How to Recover a Mind Hijacked by Fear
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How to Recover a Mind Hijacked by Fear:
Fear is a deep wired biological response when we feel threatened and unsafe. Fear starts in the brain and spreads like wild fire throughout the body. Where do you feel fear in your body? Does your heart race? Do you have a rush of blood to your face? Perhaps your heart races as your blood pressure increases?
Fear starts in your brain. The amygdala is almond shaped and resides in the temporal lobe of the brain. It’s like a hound dog as it sniffs out what stands out to you. Once it detects that something is standing out to you in a threatening manner, it lights the fuse that triggers the defense/protection mode of the body. In a 125th thousands of a second, as soon as you mentally categorize something as a potential threat to your safety and wellbeing, SHAZAM, your body follows your mind and dumps a bunch of neuro-chemicals within your system that evoke the stress response: fight, flight or freeze are your only 3 choices of response in that moment. As you nail down how fear expresses itself in your body, you create a degree of separation. You get off the stage of the drama that is evoking the fear and are in a position to choose a different thought.
Next time you feel fear rushing headlong into your body, pause, breathe and observe where it goes and how it manifests for you. When you are high-noticing around the elements of the fear response, you can then direct the powerful rush of stress hormones back to recovery. Talk back to the fear and reclaim the power of God’s love within you.“Perfect love casts out all fear” 1 John 4:18. When the serpent of fear hijacks your mind remember this truth: “The One who is within you is greater than the one in the world” 1 John 4:4.
Ask yourself the following questions next time your mind is high-jacked by fear. Clarity of focus leads to accuracy of response:
- What thought ignited the fear reaction in my body?
- What belief am I making about myself in this moment?
- How is my body manifesting the fearful thought?
- What’s real and what is imagined?
- What do I want to do about it?
I grew up in a haunted house on Long Island. In fact I was once interviewed by the X-Factor on what I saw growing up. I often joke around and say that the reason why I originally pursued pursued being a SME in stress management was for selfish reasons, because I was consistently triggered into the stress response growing up in a haunted house. I would hear footsteps every night in the room above mine, see lights turning on and off, witness things moving from one place to the other and many other un-natural things.
For example, when we first moved in, my sister, mom and I unpacked all of our clothes and put them in our dresser only to wake up the next morning to find all of our clothes in a big pile in the center of our room and all of the dresser drawers open. My sister would often see the original owner of the house (it was over 100 years old, we had pictures of the original owner) appear and disappear. When my sister played the piano, a little girl would often appear in the mirror and watch my sister play. As my mom told us after we sold the house 23 years later, the “ghosts” liked the love we shared as a family as they would only do mischievous things to get our attention.
I remember waking up after a snow storm to this scene: two of our big iron chairs, we used during the summer, had been removed from our locked storage room, and were facing out towards the water in the middle of our back lawn…no tracks in the snow. My mom said, they must have wanted to enjoy the view. There are too many stories to write them all in this post. I will end with this: we sold the house and the couple who purchased it ended up having a priest come in to do an exorcism as the ghosts apparently were not as friendly to them as they were to us. The wife was pushed down the back of the stairs and the husband started to dress like the original owner of the house. At night they were kept up by noise of opening and closing drawers and doors.
Fear has many different agents it uses to spin us out of safety. Whether it be the appearing of the spiritual world into our physical world, as was my case, or the fear of what people think of us OR the fear of not getting what we want. It is very personal and all comes down to our sense of safety and connection.
I remember when I started my personal relationship with Christ at 17 years old. My heart would race every night before going to bed, not sure what would show up in the dark. Several years later, I was moved to start praying for these people who were living with us in the “spiritual” realm. As soon as I started to pray for them, my fears started to disappear along with the footsteps that I heard for over a decade each night. How do I explain that?
Perhaps it was my choice to flip my fear into faith that God was bigger than the very thing I had given power away to:unknown spiritual things happening within a physical world.My once very restless nights consumed with fear and trepidation were replaced with confidence and inner peace, as I remembered what my soul always knows: God’s got my back and is ultimately in charge here.
So the next time your mind is hijacked by fear, stand up, talk back and recover your God given power to overcome and defeat the ghosts that haunt your mind. Think on these thoughts to remind your mind that you are safe and connected:
- The One who lives within you is greater than the circumstance that haunts you
- This too shall pass
- How will I feel about this tomorrow? Next year? 10 years?
- What would I tell a friend in this situation?
- What would I want to tell myself in this moment looking back from my deathbed?
- When was the last time I faced a similar fear, how did I move beyond it?
- What do I want to believe about myself in this moment?
- I’m not the opinions of other people unless I choose to be
- It’s not rejection it’s just direction
- There are no problems, only situations that require my attention for solution
- I’m not alone, God adores me, just as I am and has plans for me that reach far beyond this momentary struggle and hardship
- Man looks at the outer appearance and God looks at the heart
- God believes I can…do I?
This is “earth school”, as you pass one test of feeling fear and going for peace and confidence anyway, you will often notice the next one that comes along is easier to pass. Keep on practicing your ability to recover quicker today than yesterday. Take notes on the lessons you learned about yourself along with what you want to remember the next time you face a fear. Everything in life is sent to ultimately make us fearless and free!
