Fear is debilitating. It causes us to procrastinate, catastrophise and even spiral so much so that we freeze completely, keeping us stuck. The worst thing about fear is that it only exists in the space between our two ears. Yes, there are times when we experience fear for our physical safety, but if you’re like me, most of the fear that I experience is not a lion hunting me down across a savannah, but a fictional projection I have created about the future.
While you’ll never find me putting up my hand to go on Survivor and be immersed in a tank of scorpions, I do believe that the only way to tackle fear is to face it head on. By doing so, you obliterate the story you have created in your mind and suddenly, it ceases to exist within your reality. You feel lighter. More free.
There have been periods of my life that I found myself feeling constantly anxious, preoccupied with what people thought of me and generally feeling claustrophobic within my own life. My mind was like a speeding freight train on a mission to collect evidence that I was a failure.
I got to the stage where I wanted to snap out of it. I wanted to feel positive and genuinely optimistic again. I wanted to be able to experience joy, without the threat of tears springing from my eyes. But how? I decided to do a little experiment and take dramatic action to start feeling like myself again.
I did everything I felt was holding me back – and true to my personality – I batched it all into one week. I called this week: Fear Week.
My intention for Fear Week was simple. Over 7 days, I was to do all the things I knew were holding me back and were not conducive to living the life I wanted to step into. It was time to metaphorically and practically draw a line in the sand from the past chapter of my life and set the tone for the next chapter. I was going to do all the things I had been avoiding and that were keeping me entrenched in the pain I had experienced. I’m not someone who likes to linger, so this approach worked well for me.
Here’s what my Fear Week entailed:
- I didn’t wear makeup for a whole week as I knew I had been hiding and putting on a ‘public face’ that everything was fine. I didn’t want to do that anymore. Not wearing make up was my metaphorical way of saying that I will no longer present a facade to the world. I will show the real me, acne and all. Interestingly enough, this was the hardest one for me to do.
- To overcome a fear of unworthiness I bought myself some lovely new bras, underwear and bed sheets so I could feel good about myself again.
- I started a ‘Burn Book.’ I bought a cheap notebook with a soft cover (the type you use when you’re just learning to write in school) and wrote down all the ugly things I would never give myself permission to say aloud to anyone. For one month, I wrote down all the dark thoughts in my head and allowed them to flow onto the paper. Everything I believed about myself, my future, how I had failed and so on went into this book. I filled the entire notebook. At the end of the month, I burned the book on the BBQ. It was quite cathartic to give myself the space to acknowledge all the crap and get it out of my head – with no filtering or worrying what people would think if I said it out loud.
- At the end of the week, I went and stood in the ocean and facilitated my own personal cleansing. Waist deep in the water, I said out loud that I wanted to release the emotions I have been carrying that no longer serve me and allow them to wash away. As I dived under the water, it was almost like my own personal baptism and I came up feeling like I was at the start of a new chapter.
The impact of this week on my life going forward has been enormous. It was a definite catalyst for my confidence. The ritual act of symbolically drawing the line in the sand was a part of my healing and I’ve never looked back. The concept of Fear Week can be applied in many ways.
In Fear Week, you explore your relationship with anger, sadness, fear and guilt and let go of anything that is holding you back. The theory behind this is that old phrase: “what you resist persists.” If you are feeling super tired and sleepy, you can keep sitting at your desk and plough through the tiredness, but if you just had a ten minute lie down, you probably would feel a lot better for listening to how your body feels and consequently you’d get a lot more done.
If you allow yourself to acknowledge the emotions you’re feeling, you can move through them and let them go. Ain’t no point holding onto those nasties.
What would you do in your Fear Week?
