Today my guest is Friedemann Schaub, MD,  a physician specializing in cardiology and a molecular biologist who has helped thousands of people to overcome fear and anxiety with his breakthrough and empowerment program that combines his medical expertise with NLP, Time Line Therapy™, clinical hypnotherapy, meditation, and more.  Today I asked him to speak to us about situational anxiety, thecase of nerves we get in predictable circumstances like public speaking and when we’re late getting to the airport.

The Fear and Anxiety Solution presents Dr. Schaub’s program for learning to understand, direct, and utilize the subconscious mind as your greatest ally on the path to health and wholeness.

Situational Anxiety

by

Friedemann Schaub, MD

Researchers believe that some fears, such as the fears of snakes and anger, have been preserved during human evolution and passed down to us. Studies have shown that children, even infants, can recognize and respond to pictures of snakes and angry faces more rapidly than to neutral pictures. Our relatives from the Stone Age certainly faced life-threatening situations daily, whether they had to struggle with the elements or fend off huge predators. Fear and anxiety not only provided them with crucial information, but also led them to come up with adaptive responses, such as the development of weapons or shelter. Being physically inferior and insufficiently equipped, humans quickly realized that living in tribes increases their chances survive their extreme life conditions. This may be one of the reasons why the fear of making others angry has been anchored throughout evolution in our minds. 

The world has changed significantly since caves were our castles. Now we’re the most powerful species on the plant. At the same time, we’re the most dangerous threat to all living beings, including ourselves. That sounds rather bleak, and the truth is, most humans don’t pose a physical threat to each other, but live according to the “don’t harm, and don’t get harmed” creed. Thus, the vast majority of people, especially in the industrialized nations, don’t face life-threatening situations on a daily basis. Yet around 17 percent of the world’s population has been diagnosed with anxiety disorder.What are we still afraid of today?

According to a 2001 Gallup survey, the fear of public speaking, which is the fear of public humiliation, is the second most common fear in the United States, exceeded only by the “ancient” fear of snakes. Whether it is the fear of public speaking, flying in an airplane, the fear of conflict or getting fired from your job, at first glance most modern fears could be summarized as “the fear of losing something of value” – respect, health, relationships and security.

However, underneath the fear of losing something that’s important to us often lingers a greater fear, which might be also anchored in evolution: ”the fear of losing control and being powerless.” This deep-seated fear can lead to a vicious cycle, causing us to believe that hyper-vigilance, micromanaging, and even obsessive behaviors are the only way to maintain some sense of power and control when, in actuality, it is fear and anxiety that control our lives.

Most of these fears don’t make logical sense – wouldn’t it be more important to stay calm and collected when we are about to give a talk or confront a challenging issue with a friend or colleague. And isn’t it a well-known fact that flying is a much safer mode of transportation than driving our car. Obviously fear isn’t an intellectual problem, which is why we usually can’t reason ourselves out of being afraid. Our fears, like all other emotions, are created by the deeper part of our mind, the subconscious.

How Our Subconscious Scares Us

Every second of our lives, we’re surrounded by an incomprehensible amount of information. As I mentioned before, we need to filter out a large portion to make sense of the world and not become completely fried. But how do we distinguish the tiny fraction of information that is relevant from all the remaining input that needs to be ignored? If we tried to make these distinctions consciously, we wouldn’t be able to do anything else. Literally all our focus and energy would be devoted to deciphering and sorting every single detail in and around us. This is where our subconscious mind comes in and employs specific filters to separate what it perceives to be important for us.

Subconscious filters delete, distort, and generalize information that passes through them and leave us with a condensed and altered version of all that surrounds us—an internal interpretation of reality. In other words, how we see ourselves and the world around us depends on the fabric of our subconscious filters. This also means that whatever we think we are is just a fraction of the truth.

Our fear filters dictate how we interpret the danger or safety of our reality. Fear filters consist of emotional baggage of the past, unresolved inner conflicts, and limiting core beliefs, and are ultimately the subconscious root causes of anxiety. The more pervasive these subconscious fear filters are, the more they alter our internal perception of ourselves and the world we live in, which makes us more susceptible to experiencing fear and anxiety. Giving a talk becomes the equivalent of facing the firing squad. A plane ride feels like a one-way trip in an aluminum coffin. And a difficult conversation with a friend or family member reinforces our fear of ending up alone and abandoned.

So it makes sense that to break through these emotions and their ensuing behavioral patterns, we need to consciously remove and replace these filters, which is what The Fear and Anxiety Solution is all about. Addressing the subconscious root causes of our anxiety allows us to expand our perception of self, grow beyond our perceived limitations and create a life of greater peace, wholeness and self-empowerment.

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Dr Friedemann Schaub shares information that is beneficial for you and your loved ones in The Fear and Anxiety Solution. He says that people who read this book and implement the step by step program will find a difference in their lives by the time they reach the end of the book.

For more details about The Fear and Anxiety Solution, visit the tour page and Dr Schaub’s website

The Fear & Anxiety Solution can be purchased: Amazon