It's not just children who are prone to anxiety. According to statistics, more than 20% of the world's population experience various restrictions in their lives due to fears. The occurrence of this phenomenon is associated with an ancient biological reaction, and people began to ask the question of how to overcome fear back in ancient times.
Experts say that active inclusion of the brain consciousness can resist it. But first things first.
Parable of Fear
One man wandered around the world. On the way he encountered a plague. The man asked her where she was going. To which the plague replied that it was going to the neighboring village to destroy a thousand lives. They broke up, and a month later they met again. A man with claims told the plague that it deceived him and took five thousand human lives. The plague replied that it did not lie, but actually carried away a thousand, all other people died without its participation, just from fear.
People are afraid of heights, darkness, terrible dreams, loneliness, driving a car, flying and many other things that might not be afraid. Why? What happens to a person? What is fear? Are there ways to overcome fear?
From 7 to 12 years
The beginning of school life is the equator beyond which natural and “fantasy” fears increasingly give way to social ones. Children who grew up in overprotective conditions may have a hard time being separated from their parents and having to cope with school assignments on their own.
Parents often aggravate the situation by attaching excessive importance to grades, forcing them to rewrite homework multiple times, etc.
How to overcome children's fears associated with school and help a child not be afraid of this new stage of life? In the first grades, you should focus not so much on grades, but on whether the child understands the program as a whole, what blind spots he has.
If there is understanding, the marks will improve on their own. And do not forget that school is only a part of life; in addition to lessons, children should have interests and hobbies.
Fear - what is it?
Fear is an internal state caused by a threatening real or perceived disaster. From a psychological point of view, it is considered a negatively colored emotion.
It occurs every day in life. We go to work, do household chores, visit shops and theaters, where something can happen that can frighten us, so how should we fight fear and is it necessary?
We are born, begin to breathe, scream and be afraid at the same time. This phenomenon haunts us all our lives. And for many people it limits the freedom, poisons their lives, destroys both body and soul. And no one likes to experience this feeling. And it is impossible not to experience it.
There are unique people in the world who know neither fear nor horror. But this is a rare disease, as a result of which the amygdala of the brain, which is responsible for this feeling, stops working for unknown reasons. Man is not afraid of anything, not even death. It is impossible to say whether it is a gift or a disadvantage, but a person has fearlessness.
If you think about it, fearlessness is not so good, since a person is exposed to serious dangers that he is not even aware of, he does not know what to fear, and, therefore, does not think about how to deal with fears.
This condition destroys us, but at the same time it plays a positive role, both in the life of an individual and the whole society. Fear warns a person about danger, teaches what needs to be avoided, that is, warns. But if a person is covered by a wave, then the person may succumb to panic.
From 1 year to 3–4 years
After a year, the child begins to walk, gains freedom of action and actively explores the world. It is important that parents find a balance between encouraging independence and healthy parenting. Excessive prohibitions can develop timidity, apathy, or, on the contrary, give rise to a tendency to circumvent restrictions and take risks.
Also at this age, fear of pain appears - children usually associate it with going to the doctor. It is important to explain to the child the essence of medical procedures in understandable language, to avoid harsh pressure, and, if possible, to be nearby during the procedures.
Techniques for dealing with fear
Many psychologists argue that the question of how to deal with fears can be dealt with in one simple way - this is to stop even thinking about how to overcome fear, that is, stop saving yourself from it. While we think about what we are afraid of, we, losing our energy, only think about this.
For example, a common fear, especially among women, is the fear of driving. Before they even start taking the exam, they are already thinking about how to overcome their fear of driving. Thus, they program themselves for this fear.
How to overcome fear? It's pretty simple. Motivation helps everything. Don’t want to wait for hours for public transport, and then have to jostle around in it, while constantly being late for meetings or work? So you need to make your life easier and learn to drive a car. This is the only thing you need to think about. Thoughts are occupied by motivation; motivation leaves no room for the question of how to overcome fear. The equipment works flawlessly.
Tune in for the best
90% of people who suffer from fears set themselves up for them. For example, many people are afraid to fly. They don’t yet know what to be afraid of, but they are already afraid.
How to overcome this type of fear? You need to build a flight plan within yourself, that is, what interesting things you can do during the flight. Read books, get some sleep, and in the end, while doing these activities, you won’t even notice how you’ll find yourself in the right place. This will be a painless and effective overcoming of fear.
You can imagine inside yourself a small, frightened child who definitely needs to be calmed down. Positive emotions and memories, ideas of a good fairy who calms the inner child and shows beautiful pictures - all this occupies the brain and helps to overcome fear.
Breathing exercises
You need to admit to yourself that you are really afraid that everything inside is shrinking, creating discomfort. How to overcome fear and get rid of discomfort? In order to relax yourself, you can focus your attention on your breathing and restore it.
Then try to carry out actions from the body to consciousness. Intentionally turn your shoulders, start massaging any points, it is not necessary to know the massage technique, just massage, while focusing on the sensations in the body.
Getting rid of internal dialogue
Most often we are frightened by our inner voice. How to overcome the fear that comes from internal dialogue? This voice is subject to us, and we must use our power over it. You can change his intonation or make him speak in a whisper or too fast, you can even make him speak from his little toe. It is impossible to take such a voice seriously and overcoming fear will become easy and even fun.
Our imagination portrays us as very small against the background of circumstances, so we cannot always understand how to deal with such a big fear, which is much larger than us. You need to mentally place dangerous circumstances in an absurd situation.
For example, make the situation small, place it in a saucepan and cover with a lid. This will be an interesting solution to the question of how to overcome fear. It is important to believe that we know how to overcome fear, and no matter how we do it.
“Memorable incident” technique
What types of fear a person experiences depends on what methods to combat fears. If someone offended you, you were afraid of a dog, an unpleasant action was performed on you, as a result, a lump of fear remains inside you, the information about which is well known to you, that is, you know very well about the source of fear, which means the subconscious has written it down in some block remember this incident.
Naturally, a similar situation will always scare you. How to deal with such fears? You just need to imagine yourself in a cinema, on the screen of which there is a film about the circumstance that happened to you. You need to mentally roll the upper left corner of the screen into a tube, after which a new screen will appear, where almost the same actions take place, but with a successful outcome. By replacing bad actions in your subconscious three times with positive or even humorous ones, you can erase unpleasant events from your memory.
When a person laughs at something, there can be no fear; it arises only in an acute and serious situation. Over time, you will be able to notice that a funny story has been written in your subconscious instead of a scary situation, and in reality such a situation will no longer frighten you.
A quick way out of a depressing state
There are many techniques for working with fears. They can be suppressed, burned, recoded, or worked with beliefs. There is one technique that can bring you out of a state of momentary horror. You just need to remember what it is. This is a small ball of energy that may have arisen from nowhere. The purpose of this lump is one - to make sure that this condition does not happen again.
For example, you saw an accident, and now you are afraid of getting into the same situation, or you are afraid of being left without food, since you once experienced hunger (this applies to the older generation who experienced hunger), you can be afraid of the future, old age or death. These concerns are not always justified. Our subconscious does not distinguish between real events and what we can imagine.
We must convince ourselves that fear is not harmful, but useful, it activates our psyche, mobilizes us to protect ourselves from danger. And if he is so good, then we need to thank him for his good functions.
As soon as horror takes hold of you, you must understand where in the body it is located. You need to try to localize this place and imagine its image. Even if it looks like a dirty gray lump. You need to direct your kind energy to this lump with all the words of gratitude for his care. Fear, filled with warm energy, transforms into its opposite. Calm and self-confidence will appear within you.
From 12 to 16 years old
Adolescence is a time of social fears that crowd out all others. The child is going through puberty, his appearance is rapidly changing, and hormonal changes are underway.
This is how the fear of becoming ugly and becoming an object of ridicule arises. To reduce such fears to a minimum, it is important to instill in a teenager self-care skills, the habit of regularly exercising, and monitoring nutrition.
It is also important that the teenager has hobbies, his own company of like-minded people and friends. Sports or creative classes, hobbies help to avoid depressive thoughts and make it easier to overcome an identity crisis.
Hormones of fear
The symptoms of anxiety and terror are the same for everyone. But we all behave differently in critical situations. Some know how to control themselves, others look scared, and others are close to panic.
Scientific research has shown that danger causes the release of two stress hormones, such as:
- Adrenaline (rabbit hormone), which is produced in cowardly animals.
It dilates the blood vessels of the brain, but constricts the blood vessels of the skin. We are used to hearing that the face turns gray with fear. From its ejection, the pulse quickens and breathing accelerates. People are lost with the prevailing “rabbit” hormone, horror leads them into a stupor. People do not overcome fear, but surrender themselves to fate, and often their fate ends in tears.
- Norepinephrine (the lion hormone) is predominantly produced in predators and is absent in their prey.
This hormone has completely different symptoms. The blood vessels dilate, the face turns red. The presence of this hormone characterizes the stability of the nervous system to stress and determines the physical and mental stability of the body. The norepinephrine type of people automatically fight fear; they can instantly mobilize in dangerous situations, easily overcoming them. At the same time, they can perform actions that do not always fit into the framework of possibilities.
Fear is good because it forces us to look for unknown resources within us. So he reminds us that it is impossible to become the master of the situation today with the set of opportunities that we have.
Therefore, experts argue about the harm and benefits of this phenomenon, about its destructive or creative influence. They argue about how to deal with fear and whether it is worth doing. No one can give a definite answer to these questions. And most importantly, no one has solved the mystery of how this phenomenon arises when it settles in our bodies, whether this feeling is innate or acquired.
Researchers conducted an experiment in which they found that children under one year old are not afraid of terrible pictures, but already in two-year-old children, scary images caused anxiety. It turns out that fear comes to us with the negative experience that we receive from the world around us.
Some of the universal human fears may be from childhood experience, and the other part is rewritten programs of parental experience, called scripts, when hidden programs are inherited.
How to help your child not be afraid: tips for parents
The main advice that psychologists give to parents of anxious children is: “Get rid of your own anxiety and worry.” Parental anxiety can be expressed in different ways: sometimes by overprotection with attempts to protect you from the slightest difficulties, and sometimes by excessive demands and severity (“I punish because I want you to achieve something in life”).
Both often mask deeply hidden anxiety and a perception of the world as a place full of dangers and threats. The only difference is in the approach: overprotective parents try to protect against threats, harsh ones try to teach them to cope with them on their own.
But both approaches lack a positive perception of life, in which there is a place not only for struggle, but also for joy and interest in everything new. Often children are not able to understand the motive of an adult, but they, like a sponge, absorb the main idea - “the world is dangerous.” And with such an attitude, it is impossible to help a child overcome fear.
Why we are afraid: the meaning of fears
Psychologists say that fear is a phenomenon of an acute emotional reaction caused by events or circumstances in the outside world.
Moreover, the circumstances could be both real and unreal, hence the ways to combat fear are figured out. As a result, the basis is a threat to human existence, both biological and social.
Psychologists distinguish several aspects of fear: apprehensions, fears, frights and horrors. But they are all divided into external factors and internal states, that is, they can be objective or subjective.
Before figuring out how to overcome fear, you need to understand that fear is a constant defensive reaction of the human body, it is a warning to the human consciousness regarding a threatening situation.
And it will be much easier to overcome fear if we accept it as a defense. But there are more serious situations when overcoming fear begins with understanding its root cause.
From birth to one year
According to the classification of Yu. Shcherbatykh, children's fears at this age are natural, that is, based on the instinct of self-preservation. The child is afraid of strangers, loud noises, and may be nervous because of a new environment or the absence of his mother. In the second half of the year, he already distinguishes intonations well and reacts by crying to rude speech.
How to help a child overcome fear if it has already arisen? Make his life stable, monitor his daily routine, create rituals for waking up and going to bed. Tactile contact is also very important for the normal development of the psyche - hugging, carrying in arms.
Fears in modern life
We live in a very complex information world. And the unrealistic amount of information coming to us today is strikingly different from what people received in the era of Jesus Christ. Then, during the entire life cycle of a person, only six events occurred when decisions had to be made. We have to do this every day and more than once, and at the same time fight fear.
Experts say that psychologically and biologically we are no different from people of past eras. Therefore, it is difficult for us to cope with the stresses of the external environment; we experience an adaptation shock, since it is extremely difficult for us to streamline the avalanche of semantic and emotional information that falls upon us.
The nervous system of each of us experiences daily stress, so psychologists and psychotherapists today are seriously studying the question: “how to overcome fear for a modern person.”
Psychotherapist Fritz Perls said that the nervous system must chew what is happening in life, then swallow it and then digest it. Accordingly, all fears are not chewed or swallowed pieces of information.
From 3–4 to 7 years
After 3 years, children actively develop their imagination and may develop a fear of fairy-tale characters, ghosts, darkness, etc. At this age, it is worth paying close attention to the content that the child sees—aggressive cartoons, computer games. Due to the immature nervous system, overexcitation and stress appear even from the abundance of bright, dynamic shots.
As children approach school age, they begin to think about death and may be afraid of dying or experiencing the death of their parents. This is a normal part of growing up. But if a child asks such questions too often or draws scenes related to dying, there is a reason to consult a psychologist.
Fear of fairy-tale characters sometimes masks real problems in a child’s life
Parents should carefully ask their child why exactly he is afraid of this character - what exactly he can do.
It happens that behind the image of “Baba Yaga, who is forbidden in a dark closet,” there is a real adult with excessive restrictions.
Myth of the ancient Greeks
Since ancient times, people have known that this phenomenon has a dual nature. Among the ancient Greeks, this knowledge was expressed in the myth of the god Pan (hence the word “panic”). He was born with goat limbs, horns and a beard. His appearance was terrifying, but besides this, he screamed loudly, which terrified people. Pan once directed this gift for good; he terrified the army of the Persians who attacked the Greeks; they did not know how to overcome fear and fled cowardly.
This is just a myth, but in reality, scientists tested volunteers to study the nature and effects of this phenomenon on them in extreme situations. They were jumping from heights. At the time of the test, neurons in the tonsils of the brain were activated in the volunteers. This is called anxiety.
The body immediately reacts to the phenomenon. We all know the feeling of our heart jumping out of our chest; we immediately remember that fear has large eyes, but in reality the pupils dilate. In addition, our mouth becomes dry because the activity of the digestive glands decreases. Such sensations are present in each of us, but the fight against fear is different for everyone.
Drawing psychotechnics
Ask your child to draw a family and analyze where he places himself and his loved ones. Children who picture themselves apart from their families experience loneliness and a feeling of abandonment.
Pay attention to whom the child’s figure is closest to - this is the most significant adult for him, from whom support is expected. See whose figure is shaded the most. Strong pressure is a sign of emotional tension associated with a given person.
You can also ask the child to draw his fear and ask where he lives, what he likes and what he doesn’t like, what he is afraid of. The result is a tale of fear - come up with a good ending.
