As per John Burroughs, “To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.” And we can’t agree more with him.
The fact is “Fear twirls on the misuse of your imagination” and any input from your imaginations are taken as real evidence, irrespective of the real surrounding or situation. Fear is like water and it needs a channel to go down. If nothing literally life threatening is happening right at the point you feel fear, then your imagination constructs a channel for that fear by creating a reason for you to feel fearful. Fear can make you create the true essence of threatening situation and you believe it.
If you feel anxious when you think about an upcoming situation you are misusing imagination and building an unhelpful association.
How to shun Fear?
If you fear sky-diving, and you avoid because of the accident-death situation created while you were in the state of fear, those fear instinct is going to get the message that the situation is really life threatening and will try to build the fear even more.
One of the first things to switch off when your combat mode hits in is to drool or to produce saliva. For example, you are in a tricky situation and you chew gum, the gum makes you salivate and your fear instinct gets the feedback that all must be well because you can salivate and so all the other symptoms of fear get reduced in a domino effect.
Run away and the fear builds – stay and do it, fear diminishes.
Besides, if you stay in the situation rather than run from it, then eventually fear switches off because if it was really life threatening you’d run away. So you train your instincts partly by how you behave. If you refuse to face it the first time, you’re never going to do it the second time.
The strongest way to use your imagination is through hypnosis
Feel calm when you imagine doing something. This trains your instincts to produce calmness in the situation itself. The best way to do this is through your imagination during hypnotherapy, where the hypnotherapy techniques will neutralize your fear responses. As well as being influenced by your actions, your instincts are shaped by your imagination and how you feel when you imagine something. We call it Self-hypnosis!
If you have something challenging coming up, close your eyes, enter deeply relaxed hypnosis and then – and only then – imagine yourself in that upcoming situation. In this way, you are setting a helpful instinctive blueprint for the situation. This is because your instincts don’t distinguish between what you imagine and what you really experience.