We all want happiness and peace of mind. In the search for these blessings, millions of people take "happy pills" which they hope will relieve their tensions and make them feel more cheerful. Pacifying pills aren't cure-alls. Though sometimes helpfull in individual cases, pacifying pills aren't cure-alls for the worry habit. Many of the pills do bring a few hours of apparent relief from worry. But none of them bring permanent peace of mind. To get rid of abnormal fears and worries, you have to find their cause. Once it's found, you have to do something about that cause to eliminate the effects, attempts must be made to remove the cause. Here you can discover some methods for conquering your fear. They have proved helpful to almost everyone who has tried them. 1. Analyse exactly what you are afraid of. Any fear that is faced honestly and thruthfully may be conquered, if the source of the fear can be determined. 2. Analyse your problem : can something be done ? This famous prayer embodies a philosophy of life that has helped change the attitudes of thousands of persons for the better. So I quote it because this prayer may change your life. "God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; The courage to change the things I can; And the wisdom to know the difference." If something can be done, do it. If nothing can be done, stop stewing about it. We must all accept the inevitable or face mental disaster. 3. Compute the likelihood of the thing you fear happening. Compare and study statistics of the thing you fear and you will find the chances of what you fear are remote. 4. Do the thing you fear. In order to get rid of fear, we usually have to expose ourselves over and over again to the situation we fear. 5. Learn to deal with problems as soon as they arise. Many of our worries arise from our postponement of decisions. Don't vacillate. It is better to make a wrong choice than to tear yourself apart making and remaking the same decision. Because where there is undecision, there are doubts. Where there are doubts, you have conflict. Where you have conflict, you have symptoms. The longer your indecisiveness lasts, the more difficult the problem seems to become. If you vacillate long enough, your state of anxiety can become chronic. There is no recipe for infallibility. The trouble with most of us is that we want some sure fire recipe for being right 100% of the time. There is no such recipe. 6. Overcome your fear of making mistakes. Many of our fears are based on past mistakes. Instead of profiting from our failures and learning from them, we let the memory of them paralyse us. We might ask ourselves : "What have I to lose if I act as though I did not fear the thing I do fear ?" When you discover you have nothing to lose, you release within yourself the power of positive action. 7. Have faith in your ability to solve problems. Don't judge yourself more harshly then other people judge you. 8. Don't expect to be completely worry-free. Some fears and worries have a rational basis while others are based on exaggeration and misinterpretation. But only a moron could go through life completely unconcerned and unworried every second of every day. Faced with a situation he fears, every human being either : a. Runs away from it; b. Faces it or c. Retreats temporarily, gathers his reserve strength together and then attacks the situation again. You can't successfully flee from fear. Running away from any situation or fear is foolish. We can, by our small daily actions, learn to triumph over small fears and so build up the king of courage that will help us face large emergencies successfuly. 9. Compensate for physical shortcomings instead of worrying about them. Don't worry too much about physical shortcomings that can't be changed. The chances are you have desirable traits that make your friends and associates forget those shortcomings completely. Either those shortcomings can be changed or you can learn to compensate for them. 10. Have Faith in God's ability to run His universe intelligently. Faith is the key to unlock the unlimited powers of the mind, the heart, the soul. Faith that you can win out over disasters and set-backs, Faith that smashes fear. Faith in the ultimate realisation of your hopes. Fernando Soave 2003 |
