Finding Freedom from Fear

Transcript

This is episode 11 of In The Messy Podcast. I'm your host Jan, a registered psychotherapist in Ontario, Canada, and this podcast exists because we envision a future where every relationship, no matter how messy it may seem, has the potential to evolve into something beautiful and thriving.

And if you like this podcast, I'd love it if you could hit the subscribe button. And if you wanna make my day, please leave a review. It's one of the only ways I can interact with you all. And so today we're gonna talk about why it's so hard to face our fears, how to get addicted to becoming your strongest self, and how to actually conquer your fears.

So when you're ready, let's begin. So facing our fears, we've been on a journey where we are constantly developing our inner character by tackling our anxieties and fears. In previous episodes we worked on what is anxiety and how to manage it when it triggers us. And we also have taken a deep dive into the story behind our anxieties.

And if you're just joining me now, feel free to check out our previous podcast episodes as well. And so I'm gonna start off this episode telling you a story about one of my biggest friendship failures. So I'm gonna get very vulnerable with you as a way to face my fears of being seen as a terrible person. And this story is really freaking me out right now. Even my body doesn't wanna. Share this with you because I don't want any of you to think that I'm a terrible person.

But then again, I have no control over what you think about me to begin with, and I've shared about some of it in a previous episode a while back. The reason why I'm doing this is so that I can re-listen to this podcast over and over, and over again. And face my fears all over again and it will expose me and help my brain to get past this huge relationship blunder.

So I had a really good high school friend coming from a private school of 20 people in each grade and going into a public school was frankly intimidating. The first day or the second day of school, I just chose to sit by one of the group of girls and introduce myself. Hi, I'm Janette And back then and still now I am awkward.

And when I say awkward, I mean in all caps awkward. If there's anybody that knows me in my personal life, there are some things that I might say that will make people blink and stare at me. And I'm just really awkward. Uh, what can I say? So on that day, I just chose one of those girls. She looked nice and I just sat next to her and then I introduced myself, hi, I'm Janette. And I asked, oh, can I look at your phone and look at the music that you're listening to? Because back in the day, you put your music on your phone and you can listen to the MP threes. She allowed me to do it. I took her phone and went through her playlist and she had some Christian songs, so I just said, oh, you're a Christian. Let's be friends. And so that's how our friendship kind of started off.

She was my first friend in high school and me being the. I don't know innocent or naive person that I was, I just called her my best friend because she was my first high school friend. We did clubs together, we did fellowship. It was really wonderful and I got really close to her and I didn't know that she was already feeling really awkward about our friendship. Fast forward, we went to the same university, which was McGill University in Montreal, and we became roommates, and to be honest, I really wasn't the best friend that I could have been to her.

The Jan that you know today is so far from the person that I was in high school and in university. And I did a lot of things that I'm really not proud of, including, a time when I was really upset at her. I was holding up an umbrella because it was raining and because I was spiteful, I just shook the umbrella and all of these drops just went on her. I knew it really upset her, but I didn't care because I was mad at her or there would be times where I would see her on the side of the road and completely ignore her even though she'd be waving at me.

Even now as I'm talking about it, that brings a lot of emotion to my eyes because there are a lot of things that she had to deal with that she didn't have to deal with. F only because she was dealing with me and she was very compassionate and showed a lot of grace and mercy towards me. So clearly, as you can hear, I had a lot of shame in this friendship, and little did I know she was going through a lot of depression and I should have been more cognizant of her mental health. After all, I was studying to become a mental health professional. And over time our friendship just degraded, I did a lot of terrible things to her. She did her best to be my friend while my mom had cancer, while my parents stopped me from going back home to visit my mom while she was doing cancer treatment. I was going through a lot of stuff and I wasn't the best person at that time. So what ended up happening is I sat her down and I said, Hey, I want you to take care of me, because at that time, I had a very disorganized attachment style. I really wanted her to be really close. I even wanted to say, oh, you could be my maid of honor. I want you to do that. I want you to be that because you and I are this close. And I think that really hurt her because in the next breath I said, well, because you're not doing what I want you to do. You don't get to be my maid of honor. So overall, she blocked me. She moved out, she took, oh, I believe a whole year off of school and to this day. We don't talk even though we've gone to the same graduate school. She told me, don't message me. Don't talk to me. I'm happy that you're happy with your life. Have a great life. Bye. And this is one of the major pitfalls and failures in my life because there will never be a time where I can go back and say, Hey, I'm sorry. I would love for us to end on more positive terms, but that's not what she wants, and I have learned to accept that. And so the reason why I wanted to share this, even though it's twisting my gut as I'm sharing this. Is because the more I share about the skeletons in my closet, the more I face my fears of being seen as a terrible person.

I am a terrible person. I admit it, but because I now admit it, I can change. It's hard to change, especially when you live in an alternate reality where you believe that you're right. And for the longest time, even after she said. Janette, I don't wanna see you anymore. I don't want to hear from you. I'm gonna block you. Right. I was living in this alternate reality that, oh, maybe in the future we would be able to reconnect again. But now I've accepted the reality that she is no longer my best friend, that she actually doesn't believe that we were best friends or friends to begin with, and I'm okay with that. That's a skeleton in my closet.

And so now I make it a practice to go into my skeleton closet over and over again to face my fears. And the more I face it, the more I expose myself to the stimulus, the situation. And the more my brain gets acquainted with the material, and the more my brain can take that information and do something about it, right? Because if I ignore it, nothing's gonna happen. But if I actually face it and do something about it to change who I am, then I actually improve. And that skeleton isn't a skeleton anymore. It becomes a badge of honor. A challenge that I've completed and now that it has been 12 years ago, my character is not the same because of what has happened to me, and that is because I haven't ignored it. But because I constantly play it back in my mind over and over and over again, and I think because of that, my friendships nowadays, I'm more cognizant of what I am doing. How am I taking care of my friends? How am I honouring them and respecting them because I didn't do that in the past. And what I did in the past was a mistake. So when you keep on playing the thing, your skeleton back in your mind over and over and over again, you're actually doing exposure therapy and that fear that you once had isn't as scary.

So I wanna talk about the biological mechanisms that help you do hard things that freak us up, and it can help you face your fears. So one of the major areas in your brain is called the anterior mid cingulate cortex, the AMCC, which is part of the brain. You have one on both your left and your right hemisphere. That helps link your emotions, your thoughts, and your actions. You can think of it as both an alarm system for threats and a control center that helps you push through, effort, make decisions and stay motivated. It kicks in when you're doing something really hard, like powering through a tough workout, resisting a temptation, or saying something or doing something that you're really scared of doing that you know is gonna be good for you. And it also plays a role in how you handle pain, stress, and big emotions. On top of that, it helps with social thinking. And it connects brain networks to guide attention, movement, and your body's automatic responses. So the major key functions in the AMCC is motivation and effort, right? So the AMCC lights up when you're facing something really challenging. And in different brain scans, we see that it's connected to feeling frustrated or wanting to avoid effort. But the more you practice doing hard things, the stronger this area gets, which can boost your willpower and ability to stick with really hard things. It also helps you notice problems and conflicts.

So this part of the brain gets active when you spot something bad that is happening a mistake, or when you're torn between choices. It acts as a built in alarm that draws your attention to potential problems or anything that might threaten your goals. In my case, my goal is for everybody to love me, right? Because my major fear is that people will see me as a disappointment and they will leave me, right? That's part of the underlying biological human social need, to be loved and accepted. This is part of our primal instinct. So another thing is the AMCC helps us experience pain and tough emotions. It really reacts to physical pain and tough feelings like fear, disgust, anger, sadness, and it helps us figure out what should we do about it.

It helps you make decisions based on rewards by tracking how big a reward might be, how likely it is, and then tying that information to the actions that you take. And even in social situations, the AMCC also gets involved to figure out how can we figure out this solution? It also helps regulate our body, which includes things like heart rate and stress response because it helps us react under pressure. The last thing is that it helps combine and integrate information because of where it sits in their brain. Right. It's in a, it's in a very deep part of our brain. The AMCC pulls together information from many different systems, including those that handle attention, executive control, and emotional processing.

So why is this relevant, as psychotherapist is because we can see how studies have shown in autism, depression and ADHD, that AMCC is not as active. So in autism, certain studies have shown that kids with autism have differences in AMCC neurons, which can influence decision making and how different brain regions connect and depression lowered Activity in the AMCC is linked to apathy, low motivation, and depressive symptoms.

Same thing with ADHD, right, it may contribute to impulsivity, hyperactivity, and trouble focusing. And again, the research isn't conclusive. These are just studies that show there may be a connection. Correlation doesn't equal causation.

So the AMCC, the Anterior Mid Cingulate Cortex is one of the major brain areas that grow when you do hard things, such as when you face your fears. So when you focus on that and focus on facing your fears there are specific brain regions that grow. But if you start liking doing certain things right? For example, if you absolutely hate working out and you start doing that hard thing of working out, your brain starts liking it.

Then your AMCC doesn't light up as much. It doesn't grow as much. It only seems to activate when you are doing a tough task that you absolutely do not like. So it's always trying to find something else to grow and expand your brain. So it's important and why I want you to get addicted to becoming your strongest self because when you tackle your fears. They no longer scare you, right? What you bring into the light no longer scares you. It's always the things in your skeleton closet that scares you the most. And in Ephesians 5, verse 11 to 13, which is a principle that I live by, is that everything exposed by the light becomes visible, and everything that is illuminated becomes light. So instead of cowering in fear, you choose to say, you know what? Screw this. I'm not going to be controlled by fear anymore. I'm gonna live freely and I'm not going to live like I am as afraid anymore. I'm gonna own up and I'm gonna take responsibility for the things that are causing me a lot of stress, the barriers that I'm in. And so this includes tackling the haters and these critical comments that you might get from your closest loved ones. It could be from your managers, right? And it, it's not like you're going to fight fire with fire. But you are learning to train your AMCC to do hard things, which is actually face the music. And actually listen to it and say, okay, where are the truths in this? Is this true or not? If it's not true, okay, I'm not going to stick it into my skeleton closet. I'm gonna actually play around with this. I'm gonna look at this. I'm gonna see what is actually going on underneath the surface. And the more you develop the mental toughness of facing your fears, touching those fears, tackling it head on, the less your fears are gonna control you.

So you might be wondering how to actually conquer fear. Some of these principles stem from behavioral psychology as well as David Goggin's motivational books. I'm not telling you to be all woo woo and tell yourself affirmations like, I'm brave, I'm beautiful, I'm strong. No, it's about doing the hard things so that you can train your AMCC to fight to grow. When we do the hard things like tackling the fears, we build that resilience so that when we face tough things, our brain says, okay, we've already dealt with this before. It's fine. It doesn't belong in our skeleton closet, we can bring it into the light. And when it's in the light, it gets illuminated. It doesn't scare us anymore. So how do we do it? The number one thing. Is to have that mind and body connection, which is to work out. Because a lot of the times when we have anxiety and fears, there's that separation between mind and body.

And our mind is running away with the spirals, with the what ifs, with everything that is not helpful. So when we work out, for example, take running or swimming, or even just working out, we are having this bilateral stimulation, our left and right sides of our body are moving, which means the information from right and left hemispheres of our brain are getting passed back and forth and back and forth throughout the workout, and you will reach a limit in your workouts where it's hard to push through, and that's when the AMCC kicks in. It says to you, okay, you can either make the choice of quitting now or pushing through doing one more lap, doing one more rep.

Okay? And as you build up the AMCC physically, you can also apply that to your anxieties and your fears as well. The second thing is to expose yourself to your fears. Record yourself with all that your haters say about you, what your family says about you, what your friends are saying about you that aren't nice, right?

You can also record yourself sharing all the details of a traumatic event. Anything and everything that makes you feel fear, record it and listen to it over and over and over and over again until you don't feel anything. Expose yourself to that until your brain says, well, okay, I've heard this message over and over again.

Is there anything new? Right. I'm kind of bored here, right? What's the story? This is not true anymore because I've already faced that fear. I've already changed. I already have tackled this skeleton in my closet And finally, have this accountability mirror. That when you look at yourself every single day, right? You tell yourself, Hey, today I am going to face a challenge, which is my fear, and I'm going to stare that person down. I'm gonna bring that skeleton and I'm gonna drag that skeleton into the light until it becomes illuminated, and that's it. And that's how you tackle your fear, you expose yourself to it, you do what you do to bring it into the light, and then that's it. What is in the light doesn't scare you anymore.

As we wrap up our 11th episode, we went on a journey of discovering why it's so hard to face our fears, how to get addicted to becoming your strongest self, the power of the interior mid cingulate cortex, and how to battle against fear with all you've got.

And this podcast really got me so fired up to tackle my ongoing fear of putting myself out there, right? See, when you actually do the hard thing, it gets a little scary. So if you like this podcast, amazing because keep your ears open. I have something coming down the pipeline that I hope will help you live life free from relationship fears and anxiety.

And if you found this episode to be helpful, please subscribe, share, and leave a review. And I love to hear your thoughts and any questions that you might have. And thank you to my producer Joe for helping me edit this podcast. You're awesome. And finally, if no one has told you yet, I believe in you and I'm here for you in the messy.