At a time when anxiety disorders have surged this book offers a new and innovative approach to overcoming anxiety, day-to-day fears, and life stresses.
-Winfried Sedhoff
In today’s world, it’s easy to fall victim to fear. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused fear levels to surge, sending global anxiety and stress levels to new highs. We worry about how we’ll get by. We fear for the future. But all hope is not lost; you can overcome your fears and thrive.
With Taming Fear in the Age of Covid, mental health professional Dr. Winfried Sedhoff shows how you can master your anxiety and take back control of your life. After experiencing his own personal crisis that forced him to face his worst fears, Dr. Sedhoff now wishes to share what he’s learned so that you too can emerge stronger from the other side. Inside, you’ll discover:
- actionable lessons to implement in your daily life to reduce stress and find peace
- how to resolve different types of fears at their source, from day-to-day fears such as fear of failure to the fears of severe trauma, illness, PTSD, and death
- how to prevent fears before they take hold
- how you can tap into the secret fear-taming properties of nature
- much, much more.
Whether you’re experiencing fear related to COVID or anxiety in your home, study, or workplace, you deserve to live a calm life. As you’ll learn, we each have the power to resolve our fears and choose our future.
Excerpt from Taming Fear in the Age of Covid
INTRODUCTION
A Bit About Fear
….But you don’t get it! You don’t know how bad my fear is. There must be something seriously wrong with me for it to be this bad!
You are right; I don’t know what fear feels like for you. I am not you. We are unique. Not surprisingly, no two people will experience anxiety in precisely the same way. How you experience anxiety will be different from the way it is experienced by your friends, neighbours or people you bump into in the street or see in the news, and different from the way I experience it. No one can tell you what fear is for you or how much it affects your life; only you can know that.
Having said that, how fear works and what it does – how it can affect us physically and mentally – we do have in common. We will see how in a moment. But, thanks to what we share about the fear experience, it gives us the confidence to know there are skills and understandings that can help all of us to better tame them.
Does that also mean all the skills we learn to tame fears will work the same for everyone?
No. That is where our uniqueness comes in. Some of us may find some fear-taming skills work better for us than others. Some of us may need to learn more intense methods and persist in taming fear more than the person next to us.
That is OK.
I remember a heart-warming story of an abused, terrified dog with barely any hair that would show its teeth whenever anyone came near. It was ready to bite anyone who came close. No one could be sure it could be saved; it was so vicious to everyone. But with consistent loving kindness and gentle caring, the dog came around after a few months. It welcomed a caring hand. It eventually allowed a kind and gentle pat. Now it was a happy family pet with a full coat of shiny, healthy looking fur, and could play without looking and behaving as if it was terrified for its life.
We each carry our own fear monster inside us, and in many of us it has been trained over many years like a vicious dog. Some monsters will need more kindness, compassion and caring than others. It isn’t always easy, but persist enough, and even our worst fear monsters can be tamed.
That sounds well and good, but what if I’m too scared to look at my fears and what worries me? What do I do then?
First, we take a deep breath and realise that’s OK too.
We will go slow.
We will begin by giving ourselves some space. We will do this by first understanding the nature of fear. This will allow us to keep anxiety at a comfortable distance between us and break the fear into smaller, manageable bits.
In the initial sections, you will learn the following:
- Why we fear the unknown. It’s completely normal and OK, by the way.
- How our brain tries to predict the future all the time. We’re being terrified by fantasies, and most of us haven’t even realised it.
- The fantastic ability of our brain to rewrite fears. We can completely change fears when we know how to.
- Why fears can so quickly get out of control. To better manage our fears we need to be aware of how they can take over our lives.
Learning all this will help us better recognise, understand and reveal what can be regarded as fear’s great secret. Moreover, this practical insight gives us new tools to master and tame fear.
What is the great secret that is the key to mastering fear?
Put simply, to resolve fear, our brain wants one of two things: either a plan or acceptance.
What a plan or acceptance is we will learn soon enough. Suffice to say, once we know how to develop practical communication with our fears, they are pretty happy to show us what we need, so they go away. Unfortunately, most of us haven’t learned how to ask – to know the language fear speaks. A hint: fears don’t use words…