Day 25 Pain without fear

@Adde160, it sounds like you are achieving success. I would suggest that your fearful brain is a little bit desperate about this success, so it's trying to convince you that abandoning your fear is risky and dangerous. It's also trying to make you feel bad about yourself, when you should be giving yourself a lot more credit for what you've achieved so far.

Remember, humans, along with all sentient beings, are wired to constantly be on the alert for danger - this is built in to us and it has not evolved to cope with the modern world. Any time you feel fear, your primitive brain is interpreting the possible threat as equivalent to a sabre-tooth tiger waiting to eat you, and its job is to ramp up the initial fear into a full-blown fight-or-flight response. Health or exercise anxiety is a perfect catalyst for this. And I know what I'm talking about, because I've had exercise anxiety all my life.

Or maybe it's too much! This can happen!** Engaging in this amount of effort can actually turn into distracting and desperate behavior, which is the opposite of what we want to achieve. Consider what might happen if you set that aside for now, and worked on a new skill? There's one which would be quite appropriate at this stage, which is the skill of talking yourself down from fear in the moment. This means being willing to literally talk to your fearful brain, thank it for trying to keep you safe, and then calm it and love it and convince it that you are perfectly safe and healthy, and that whatever symptom it's trying to use to make you fearful is simply not necessary. Always accompany your self-talk with deep calm breathing.

The first symptom I used this on when I first started doing this work in 2011 was digestive distress, and it worked instantly. I realized I could also use it at the gym whenever my personal trainer suggested something that my fear brain tried to tell me I couldn't do. I told my brain that I was safe, I had supervision, and that I'd been with my trainer long enough that I trusted her judgement. In addition, I visualized the benefits I would achieve (I had received a diagnosis of mild osteoporosis in my late 50s, around 2009 or so, and I didn't want to take the drugs - which meant that I had to get serious about weight-bearing exercise). My brain tried to give me pain and anxiety symptoms (like a tight chest) but I decided that I was capable of differentiating between symptoms that I could work through, and ones that maybe I should back off from a little bit - with the goal of working up to whatever. And I did it. My rational brain prevailed, and the increase in my physical abilities and stamina were a significant part of my overall TMS success in 2011 and 2012.

~Jan

** for a discussion of how letting go is an option, check out these two replies on a recent thread started by someone who has been doing the work and is still struggling: by @hawaii_five0 and by @mbo . I wish there was a black-and-white answer for you, but the truth about this work is that there is no such thing, just as there is no One Way to heal. The one key element we see over and over is being able to stop, calm down, and mindfully examine what's going on in the moment.