F.E.A.R. and Your Anxiety Disorder

This is the age of fear. Fear is being sold to us constantly and if we have an anxiety disorder, we’re buying it in large quantities and stocking up on it. We store it in our subconscious minds until we’re overflowing with it.

F.E.A.R. is an acronym that comes in three different flavors and none of them tastes all that good. Yet we tend to buy them and eat them anyway. Or, more accurately, they eat us.

F.E.A.R. – False Evidence Appearing Real

Think for just a moment about how you feel about our current economic crisis. See, if you just thought about an economic crisis, you bought more fear. Is it really a crisis and does it really affect you directly? If you’re like the vast majority of people, it does NOT directly affect you, even if the unemployment rate is 10 or 12 percent. Even at 12% unemployment, 88% are still employed. And last I checked, that’s an overwhelming majority.

The news media refuse to let go of the “crises” in the world because they keep you glued to the television or front page of the paper. They WANT you to be afraid because it sells. They’re presenting you with tons of false evidence and you’re accepting it as gospel.

For a recent example, let’s look at the Swine Flu outbreak. The Mexican authorities responsibly reported it and a media feeding frenzy ensued. Flights in and out of Mexico City were suspended, American people were afraid to go anywhere in Mexico and were actually afraid of getting within ten feet of anyone who had been to Mexico or even looked like a Mexican person. Even if that Mexican-looking person hadn’t even been to Mexico. U. S. hospitals set up screening stations at their entrances - complete with surgical masks for visitors - and their emergency rooms were overflowing with people thinking they were going to die from a virus they thought they might have.

When authorities like the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control released their findings, it turned out the Swine Flu “epidemic” wasn’t an epidemic after all and the Swine Flu wasn’t any worse than any other flu, it was just more contagious. But did the news media spend any time telling us that? No. They were still busily feeding the fear market.

F.E.A.R. – False Experience Appearing Real

Fear is a reaction generated in your mind and whether the experience causing it is real or imagined, you experience the experience and you feel the fear. Again, we’ll use the example of the media. War, terrorism, the earthquake in Haiti - these are all lead stories. If you live in all but three or four countries in the world, you’re not actually experiencing any of these things but if you watch the news, they’re creating fear in your mind. And this leads to physical stress and tension.

You can’t help it, your mind conjures up worst case scenarios of what could happen to you if you were there or if those problems came to your neighborhood. You falsely experience what COULD happen rather than experiencing what really IS happening. Then you find yourself stressed out and anxious.

Now let’s move on to the acronym that most affects you if you have any kind of anxiety disorder:

F.E.A.R - False Expectations Appearing Real

If you suffer from any form of anxiety disorder you have developed a habit of getting into “what-if” thinking. And you also have a negative mindset so all the “what-ifs” are going to be negative. “What if I don’t hear my alarm in the morning? I’ll oversleep. And what if traffic is bad? Then I’ll be really late. If I’m late for work I’ll miss that important meeting and my boss will be really mad. He might fire me!”

Would that mental scenario keep you tense and unable to sleep all night? I’d guess the answer is yes. So you’d get to work on time but be so tired you’d be ineffective and guess what? Your boss would be mad. A self-fulfilling prophecy and the Law of Attraction at work: If you focus on your fears, they’re likely to come true in sometimes strange and unimagined ways.

What Can You Do?

First of all, you need to accept the fact that the vast majority of your fears are not going to come true. After all, you’ve been feeling fears for a long time – maybe all your life – and most of the things you feared didn’t materialize, did they?

Second, those feared things that DID happen, you’ve survived, haven’t you? You dealt with things that happened when they happened: in the moment. And you’re still alive to talk about it.

When you play the “what-if” game, you lose your perspective on reality and begin accepting as “fact” things that are far from reality. The price you pay for playing this game is anxiety, panic and mental and emotional paralysis. You get stuck looking ahead and life stops moving forward.

Stop buying the fear everyone is selling and live in the moment. If you catch yourself playing the game, remind yourself that it’s someone else’s game and you don’t have to play it. Ask yourself this question: “Is that REALLY going to happen to me? If it’s not happening to me at this moment, why do I believe it’s going to happen to me?”

And last but not least, turn off the TV news and skip the front page of the newspaper. You can live without knowing all the gory details of the latest war or other crisis and you'll live a better life without wasting your valuable time worrying about when we're going to get out of the recession.

The News And Your Anxiety

Do you watch the news on TV, listen to it on the radio or habitually read the newspaper? If you have an Anxiety Disorder of any kind, be it Generalized Anxiety, Chronic Anxiety, Panic Disorder, Hypochondria, Agoraphobia or OCD, you probably should break the news habit. Why? Because watching what media outlets decide is newsworthy will cause your anxiety problem to worsen!

Think about what's on the front page of the paper, on your local or national news broadcasts - and even what's on NPR. Is it good news? Is it about happy events? Are there any personal interest stories in the first 20 minutes of the local news program? Not very often, right?

So what are they feeding you? Crime, death, war, bad economy, epidemics and in winter, deadly snow storms. That's right, even on the weather channels and in the brief weather reports on the local and national news, they don't bother telling you how wonderful the weather is in Key West, they only mention Key West when there's a hurricane there.

And notice how when they're going to tell you there's a slight chance of snow in your area they start off the news show by getting (and keeping) your attention with "Snow possible tonight!" Be honest, how many times when they've done that, has it actually snowed an appreciable amount?

News media have one purpose, and that's to make money for the station or network, or the paper. And their decisions as to what's newsworthy have nothing to do with what you want to see, only with what they want you to see. In other words, what sells.

What Sells Commercial Airtime and Why Should You Care?

Apparently the media have done their homework and found long ago that what brings in the most money is keeping you glued to the TV. And that what keeps Americans (and I'm sure anyone else anywhere in the world) glued to the TV is fear, plain and simple. High drama. Things that make you think: "Oh! How awful!"

Even though what they're showing you on the TV or the front page of the paper probably isn't happening to you, it's affecting you. Because you're not involved in what's happening, you can't do anything about it and you have no power to resolve the conflict you're absorbing. And this causes you tension and stress. And anxiety.

How About Sports?

Of course, something that brings in the big bucks for the TV networks is sports. Pretty fun stuff, right? I mean, it beats war and famine. But guess what? If you have a favorite team - YOUR team - watching them on TV can cause you worse problems than the news!

Don't believe me? I used to be a huge sports nut but found out years ago that watching my Seattle teams lose made my anxiety symptoms terrible - after I quit drinking. In fact, the last time I tried to watch the Seahawks play was at the end of their best season ever, in the Super Bowl. I should be happy and excited, right? But what I witnessed was the officials embarrassing the entire NFL by doing anything they could think of - no matter how obvious - to steal the game from the Hawks and hand it to the Steelers. Hey, ESPN polls showed that most of the country saw the same thing. Anyway back to the anxiety: I had to quit watching my team playing in the Super Bowl because I started having a panic attack!

How About Regular Programs and Movies?

Back when I used to watch some TV, the most popular shows were police and crime dramas, what my dad used to call "shoot-em-ups". Again, these create unresolved conflict that you internalize, leading to higher stress levels and anxiety. And really, if you want an example of unresolved conflict, the soap operas are BUILT on it! Day after day of no resolution.

The same can be said about a lot of dramatic movies, by the way. Have you ever watched a scary movie, the kind that keeps you on the edge of the couch waiting to find out if the hero is going to get killed? Bad news if you suffer from anxiety disorder. And even after the movie ends, you're still stressed out and nervous, right?

When you get right down to it, about the only thing on TV that's safe for anxiety sufferers to watch is comedy and the educational cable channels, like Discovery and Animal Planet. But now that I think about it, isn't most TV comedy an insult to your intelligence? :-)

Let's face it: Watching network television isn't good for your mental health and if you have anxiety disorder, your physical health, either. You'd be better off spending your time reading this blog.

To your health,

Owen