Don't Let Fear Take Over Your Life
If you’re a little wary of putting strawberries in your fruit salad right now then you’re definitely not alone.
With a spate of needles being discovered in our favourite little fruit around Australia in the last week, it’s likely that strawberries are not your shopping list today.
Like other food scares of our recent past, public hysteria usually follows with fear settling in for a fair while. Scared of illness, or in this case, injury, consumption of strawberries has halted, and will likely return when the perpetrators are caught and consumer confidence grows again.
This heightening of fear will take some time to die down; it might be days, weeks, months or depending on who you are, years. I know some people who are still not looking at frozen berries the same way.
But the human response to these sorts of incidents is always interesting, and of course understandable. With a brain that is quick to protect us, it often takes an all-or-nothing approach to keeping us safe. Instead of cutting up the strawberries we have and just checking them, we avoid them like the plague. On writing this, I believe that 10 strawberries have been found to have been tampered with nationally, whilst millions (of likely perfectly fine ones) have been dumped and destroyed. An industry has been shattered.
No, you don’t want to bite into a needle whilst enjoying a piece of fruit. But whenever we are presented with information that threatens us, either physically or mentally, our emotions turn to fear (sense turns off) and we tend to ‘overprotect’. We do it not only with contaminated fruit, but plane crashes, volcanos and terror plots. Our behaviour goes into survival mode and we operate from a place of fear.
But unbeknownst to us, fear plays a huge role in our lives, in fact, it operates it a lot of the time. They can be conscious, like our needle-in-a-strawberry fear, but most of our fears remain largely unconscious, and can fuel a range of emotional conflicts with ourselves and those around us as well as create dilemmas in our life.
Fear can make us avoid all sorts of things. From what we have learned growing up, as well as our own life experience we come to fear illness, fear rejection, fear judgement and fear authority. These are all uncomfortable states to be in, but in avoiding them at all costs, intentionally or not, can lead to anxiety, stop us from having fun, reaching our potential and many times, kill our dreams.
Yes fear keeps us safe and cosy in our comfort zones, but often after a few years in the same mindset, they don’t feel so comfortable anymore. In fact, they become rather uncomfortable, with sometimes regret and resentment kicking in.
Fear changes our behaviour. It stops us not only from being harmed in the now, but it can keep us holding on to that emotion for use in the future.