Fear is stickier than the plague: PEOPLETALK columnist Nika Nabokova explains why fears come true

Every month, The Fashion Vibes columnist, author, author of eight best-selling popular psychology books, creator of Mindspa app (one of the top 5 mental health apps) Nika Nabokova analyzes issues that affect any of us.

We all need support, especially now. Here you will find answers to questions about yourself, as well as questions about love, life, people, relationships, fears, courage, challenges and happiness.

Nika Nabokova, The Fashion Vibes columnist, author, and a psychological service manager

Let’s start with perhaps the most important thing: fears are normal. “How to get rid of fear?”, “How to stop being afraid?”, “How to be a person who is afraid of nothing?” And such. These formulations show how distorted, superficial our understanding of the essence of fear is.

Let’s pretend you’re not afraid of anything. Here is a button that turns off the fear. You boldly set off without looking around, get into any car, cheerfully clash with an incompetent person in a bar, even if he has an openly guilty-looking cheerful company, you give your card details to a new acquaintance. and such. How long will you last? That’s right, your story will end very, very quickly.

Fear is our defense mechanism. It opens when faced with a danger or hypothetical danger. Thanks to fear, we regulate our behavior, analyze situations, think first, then act.

Rather, the absence of fear should be more alarming than its presence.

Of course there is a “but”.

There is such a thing as “neurotic fear” (sometimes called neurotic and both are true).

neurotic fear

This type of fear limits life, degrades its quality, is obsessive, and kicks in even when there is no or real danger, but the level of fear is disproportionately great and with a drunk surgeon).

Oftentimes, neurotic fears are associated with social interaction. These are fear of failure, loneliness, betrayal, fear of public speaking, fear of separation, rejection, relationships, etc.

And in general, before you go out with a presentation or an important meeting, it’s okay to worry about something wrong in your relationship and what that could turn into. It’s not okay when fear becomes unmanageable and begins to negatively affect your behavior.

Here we come to the answer of the question from the title

There is a wonderful phrase like “Wherever you look, there you will come”. If you walk to avoid falling and just look at your feet, sooner or later you will definitely hit the wall and most likely collapse or fill a mound.

Our soul has an interesting feature: It is important to him that the outer picture matches the inner picture. For this reason, for example, people who believe in Allah see important signs pointing to His presence everywhere. People who believe in UFOs don’t lie when they talk about objects they see, they actually meet something and take it as a confirmation of their belief.

Our brain bends everything according to our beliefs. So, by the way, the same events have a different interpretation. Everyone sees them through their own glasses.

What about fear?

Thanks to this feature of our soul, fear can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The mechanism is this: I am very afraid of something, fantasies about it occupy my consciousness, and under their influence I begin to behave in a certain way, creating situations that literally correspond to my inner picture of the world.

Let me explain with the example of fear of loneliness.

Masha is afraid of loneliness. A lot. She has obsessive thoughts about “I need to find someone”, self-doubt “suddenly no one needs me”, attitudes about “I didn’t get married – I didn’t succeed as a woman”, and a lot of anxiety about “I”. I cannot cope with this life alone.

Therefore, Masha clings to literally every potential partner. There’s a lot of him, he’s suffocating, filling the whole space with himself, but of course he doesn’t notice it himself, and if he does, he can’t do anything.

In total, the boyfriends either run away, or Masha finds herself in a relationship with some kind of childish or, conversely, enslaving sadist and … she is still alone (together loneliness is also loneliness). Fear happens.

It can be the other way around, Masha is so afraid of loneliness that she is literally chained and invisible. Humpback, tiny, always in a corner, it’s impossible to get the words out of his mouth. Naturally, no one notices Masha, she is alone, her fear becomes real.

Fear influences our behavior. Always. It should, that’s its healthy mechanism.

It just saves our lives in the normal version but ruins our lives in the distorted, neurotic version.

What should we do?

Develop awareness

Why? So it helps us to distinguish the adequate from the neurotic, see where we rely on facts, where speculation, understand where fear is real and where our trauma, for example, works, and of course, choose a strategy for dealing with our fear.

Then he goes.