I’m taking a little side-trip from my review of the Comfort Zone to talk about the energy demands of wrestling with and getting control of anxiety and fear. The bottom-line is this: it takes a LOT of energy to push past our Comfort Zones.

It is easy for us to credit physical work – work you can the results of in the visible world. If you wash the dishes, well, you get clean dishes. If you vacuum the living room then you have a clean floor in the living room. If you empty the in-basket on your desk at work then presto! You have an empty in-basket.

It is often much more difficult to credit ourselves when we do this invisible world work in our thinking. But make no mistake: it takes at least as much energy to face into and tackle our anxious thinking as it does to vacuum that floor or clear that in-basket.

As If You Didn’t Know This Already…

You’ve experienced this: you decide to tackle a fear (or a fear is pushed into your awareness by the current situation you’re in.) You wrestle with it, which takes 5 minutes or 15 minutes or an hour, and suddenly you’re WIPED – feeling beat-up, like you’ve run a race.

Many of us (probably most of us) become very dismissive of that feeling/experience, both to ourselves and to other people. “What’s the problem?” we ask ourselves, shaking our head at our apparent weakness and frailty. It isn’t like we were DOING anything, after all…

Except we ARE doing real work when we face into our fears! We learned along the way to treat the mind and the body as distinct and separate creatures – like 2 passengers in a car. But those two things are NOT separated – they are connected together, and what drains one drains the other.

Thus The Need For Self-Care In Fear-Busting!

I know that we live in the work 24/7/365 culture of the modern age – that all success is measured by our output and visible productivity. But there are kinds of productivity that can’t be easily measured except by ourselves, internally, and one of those is this work on fear.

We need to be patient and self-caring as we take on our fears. I’ve said that a lot in this blog. But this is doubly true when it comes to the energy cost of taking on our anxieties.

Part of the problem is we’re often terrible energy managers. We create to-do lists, we set out to build Rome in a day (and no, I’m not exaggerating!), and then we wonder why we’re so stinkin’ burned out at the end of that day.

If You’re Going to Run a Race You Better Have Your Gatorade

I’m going to write more specifics about this, but here are some things to consider in today’s Fear Mastery thinking:
1) What ARE your energy demands in the day?
2) Are you attempting to do too much some days?
3) How does that impact your work at unplugging fear and worry for you?
4) What can you do, even in small, beginning ways, to make this work more successful for you?
5) What is one thing you can defer or wait on until you’ve unplugged a fear or two?
6) What energizes you and gives you MORE energy to do this work?
7) What is one way you can do self-care better – different food, different sleep habits, different physical activity? Even in a small way?

You are worth the effort, and you are your own best care provider for yourself. Rome really wasn’t built in a day (except on HBO.) You won’t master your fears in a day either. But you can do a significantly more effective job of it if you’ll do the self-care that makes that work less draining, and gives you the energy you need to do it AT ALL. :)

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