Fear - Anxiety - Worry
over problems you can't solve or fix
Fear is an emotional and physiological reaction to an immediate and actual perceived threat of harm to ourself or to something or someone that matters to us.
Anxiety is an emotional and physiological reaction to a imagined danger of harm to ourself or our interests at some time in the future - i.e. to something that might happen, whereas fear relates to a threat that actually is happening now.
Worry is the mental consideration of possible harm that might befall us, or people or things that matter to us, and mental consideration of how we might deal with that threat.
Panic is the state of mind and emotions where we act (react) forcibly, impulsively and/or irrationally and unconstructively to a perceived threat.
Terror is the state where fear is so overwhelming that our mind, body and emotions become partly or totally paralysed. We have great difficulty in functioning. We "can't think straight". We are physically "frozen with terror" and emotionally overwhelmed i.e. have difficulty expressing the torrent of feeling we experience, such that some become internalised and held-in for a period of time. Held-in feelings are experienced as persistent trauma - in the most extreme cases we call this "post-traumatic stress disorder".
The Anxiety Experience: poem
Consequences Fear, anxiety and worry are natural and unavoidable occasional experiences from which our healthy mind, body, spirit and emotions quickly "bounce back". If we experience them too frequently, or even constantly, our mind, body, spirit and emotions may enter unbalanced patterns leading to increasing misperceptions, increasingly poor judgements and decisions. Anxiety drives accident-prone, aggressive, erratic, impulsive and obsessional behaviours. It also leads to the downward path of deteriorating performance, relationships, exhaustion and burnout. If these situations are not corrected then our health may become seriously impaired, we become prone to heart attack, high blood pressure, stroke, stomach ulcers and many other diseases.
- our perception of the magnitude of the threat
- our perception of the extent to which we are powerless
- our perception of the extent to which we are helpless (on our own)
- external factors (the information we have from the real world)
- memory factors (our past experiences of this type of situation)
- current state (of mind, body, spirit, emotions)
Confidence & Self-esteem
Centering & Meditation
Autogenics & Self-hypnosisBreathing techniques
Reflective practice
Healing heartbreaksExercise
Prayer
Massage
