When Fear Dominates Your Life

Fear is a natural feeling that alerts us to the presence of danger or arises in response to the unknown. The problem is that this natural sensation often gets to be too much and starts to take control of our lives. It can turn you into an insecure person. It can practically destroy and paralyze you. Have you ever felt that fear dominates your life?

Ideally, people should learn to recognize the validity of certain fears and prevent them from dominating their lives. Nothing is immune to fear’s destructive power, but it is possible to detect its presence and reduce its negative impact. It just has to be done in a timely manner, before it’s too late.

In a society like ours, we always have to be on our game. The idea of success is always lingering in front of us, and we must achieve it if we don’t want to look like failures, unable to join that glorious group of people who get where they want to go.

In these circumstances, the fear of failure prevents you from taking a single step. It blocks you until you can’t even find the motivation to try anymore. And when you hear people say things like “success is for those who take risks,” you feel terrible because fear has conditioned your life and prevented you from taking risks. And in those moments, you forget that we all have the ability to achieve our goals.

The fear of not being noticed

You try to do things to achieve recognition, but the fear of rejection causes you to keep stepping back until your self-esteem drops to the lowest level it can go. Social approval is like a ghost that chases you, a nightmare that visits you in your sleep.

Is feels like nothing goes your way. You convince yourself that you weren’t born for greatness and you seem to be destined to suffer until you die. You feel like others point their fingers at you, question you, criticize you, and avoid you. The more you want to, the harder it is to build relationships where you really trust the other person. But you don’t realize that you’re the one distancing yourself from them.

You compare yourself with others on social media. You don’t understand why they can be happy and you can’t. You see them smiling in their photos and posting about countless triumphs, about how wonderful their lives are. But you never ask yourself whether everything you see is real.

Comparing yourself with others distracts you from your own goals. We all have the same potential, and even though each of us is a unique human being, we live in a community and we have to accept each other the way we are.

The fear of leaving your comfort zone

The comfort zone is a mental state that prevents us from pushing our limits. We get so accustomed to the things we already do and have that we get scared of losing them. People who are dominated by fear don’t see change as an opportunity; they see it as a risk to their sense of well-being. But in the long term, this supposed sense of well-being is what really limits us.

You might not be happy with your job, but you hear that unemployment rates are increasing and you can’t give yourself the luxury of wandering aimlessly. Even though you feel underpaid, exploited, and unable to advance, at least it gives you the illusion of stability. You don’t even realize that fear is the reason you see it this way.

You put off important decisions and stick to your routine out of fear of uncertainty. You deny yourself the possibility of change, which would certainly benefit you, just because you’re terrified of leaving your comfort zone. In doing so, you’re denying yourself the opportunity to improve. Absolute resistance to change is a sign that fear is dominating your life.

We’ve been told that dreams are for the naive. Many people proclaim that renouncing your hopes and dreams is an act of maturity. But in reality, the philosophy of conformity only encourages people to be afraid of mistakes and failure. They don’t realize that maybe, one of the biggest failures is being to afraid to live a better life.