3 REASONS WHY WE FEEL FEAR DURING GLOBAL EVENTS

I was inspired by my breakfast for last week's blog. I got to wondering, how heavy is a coffee mug? Spoiler alert: It doesn't matter. Check it out HERE if you missed it.

Today, let's talk about fear. With everything that is happening in the world right now, we can't help it but to sometimes experience fear. I'm not a political type, so I'm not going to dig deep into the Ukraine and Russia situation, I'm not going to make predictions about what could happen, but there is one thing I can help with: Fear. Why are we afraid? Why do we have these feelings that seem to be overwhelming? Keep reading or watch the video below for more...

Whether you work for a corporation, whether you built your own business or whether you are retired, there are some impacts, and we cannot ignore them. No matter what they are, global events have an impact on us, on our personal feelings. It affects everybody. There are three reasons we will be discussing today as to why we often feel afraid during a global event.

Let's understand what is happening in our brain and why we are afraid even though we may be physically safe.

#1. Into the Unknown

why do we feel fear during global events

Moving forward on a road that hasn't been built yet is pretty scary, isn't it? Well, what we don't know, we make up. Our brain fills in the blanks and what's happening right now in our brain is that there are lots of pieces that we cannot explain or that we cannot be sure of.

Of course, let's be honest with ourselves. Even before this happened, we were still not sure about the future. No one can be. Our brain already was filling the blanks with predictions, but right now, because of everything that we see on the news, it's filling the blanks with a powerful emotion: Fear. Fear is what's sitting on top of our prefrontal cortex now.

#2. Stuck in a Loop

We tend to get caught up in an emotional loop. When you're afraid, your brain identifies the feeling as fear, and it sends the feeling throughout our body, so that we physically feel it. When the body feels the fear, it sends a message to the brain saying: "Hey bud, we're afraid right now. Help me continue to feel that way." Then the brain comes up with another reason why you should be afraid and it feeds it to your body. The body then sends another message asking... You get the picture, right? You get stuck in that emotional loop.

The thing is emotions are not designed to last that long. What usually happens is that our unconscious mind comes to the rescue and takes the emotion from you so that it can deal with it, and you can exit the loop. Just like when children throw a temper tantrum and are all good 90 seconds later! For us, though, because of our experiences, because of what we lived in the past, because of everything that we know and all the stuff that is accumulated in our drawer of life, our vision of things can be biased and we'll have more trouble exiting the loop.

#3. What's Your Story?

What is your story? What's your model of reality? Have you lived through war before? You have lived through a pandemic. You have lived through a global worldwide event before. You may have lived through a recession before. You may have lived through a market crash. You may have lived through losing your business. You may have lived through serious challenges in your life or in your career. A lot of our past experiences tint the glasses we look through. They can cause us to feel more afraid or less afraid.

Our brain has this habit. It's like you are living in a corn field and some paths are already flattened out. They are the paths we take the most. And if you have had lots of experiences and challenges happen to you in the past, you may take the flattened out path and see the future in a darker way. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that people that see the future in a darker way are bad people. They're not. They just had more stuff happen to them before, so they are living in their own model of reality.

Understanding your past may help you and in next week's blog, we will be learning about seven tools that we can use in order to be able to get back in control during a global event, because no one can control what is happening, but we can always control ourselves. See you next time!