textures. Dirty fear ignores the facts (like right now you’re perfectly safe) and
embellishes your worries in a toxic and dramatic way. Your imagination can put your
body into fight, flight or freeze mode, and create physical symptoms like a madly
beating heart, shallow breathing and a sense of panic. A dear friend of mine
describes how she eventually finds herself deciding what to wear to the funeral
when her husband is late coming home. When you believe a fear to be true (even if
it’s not) your whole body reacts accordingly.
Dirty fear turns you into a victim – you’re powerless to do much in the face of an
imagined fear. When you feel powerless you become de-motivated. When you feel
de-motivated you’re unable to take action. The fear you experience is not the
problem – it’s the fact that YOU allow it to limit you in such an effective way.
Practice
Use alarms to do this check every four hours: rate your anxiety levels
on a scale of 0 (totally relaxed and peaceful) to 10 (highly stressed
and anxious, beating heart, shallow breathing etc). If you answered
five or more, then ask yourself whether the issue causing this anxiety
is true right now. Keep a record of your answers for about 10 days.
What do your answers show you?Learn to discern the dirty fears from the clean ones. It’s not difficult – any moment
when you are experiencing anxiety, check if there’s true, immediate danger. The
majority of the time you’ll find there isn’t. Also, when you experience clean fear –
you’ll find that you are totally present and in the moment. When you cross a busy
road, your mind is aware as you cross. You won’t be wondering what to eat for lunch
as you cross the road!
When your mind is busy with dirty fear – you’re not completely present. When
you’re worrying about your partner being unfaithful, or running out of money, or
being retrenched, your mind is busy with some future possibility; it’s not dealing
with the present moment.