Why and How to Face Fears

Fear is one of the most useful emotions human being can feel. If you would not fear - you would be in great danger. Fear is the tool to make us run away from dangerous situations.

I have talked about living in the present moment in earlier posts. It is a good way of living, and you should do it. Fear is something we can feel only if we are present and observing. If we are lost in our thoughts or other emotions, we will not see dangerous situation and would suffer the consequences.

I can conclude that fear is a part of our lives and we should welcome it and accept it. When someone tells you he or she does not fear anything, you ask them how can they be alive? When they ask why, ask them counter question - why you do not cross the street while the red light is on? 

So we all should fear. What is then the problem? The problem lies in our evolution. When our ancestors were in wilderness surrounded by wild animals and other dangers, it was literally vital to sense fear rapidly. If sabretooth tiger was starting to run after you, you would sense fear and gain physical advantage by releasing of necessary hormones and reducing blood flow to unnecessary parts of the body. This is what we call fear.

Today, number of lethal situations is greatly reduced, but our fear mechanism stayed. Our prefrontal cortex is part of the brain tasked for imagination, and is one of the most powerful tools humans have. We can imagine things that do not exist, avoid things that are unpleasant (we do not make sea water tasting ice cream). This way we are able to think and contemplate about past and present, as if we are actually there. Our brain has power to fool the body to think that what we think about is actually happening. This is thanks to layered structure of our brain. As new parts evolved (like prefrontal cortex) they started to influence old parts (like amygdala).

When we get lost in difficult or unpleasant thoughts or emotions, our brain starts to react as if contents of our thoughts are actually happening. This way, we can get annoyed by some event that happened long ago or something we think will happen in future.

How Can We Face Fears

Facing fears is pretty abstract advice. It sounds confrontational but it is not. It is the exact opposite. You need to see your fear and find it in your body. Is it in your stomach, chest, jaw? Observe it and do not try to erase it. You will fail. Fear can not be erased or neutralized because fighting what already exists always lead to defeat. Embrace your fear and see it for what it is - unnecessary part of your life. Do not fear to lose your job or to speak in public. That fear you experience is just relic from very old times when we needed to run away from predators. Now we feel this urge when we face a dentist, which is quite silly. 

By observing your fear it might not go away completely. It might be just a bit reduced. You might feel a bit more calm. You might even feel more scared when you clearly see your fear. Do not give up! Stay in the moment by watching your breath and gently return to it when your mind starts to produce fear by thinking. Do this for ten minutes.

Facing fear is an activity with steps. I gave you one example of steps to do when afraid. There are a number of methods of using mindfulness meditation available on the web.

Why We Need to Face Fears


Main reason for facing fears is that they do not just go away by themselves. For example, when you delay going to the dentist for a couple of months, your fear comes back later. Not only it comes back, but it enhances.

If we try to push away fear we will fail. No matter what we do to fight it will not make it go away. When the even we fear about passes we feel relieved. The problem is - it might happen again. We need to meet our fears eye to eye and accept them as they are.

Living With Anxiety

I live with a lot of anxiety. I am anxious about most things in my life that matter to me - like health and family. I had to learn to live with it.

At the beginning of this year I had serious health issues. My blood pressure was very high and I ended up in a hospital for two weeks. After that, I was on a sick leave for whole two months. Most of this was caused by stress, which is as common as breathing these days.

My problem with anxiety was that it caused what I call cycle-effect. I become mildly anxious about something and then I get anxious more about being anxious. That goes on and on. If I measure my blood pressure, and it is moderately nigh, I become very anxious about it. Then my blood pressure rises more and more in this cycle-effect.

Being concerned about such big issues in life is not the only source. We can get anxious about very small things, things we would not even notice on a different day. If you remember last time screaming child got you mad, you will certainly remember times when you did not even notice such an event. 

What types of anxiety there are:
1. Panic (general fear)
2. Social anxiety (fear of being judged)
3. Phobias (overreacting to fear)
4. General anxiety (threats that are not there)

First three types will not be covered in this post. I am not qualified enough to give any advice, and it is better to consult with proper medical expert. I can not recommend reading articles on blogs instead going to the doctor's office.

When we usually feel general anxiety:
1. Some issue in family
2. Some issue at workplace
3. Public speaking and performing

This is pretty normal, I could say human feeling. We know we are human beings if we feel nervous from time to time. If we are never nervous, we have probably damaged our amygdala or hippocampus.

Anxiety can be triggered by events that occurred in the past or are occurring now. We can even be anxious about events that never happened, such as the event we imagine will happen in the future. We can not change the things that have already happening or happened before, but we certainly can influence our imagination. When our brains start to ruminate about some scary event in the future, acknowledge it and let go.

How to let go of anxiety?

This is a hard part. If it was easy, we would just dismiss it and move on. Our brains so not work that way. 

One of the ways to relieve anxiety is to engage in some activity. We will forget about our problems. This is just a temporary resolution because anxiety will most likely come back.

Another way is to use anti-anxiety medications which were prescribed by your doctor. This is also a temporary relieve, unless you plan to use them all your life.

The problems which cause anxiety does not seem to just go away, and so does anxiety. Whenever we apply temporary solution it will come back.

Obviously, to solve the initial problem is a perfect solution. You deal with what you are anxious about, solve it and move on. There are times when you just can not do it. Then what?

Only way to let go of the anxiousness is to accept it. This is easier said than done. This is why this blog post is titled "Living With Anxiety" instead of "Get Rid of Anxiety". Actually, if you manage to accept your anxiety as a part of your being, you will in a way get rid of it. If you try to fight your anxiety - you will definitely lose. You should not fight with what already is. If you are anxious - you are. You should not expect that you will not be anxious in the future. You should not expect any technique or drug relieve you of anxiety, because when it does not, you will lose faith in techniques and drugs. They will certainly fail at one point or another. 

So, my "technique" is not to do anything much about it. Just observe it, see it clearly, try to pinpoint in which part of the body it inhabits and watch it. Anxiety is usually present in stomach, chest or jaw. Look for it and give it your full attention. The anxiety will not immediately go away. It could stay there for hours. With doing nothing, and concentrating on something else, like your breath, anxiety will diminish. It might come back after a few seconds or minutes. I have about 50% chance to relieve anxiety this way. 

Another way is to concentrate on the present moment. You can hear the sounds and label them ("car horn", "bird", "wife vacuuming") or you can count your breath (1-2, 1-2) as you breathe in and out. This way you will ground your mind in the present moment. If it doesn't do the trick, try at the same time to feel your feet on the floor and breathe or listen. If you give your mind enough "topics" to concentrate on, it will let go of the anxiety.

To conclude, anxiety is a normal human condition. It is useless to fight it, because fighting it causes more anxiety and will fail. What you can do is to accept it and let it be. Anxiety is rooted in a number of events in what we call life. It is a part of the deal and it is quite normal to see it as a welcome guest and let it leave as soon as possible. If you didn't ever feel anxious - how could you feel calmness?

How do you deal with anxiety? Please voice in the comments section!

Why Past and Future Do Not Exist and What to Do About It?

photo credit: h.koppdelaney via photopin cc

What is time? Searching Wikipedia I have found the definition: "Time is a dimension and measure in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future, and also the measure of duration of events and the intervals between them.", which sounds about right.

The key word in definition is "measure", which suggests that we use time to measure something. Is there any other measure that we use every day? We measure length using meters or yards, we measure temperature using degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Therefore I conclude that measure is not a real thing, it does not exist in a real world. We can not catch, hold, buy, sell, bury or eat nor time or length. We can not throw temperature away when we feel hot or cold. Therefore, measures do not exist. We invented them, and use them chiefly to communicate. We can say that it is 32 degrees Celsius outside, and everyone knows that they should wear shorts and t-shirts. We can meet someone at the cinema exactly at 8 o'clock, so we can watch a movie together.

Marcus Aurelius talks about this in his brilliant book "Meditations", in book 6, paragraph 49:

"Thou art not dissatisfied, I suppose, because thou weighest only so many litre and not three hundred. Be not dissatisfied then that thou must live only so many years and not more; for as thou art satisfied with the amount of substance which has been assigned to thee, so be content with the time."

When we think about past and future, we are exploring non-existing things. "But I have memories, you can't tell me they are not real!", was my reaction when I read about this subject. I could understand this concept about future because it did not happen yet, but I could not deny the past.

In the book The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes:

"Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is."

What he is teaching us is that any point in the past was actually the present moment. The time, thirty years ago, when I was camping in Greece with my parents was the present moment then. The time my daughter was born was also the present moment. The same goes for the future. In ten minutes, it will still be now. Tomorrow will be now and anytime will be now.

I found this model a bit confusing at first, but quickly understood its value and its truthfulness. The logic is unbreakable. For me, the student of mathematics and Aristotle's logic, and on top of it a computer programmer - logic is obviously the key argument.

Following this logic, I accepted that past and future do not exist, and that all that exist is the present moment (Eckhart's "Now" with capital N). More so, every single point in the past and in the future was or will be - now. Everything that happened and will happen was or will be exactly now. To my amazement this led me to deduce that I live my whole life now, and that everyone else does, too.

As you can imagine, that conclusion destroyed my understanding of the past and the future, and eliminated time as a factor in my life. I understood that if I wanted to live my life I have to live it in the present moment. Every time my mind wonders in memories, or when it starts mindlessly thinking about what will be, I stop living. I become mindless.

I will quote Jon Kabat-Zinn's definition of mindfulness:

“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; On purpose, in the present moment, and non judgmentally.”

This quote gave me the practical instruction how to live in the present moment - I have to be mindful. He also mentions the present moment, which is one of the key concepts of mindfulness. I will cover other parts of this definition in later posts.

Jon Kabat-Zinn also says:

"We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now."

He means that what we do now directly influences our future. One important thing - he talks about "taking care" of the present now. That implies action. That also implies that mindless thinking about the future is not what we should do.

Alas, we all do ruminate (definition of rumination). It is part of human nature. Whenever we are in a distressing situation we tend to obsessively think about our plight, sometimes planning ahead and sometimes thinking of the past trouble. You know when you think about some event in the future, some important business presentation to deliver. You explore every possible scenario. You rehearse endlessly what you will say and what people will ask you. You repeatedly do it, sometimes for hours. It's like a broken record playing in your head, and it is very difficult to stop.

The same thing happens when you are in a romantic relationship, particularly when there is some problem. Someone had offended you, done something wrong. You will endlessly think about what you should have said or did. You think about how you will repay the insult, over and over again.

We also react similarly in much less difficult situations, such as when someone cuts the line in the grocery store. We are feeling distressed, and think over and over what should you do. Sometimes, long after you get home, the incident comes back in your mind, and you ruminate again.

If we do not control this, it can lead to very serious conditions, such as depression disorders.

How can we avoid this? One of the methods is meditation. By meditating ten minutes a day, you can achieve to become more aware of your surroundings, your thoughts and your feelings. In this blog I will discuss some meditation techniques, in later posts.

One of the most common ways to practice meditation is to close your eyes and follow your breath. That's about it. Whenever your mind wanders, and it most certainly will, you gently bring back your attention to the breath. Try this for even three minutes, and you will see what I am talking about.

Mindfulness meditation by following your breath is extremely simple, but it is not easy by any means. You will need to practice it daily. This practice is very similar to common exercise, and the difference is you practice your brain instead your muscles. Note that I wrote "brain" and not "mind", since by meditating you are influencing your brain structure (in a positive way). 

Just to drop the possibility this is some mumbo jumbo, I will share a link to Psychology Today's article "Use Your Mind to Change Your Brain", written by  Rebecca Gladding, M.D. There is multitude of scientific proof available to substantiate meditation as a "real thing", and not some eastern religious Buddhist fabrication.

Conclusion is that we can live in the present moment, by practicing mindfulness. Return and read definition of mindfulness once more.

For me, it is beautiful way to live my life. I am by no means mindful all the time, as some meditation masters claim. I am just an ordinary guy, and I meditate daily at least 10 minutes. Even with that practice, I spend most of my day not mindful. For me it is difficult to be aware, but after a year of practice, I am living in the Now for longer intervals. I feel less stressed and I am able to "intercept" stressful thoughts and feelings and let them go. Not all of them, of course.

How I Discovered Mindfulness

photo credit: mindfulness via photopin cc

I live a frantic life at work, working for huge multinational corporation. Every day I wake up at 6 am, get ready for work, spend some time with my wife, wake up the kids for school. Then, get some breakfast and go to work. After work, I come home, watch some TV, eat dinner while watching TV, and then go to bed.

My whole family executes this pattern day in, day out, every working day. This routine is something we do on auto-pilot, without much attention. When I brush my teeth I think about my task list for the day. When I eat breakfast, I read the news articles or contemplate about upcoming project at work.

"This is how it should be," I was thinking for years. Everyone I know, my friends, relatives and colleagues live similar lives, doing the same routine, day in, day out - indefinitely.

First, what is mindfulness? The best definition was given by Jon Kabat-Zinn:

"Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and non judgmentally."

I will get back to this. Sentence is complex and consists of several key areas, which I will cover in later posts.

This depiction describes the exact opposite of my life. Ever since I discovered mindfulness, my life changed and in a positive way.

My first contact with mindfulness and meditation was last summer, when I saw a TED talk by Andy Puddicombe ("All it takes is 10 mindful minutes"). What Andy asked me, and all of his audience, is to do nothing for ten minutes. At the beginning of his talk Andy asked the question:

"I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any time to do nothing? Just 10 minutes, undisturbed? And when I say nothing, I do mean nothing. So that's no emailing, texting, no Internet, no TV, no chatting, no eating, no reading, not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. Simply doing nothing. I see a lot of very blank faces." 

You can watch Andy's performance, and see for yourself.

This is the moment something just clicked in my mind, as I fearfully realized that I do not have an answer. This is where I have discovered mindfulness.
Next, I went to Andy's website Headspace, and browsed around, looking at his excellent short videos.

At this point, I downloaded Headspace Android application Headspace (on-the-go), and decided to try out his ten-day free meditation program. I whipped out my headphones and started with Day one video and audio recording. The experience was eye-opening, not to mention very satisfying. After first ten minutes of meditation I felt like a giant boulder just dropped from my hands. Experience passed after several minutes, but I made up my mind to continue the next day, with lesson number two.

Since Andy's program is not cheap (75 EUR for a yearly subscription), I embarked on a quest to find more affordable (meaning "free") material about mindfulness meditation, before coughing up money. Andy's material is so great that I eventually purchased membership.

Next stop was YouTube. As a repository of humongous number of videos, many of them of cats, it houses countless lectures about mindfulness, meditation and awareness. Here is a first video that I saw (Jon Kabat-Zinn - "The Healing Power of Mindfulness"):

If you want to learn more about Jon read about him on Wikipedia. In short, he is professor of medicine and founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine. He has a doctorate in molecular biology from MIT.

Video "The Healing Power of Mindfulness" was an eye opener for me. Here I found out that meditation is not some eastern religious ritual, but a scientifically studied practice. Jon's lecture is clear, and he has a lot to say about the matter.

Next video was Jon's talk in Google. Here I have established a feeling of credibility about Jon Kabat-Zinn, because if you pass Google's screening and get to talk to their employees, you sure have something important to say. As if previous talk in New Hampshire based Ivy League College was not credible enough.

In first video, Jon mentions some guy named Eckhart Tolle. He said we should read his books, so as a member of hyper-connected generation, I have first looked him up on Wikipedia (Eckhart Tolle on Wikipedia) and, afterwards, on YouTube. And lo and behold, I found the video called "Eckhart Tolle in Conversation with Bradley Horowitz | Talks at Google". Here it is:

Now I had another Google hosted talk about the same topic, this time much less scientific and more on emotional side.

Why I insisted on Google lectures? It is for personal reason - I am IT professional, and I am probably quite similar to people working at other IT companies, and have similar concerns, interests and skepticism as they have.

Third video I stumbled on was "Mark Williams on Mindfulness", by professor Mark Williams (professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford). For me, this was the best  of four video lectures featured in this post, as it is the most "scientific" of them all. It is more down-to-earth type of lecture, to the point and without excessive ramblings.

After watching the videos, it was high time time to get more serious! I needed to read some books, and since I was new to the field of mindfulness meditation, I struggled to find right book to start with. 

After browsing the web, and amazing website Goodreads (goodreads.com), I found the book "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment" by Eckhart Tolle. Persuaded by Jon Kabat-Zinn lecture, I have read this book and I was dumbfounded. Eckhart talks about present moment, and proves very easily that present moment is the only moment that ever existed! What a paradigm shift. He explains that every moment in the past was present moment then. Exactly the same logic applies to future moments. He proved that past and future is illusion and that they do not exist. You can not experience or touch past or future, just what is now in this moment. I believe that this perspective change was the single moment that made me choose to continue my study of awareness, mindfulness and the present moment.

It was very important for me to understand the present moment, and to start noticing it in my life. Since I have continued Headspace meditation practice, I could finally understand the reason Andy was telling me to follow my breath and let my thoughts and emotions pass without getting angry with myself that I can not do such a simple thing. "Just gently bring back your attention to the breath", said Andy.

Next book I have read is "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life" by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Jon's history and experience on subject convinced me to read his book. Inside the book, there are chapters about mindfulness meditation, laid out in straightforward way. His style is easier to read than Tolle's. He teaches us how to meditate. The main point for me was his explanation of the difference between "being" and "doing". He even explained to my corporate-driven, productive mind that I am "human being", not "human doing".

This is the end of my list and good starting point for everyone who wishes to learn about mindfulness and meditation. I have read more books, seen more lectures and tried other meditation techniques, and I intend to cover them in later posts.

Do you have any interesting book or video to share? Please write in the comments section below!