When the mind shifts from fear to love, the mind can heal the body, and it's not some fuzzy New Age metaphysical thing. It's simple physiology.​

 

Lissa Rankin, M.D. in the "The Fear Cure"

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Fear is one of the primary barriers to connection for people reporting the feeling of loneliness.

 

And just like the word "loneliness", the word "fear" often gets weighed down and distorted by the social pressures of "shame" and is therefore not properly addressed.

 

Fear as a survival mechanism seems pretty straight forward. False fears, or those fears trapped in your mind, are far more complicated to name and understand because it's hard for you to determine whether they are a real threat or not.

 

Unfortunately, because of this confusion, the body reacts to them in the same way as true fears, sending adrenaline, other hormones and blood to big muscles and centers of coordination that support the near-term survival of our physical being at expense of our long-term wellness. In this way, fear and loneliness have a similar effect on our biological well-being.

 

Dr. Lissa Rankin, author of The Fear Cure,  and Mind Over Medicine presents a small part of this thinking in this video below, and helps us to understand how to manage that fear.

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ASSIGNMENT: Watch the video below, and then CLICK HERE or the survey image below to write down your definitions of fear in the same four ways that we explored loneliness earlier in this course.

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MOODIFY about your own approach to fear after watching this video.

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