderful to share with the world that isn’t getting to enough (or any) people
Another way to spot check for a fear addiction is to review how you treat those noisy, negative voices in your head. As the above symptoms outline, you can go from listening to them to actually believing them. And once those voices cross the line from being an annoyance to being known, comfortable friends that give you just the excuse you need not to succeed at the things you want to achieve.
Coping with Fear Addiction
Every human is going to experience some level of fear and anxiety from time to time, but the surefire sign of an addiction is when that fear and anxiety begins to rule your life. Even if the worries and woes have gotten to the addiction level, it’s never too late to change. A number of positive practices can help quiet the noisy worries and negative voices in your head.
Let yourself go through it.
Trying to squash fear, or any emotion, never works. Even if you’re able to pretend to ignore the emotion for a brief period, squashing it only pushes it down into your core where it festers and grows. It can then erupt when you least expect it. Instead of trying to downplay or run from fear, try sitting through it. Sit and experience it. Feel what it does to your entire body. Watch what it does to your mind. Let it run its course as you simply observe. Then watch as it begins to dissipate.
Live in a state of love and trust.
Yes, this tactic may be much easier said than done, but you can work on it through daily meditations as well as daily situations as they arise. Instead of falling into the fear trap as you normally would, focus on the idea that everything is going to be OK. A state of love and trust is the exact opposite of a state of fear, and you can’t live in both places at the same time.
If all else fails, you can always immerse yourself in hot water, with a scented bath that relaxes muscles and releases tension. Steering clear of sugar and caffeine can also help reduce anxiety, as can avoiding negative people, newscasts and other stress-inducing situations. Whether it’s driving fear and driving anxiety, or a general fear and anxiety, you can take actions to break the addiction that no longer needs to rule your life.
SOURCES:
Photo Credit: swong95765 via Compfight cc
