Working with clients this week has got me thinking a little deeper about our fears and how they stifle us from moving forwards and how fear depletes our energy on a daily basis, raises our physiological nutritional requirements, and has the potential to make us unhealthy and ultimately shorten our lifespans. For our ancestors fear was a useful aid to survival. It helped him to fight or to turn and run and improved the chances of short term survival. But the key here is “short-term”. In a fear state
the Sympathetic Nervous System is invoked which stimulates the production of adrenaline and prepares the body for action. In this state the body healing and digestion functionality is cut to focus on the scary tiger running after us. Once the race against the tiger has been run or the fight run the body adrenaline levels reduce and the Parasympathic Nervous system resume work and we can rest, relax and digest.

In the modern world we don’t usually have tigers to worry about, but the mortgage, the job, the kids. We can have fears for all of these things. Many people spend much of their lives in a stressful state. Long term this has bad implications for health. It means that food doesn’t get digested properly, and people can spend most of their lives living on adrenaline or stimulants and its a hard cycle to break. This is one of the major block to healing and making the life that we want for ourselves. Fear keeps us from moving on to a better place but the dissatisfaction of staying in the place that we are now is also a huge stress. It’s a double bind.
The only way out is to start to logically and rationally address the fears and start to pick our way out of the hole we have dug. But how? Where to start? A person in an extreme fear state may not be best placed to make logical and rational decisions.
There are lots of good kinesiology tools that can help people who want to start to see their way out of a perpetual fear state. EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) is a basic one and there is a good programme for self-help. Emotional Stress Release (ESR) another good self-help tool. Beyond this, Health Kinesiologists are trained to help clients release fears and phobias which can be life-changing for some people.

There is so much to talk about on fears that I’m certain to revisit it again, but that’s all for now.