Will You Let Fear Prevent You From Being Happy Every Day?

Back in cave man days, fear was essential to survival. Fear stopped us from starving. If we were hungry, we just had to get out there and face the wild beasts in order to find something to eat. Out in the wilds, fear sharpened our senses so that we could detect if there was something large and ferocious out there, just waiting to make a meal of us!

But today, we don’t need to have such a sharp, heightened sense of fear around day-to-day activities such a buying food. Yet, many people do have a fear of going to the supermarket, going to the park or beach, going anywhere outside their homes. This is a debilitating fear which can stop people living full and active and interesting lives.

Now, your own fears may not be so incapacitating as the inability to leave you house. But where do you feel fearful? At a job interview? At a social gathering like a friend’s party? On a date? All of us feel some degree of nervousness at times, but if this feeling grows strong, it can prevent us from going out and enjoying life.

Where do you think your fear comes from? There are no sabre tooth tigers or wooly mammoths out there! But there are other people, and how other people think of us can make us unwilling to do the things we’d really love to do. That kind of fear, real or imagined (and a lot of fears really are imagined), is something we can tap away using a body energy therapy called EFT.

Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, is a mode of energy psychology which combines focusing on negative thoughts in the mind, while tapping on the acupressure points on the face and body. What this means is that you think about your negative emotion, such as fear, while tapping lightly with the fingers on points around the eyes, under the nose and chin, then on the collarbones, sides and top of the head. While repeating the negative thoughts out loud, this process actually reduces the strong emotional reaction to those negative thoughts so that you feel clearer and can make better choices. It doesn’t get rid of the situation which caused the negative feeling, but it does give you a clearer mind to cope with it.

For example, you may be feeling anxious about a job interview because you’ve been unemployed for a while and none of your recent job interviews have gone well. Tapping on those past experiences and the negative thoughts they have created will reduce your belief that this interview will also be a failure, that the interviewers will be secretly laughing or talking about you and that you’ll never find a job. Sure, you still have to do the interview, but now you’ll go in feeling confident, self-assured and calm.

Fear is part of our natural survival instinct and it is important. But we don’t want it to take over our lives. Use EFT every day to tap away unnecessary fears that are holding you back.