Fear and anxiety are emotions often used interchangeably, although they are not the same thing. In this blog, however, I won’t go into detail about the difference between those emotions but mainly look at how they affect our health. I will also mainly focus on the fear of developing a life-threatening disease or getting a viral infection with complications because many people consciously or unconsciously suffer from this type of fear.
What are fear and anxiety?
The biological purpose of fear is to help you survive. The fear’s “job” is to get the body ready to fight or run away (the “fight or flight” response) when there is any form of danger.
When you feel an emotion such as fear, the five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching translate information happening in your immediate environment. For example, when you see a car approaching at high speed, hear footsteps approaching from behind, smell gas in your house, eat something that tastes spoiled, or feel a touch in a dark room when you have not seen anyone there, your limbic system, known as the emotional brain, switches on the fear response.
This happens automatically; you have no control over whether you have such emotions, only how you react to them and deal with them. So don’t blame yourself for having emotions, like fear, because you cannot always prevent them. But you can prevent the fear from turning into anxiety, which means that the fear is suppressed and sinks to a deeper level where it constantly remains present.
Where do the fear and anxiety come from?
Fear and anxiety usually come from a feeling of ignorance, powerlessness, and uncertainty about what can happen. Uncertainty is a phenomenon that we deal with every day, consciously or unconsciously. If we are able to see that the only certainty in life is that one day we will leave our physical body, then we will never have to place value on certainty anymore. We will be able to accept the permanent presence of uncertainty in our lives without fear and contradiction. If we go out the door and get in the car, we have no certainty that we will return home unharmed. In this way, we can deal with other things in life by not paying much attention to them.
Powerlessness, in this case, is the result of ignorance. If you understand how your body works on the inside and how you can optimize its functioning, you can let go of the fear of developing a life-threatening disease or getting a viral infection.
If you remain dependent throughout your life on someone else (doctors or therapists) to make you better because you don’t know what you can do to get better, the fear, on an unconscious level, will keep you imprisoned for life and continue to control your life. To experience true freedom in your life, it is necessary to let go of your fears and discover the power within yourself. You can do that by gaining knowledge about how you can optimally take care of your body and applying it structurally.
Now let’s see what fear and anxiety do to your body
Anxiety paralyzes your body and mind, so you can no longer use your physical and mental abilities to solve the problems in your body in a natural way. If anxiety attacks you due to the coronavirus or because you are afraid you might have cancer, the stress level in your body increases dramatically. Often you are not even aware of that stress because fear keeps you paralyzed. If you have health problems, it is very understandable that you worry; that’s very human. In this case, you have even more reasons to let go of fear so that your body can be unhindered and active in protecting you against the disease or a virus.
What does fear do to the physiological processes in your body?
Fear and anxiety cause many changes in the body. You probably know that the adrenaline and cortisol levels and, therefore, also blood sugar levels in your body increase considerably during stress. If this happens for a short time, nothing is wrong. It is healthy and normal to experience fear when you cross the road and see a car approaching you at an enormous speed. You startle, and your body responds as it should respond; you run to save your life. Any physical changes that fear causes promote a rapid response to danger.
But if you are held in fear for a long period because you don’t know where your complaints come from or, during a virus pandemic, because you are afraid of being infected and getting seriously ill from it, your fight-and-flight mechanism stays on. High adrenaline and cortisol levels, as a result of that stress, disrupt all vital processes in your body.
Your heart starts racing, and your breathing gets shallower and faster. Your digestive system will then no longer be able to digest your food optimally, no matter how healthily you try to eat, your excretory organs will no longer be able to optimally process the waste, so a lot of toxic waste will remain in your body and be stored in your tissues and organs, and your immune system can no longer optimally protect against a virus or a possible growth of cancer cells because, among other things, signal transmission from your brain is disrupted.
The hunger and satiety center in your body that regulates your feeling of hunger and fullness is also disturbed, which increases the chance that you will eat unhealthily and too much. This has a negative effect on your immune system, so you quickly end up in a vicious circle, and your body’s capacities deteriorate even more. In this state, your body cannot keep itself in good shape and work on healing. The first and most important step is, therefore, to let go of the fear and focus on strengthening your immune system and all other processes in your body.
How do you release fear and anxiety?
It is, of course, not a one-two-three task for your body to eliminate fear and anxiety. It is a process. Because I only discuss the fear of getting a disease, such as cancer, a heart attack, or infection with a virus in this blog, it is easier to tackle and eliminate this fear quickly. The practical lifestyle, nutrition tips, and knowledge about how your body works that you will find on this website or in my books, online program, and masterclasses will give you more confidence in the power of your body. To experience this power, it is, of course, necessary to convert the knowledge into action. Once you act, the fear will slowly disappear, and there will be room for continuous improvements in your health.
