09/02/2026
Fear is nothing more than a construct of the mind.
I had someone see me for help for what they explained to be a phobia of heights. I asked him to explain what he was experiencing.
His job requires him to go on ladders. The day he saw me, he had to climb up 150 feet to do some work. His heart was racing and had nervous thoughts as he was completing the job. Despite this, he successfully did his work then made his way safely back to the ground.
I asked him when he decided he has a phobia of heights.
He thought that because of the body sensations experienced and the nervousness felt, he equated this to fear. He created a belief around this and that he was the only one of all his co-workers who felt this, and because of this, made this out to mean there was something wrong with him.
My response?
Do you realize most people would not be comfortable, let alone able to climb 150 feet on a ladder? And if they do, would most likely experience those same somatic responses. Again, where did you decide this equates to being a phobia?
Somewhere along the way, he made a decision about what this means for him. Then, based on that decision, continued to play out the story to support it, which then created more of those nervous responses.
Where do we do this same thing?
Where do we have something we want to do, change something, try something new.
And our body responds. The symptoms of what we make out to be nervous or anxious or even fear, that we then intellectualize to mean something. Enough so that we pull our self back, procrastinate, don’t follow through.
This is the thing to take from this.
Everything just is.
Everything just is.
It is our mind, the thinking we think about that thing, that makes it so. We make it mean some-thing, or no-thing.
That meaning is then how we are going to experience it.
The more I think about this, the more I realize just how powerful we really are.
So powerful that we can actually decide to never do that thing and will create every reason within our body and mind to support not doing it. And we will, in fact, continue to experience more reasons not to.
Or, realize that fear is nothing more than a single thought. A thought we can change in an instant.
It’s up to us to decide what we’re going to make of it.