FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real - Video Transcript

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist and today I'm going to be talking about the acronym FEAR. So we all know fear as a basic human emotion, you know, it's necessary for survival and everybody experiences it, but in the psychology world we like to use it as an acronym for false evidence appearing real. So when we experience anxiety a lot of times, we are making assumptions about how the future is going to be right, and so we're not basing anything off of real evidence that we have, but rather we're sort of creating this narrative of fear and despair based on maybe one little fact that we know or or one little symptom, the best example I can think of for this is, and I'm sure everyone has done this at some point, but you know, you experience some physical symptom and all of a sudden you're on google and WebMD, looking up your symptoms and next thing, you know, you're diagnosing yourself with some terminal illness, right?

It sort of snowballs into this this bubble of terror and you start to kind of feel trapped and really fearful of the situation when in reality this was kind of constructed in your own mind, so we're living in this thought, constructed hell, which which can feel very real and true and in arguable, but in reality it's we're just sort of reinventing and re experiencing a reality that doesn't exist and likely will not exist in the future, right? It's just this, this narrative that we have running through our minds.

So how do we deal with this? I think one of the first steps is just understanding it. So, part of it is just acknowledging that you simply don't know, right? Our brain wants concrete information. It wants, it hates uncertainty. It wants something to cling to, to say, you know, this is what's happening, or this is what's going to happen, is going to happen.

And so by simply saying, you don't know, you're really leaning into that uncertainty and accepting that there are things that you still don't have information about. But instead of allowing your mind to fill in the blanks with those negative thoughts and assumptions and that fear, you're going to just kind of sit with that uncertainty and the fact that there are some things you don't know.

So that's easier said than done. But with practice, you can get better at doing that. We also want to understand that this is a very it's a biological response that's hardwired fear is hardwired from an evolutionary perspective. So it's necessary for survival. If we deleted this emotion that's hard wired in our brain, it would cause us to become too careless and then this would actually diminish our chances of being able to keep ourselves safe and alive.

So fear is an important emotion and it's necessary for survival and keeping ourselves safe. It's just that we want to experience that fear in a healthy amount and not have it sort of go overboard and create more anxiety and more fear than what is rooted in reality and evidence. And then lastly to understand that a lot of fears in the modern world are what we would call learned fears.

So um a common one would be like getting caught up in the impression that you have on others and how their judgment is going to have an impact on your own self worth. So this is a learned fear and something that really I see most of my clients struggle with. And so it's important to understand that, you know, this is not a a real threat to your survival.

But it's more of a perceived threat and once we can can identify that that is false evidence, right? That it's a perceived threat, we don't have actual evidence that our survival is threatened, then we can sort of start to separate ourselves from that fear and from those, those thoughts that are creating that that narrative for us.

So I hope this was informative and helpful. Feel free to leave a comment or ask any questions if you have them. Be sure to subscribe to either my youtube channel, "The Anxiety Therapist," or follow me on social media @catharticspacecounseling or you can check out my website www.catharticspacecounseling.com.

I do offer free 15 minute phone consultations for potential clients, so feel free to schedule that and see if we might be a good fit to work together. I hope you all have a great week and I'll see you next time.