Have you ever noticed that the scariest thoughts you have seem to be the ones you pay most attention to?
Being scared. I’ve been wondering about that for a while, and what I’ve seen is this: because scary thoughts make me feel like there’s something wrong, they feel more dangerous than other thoughts. The result is, I feel like I have to do something to protect myself from scary thoughts.
Thought is neutral
- That’s the way many of us live, and the way I lived until I saw a fundamental truth about the nature of thought: it’s completely neutral.
- There’s no such thing as a dangerous thought. There are only thoughts that feel dangerous. But the more intense the thought, the stronger the feeling it generates.
- So, on one level it seems to makes perfect sense that I would respond intensely to a thought I find frightening.
Except for one thing: this uncomfortable, undesirable feeling in my body is simply the reflection of a thought, not a response to a real, physical threat. In this case, the thought is a scary one, so how can the feeling be anything other than scary?
I was listening to a client express a deep fear recently, and trying to understand the nature of his difficulty in a way that might help him see something new. It suddenly occurred to me what was making his life feel so difficult: he was scared of being scared. The degree of fear he expressed didn’t seem to correlate with what he thought he was afraid of. But since was afraid of being afraid, each time he had a scary thought, he went into high gear, thinking he had to protect himself from feeling scared.
There’s no such thing as a dangerous thought. There are only thoughts that feel dangerous.
Since I felt like I had a handle on his misunderstanding, I asked him, “What if you’re really just scared of feeling scared?” I know he heard me, because I saw him start to physically relax.
When he was able to see through the illusion of physical danger generated by the scary thought, he saw his fear for what it was: simply the felt-reflection of a scary thought. When he saw that, he was also able to see that, in this instance, fear and danger weren’t the same thing. Seeing that truth seems to have been a game changer for him just like it was for me.
There’s a widely held belief that being scared negatively affects performance. I’m not sure why people believe this, but I’d guess that it has something to do with the way being scared makes us feel. It feels shitty, and can easily hijack our focus if we allow it to. In that sense, it can affect performance the same way any distraction can, especially if we place our focus on the distraction.
Seeing the nature of that distraction, knowing that it has no meaning until I assign one to it, takes away whatever power the scary thought appears to possess. When I see that, I can feel myself slow down. As soon as that happens, I’m able to remember that nothing’s wrong, and I’m not in danger. I’m just feeling scary thoughts.
