Episode 041 – How I Trained My Nervous System to Be Unafraid

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  There’s a lot of truth to this famous quote, seeing as fear is the predominant emotion that holds us back from pretty much everything we want to create, achieve, or become in our lives – more money, better relationships, improved health, overall happiness, you name it.

So today, I’m going to share with you how I was able to train my nervous system to become unafraid, which ultimately allowed me to attract the woman of my dreams, generate over $30 million with my business, and become clear on who I am and the vision I have for my life.

Where Does Fear Come From?

Fear emerges in a variety of forms – anger, stress, overwhelm, anxiety, depression, hustle & grind, not enough time, financial insecurity, procrastination, perfectionism, and self-sabotage.  This wide range of emotions is all rooted in some form of fear and puts us into a “primal state” of being, which can be described as pretty much any moment or experience that doesn’t feel good.  Compare that to “powerful states” of being like joy, happiness, creativity, flow, and abundance that inherently make us feel good. 

But where does this fear come from?  Our beliefs.  More specifically, the limiting beliefs created as the result of early childhood traumas and misunderstandings.  When the meanings we give to these experiences are carried forward into our present reality, they invoke fear and create self-fulfilling prophecies of undesirable thoughts, emotions, actions, and outcomes in our lives.  In other words, fear is little more than an unprocessed emotion that’s become a habit in our lives.

For example, maybe you were told as a child that children should be seen and not heard. This instilled a belief in you that you should not act like the fullest expression of yourself, which is likely incongruent with the fact that you were also told that life was full of infinite possibilities and you could be or do whatever you want in the world.  

That information then gets processed in your nervous system and becomes a memory that invokes a negative feeling. Now, as an adult, you’re living your life with this deeply rooted belief that you should be seen and not heard, which can manifest itself in a business meeting, or an argument with your spouse, or another social situation that creates emotional discomfort because you’re reliving that memory from your childhood.

Detoxify Your Fear In 3-Steps

Now, the name of the game when it comes to overcoming fear is cultivating your capacity to down-regulate your nervous system and detoxify yourself from fear. If you can do this, the natural byproduct of that is that you’ll spend more time in a powerful state and become more likely to materialize the dreams and the vision you have for your life.  

Step one in doing that is to acknowledge that the fear you’re experiencing in any given moment is little more than a memory. Your nervous system has trained your brain to experience this memory as you experienced it very early on in your life.  What this will do is begin to separate you from the fear itself.

With this level of awareness, the next step is to ask yourself: what was I thinking? Ultimately, the eternal circumstance isn’t or situation is not what’s determining how you feel – in this case, fear – it’s the meaning you’re giving to the experience. If you argue with your spouse, it’s not what your spouse said or did that’s upsetting you, it’s your interpretation and the meaning you’re giving the situation.

What I’ve found to be true 100% of the time is that when you’re having thoughts that move you into a primal state, it’s the result of some form of limiting belief or unprocessed trauma that’s not actually true. Can’t trust other people? Not actually true. There have just been a handful of instances in your life where you felt like you couldn’t trust someone and you’ve adopted that belief as a dogma to reflect your relationships with everyone else. 

Now, you can play a little game. If the thoughts you’re thinking due to a limiting belief aren’t actually true, then some form of the opposite must be true. In the trust example, what’s actually true is that people are inherently trusting. If you believe money is hard to make, the reality is that money is abundant and you have access to as much of it as you need when you need it. And so on.

What you’ll notice is that when you engage more with these “opposite” beliefs, they feel good and move you into a powerful state. The more you reflect on the memories in your life, the more you’ll see that you’ve simply been paying attention to the “wrong” information that aligns with the limiting belief, and you’ve been ignoring everything else.

Out With The Old, In With The Powerful

The more you play this game, the more awareness you’ll bring to parts of your brain that haven’t been active, despite the memories being there. What happens is that your nervous system has become so acclimated to “old” information, but by finding evidence for these new, empowering beliefs, you actually begin pruning the neural networks of your brain that were storing these memories that previously put you in the habit of moving into a primal state.

This isn’t much different than going to the gym to build muscles that previously weren’t being activated much. In this case, you’re moving your thoughts and emotions in a new direction and each rep is building momentum towards developing a new habit. Over time, what happens is you begin the process of down regulating your nervous system and operating more from the parasympathetic nervous system of rest and relaxation.

The more you do this, the more your thoughts, emotions, and actions will begin contributing to the desired results you want to create. The more you’ll start attracting coincidences and synchronicities that support you in achieving those results. Eventually, it won’t feel much like work, as you’ll have trained your nervous system to make unconscious, goal-achieving decisions as a result of spending more time in a powerful state.

This is the framework I ultimately used to attract the woman of my dreams, build a successful Inc #171 company, and accomplish so many things that were never possible when I was operating in a default state of fear.  

Eventually, I came to understand that fear is not an enemy – it’s a teacher.  It’s an emotion that comes up because it wants you to process the unresolved limiting beliefs in your life that put you into a primal state. But when you understand that the name of the game is detoxifying yourself of this fear and use some of the tools I’ve shared with you to do it, the more you can continue to grow, evolve, and move powerfully forward in your life.