We’ve obviously lived through a pandemic. We’ve lived through a lot of things recently that evoke a lot of fear. And so how do we manage our minds around this and how do we take control of that emotion and take control of those thoughts? So that’s what I’m gonna be talking about in this episode. And then in my part two episode, I’m gonna be talking more about the fears that often hold us back. Sometimes those are social fears, social anxieties, but a lot of times we, as human beings, we have dreams, we have goals. We have things that we want to do that may require us to step outside of our comfort zone. And a lot of times when we go to do that, we are faced with a lot of more internal fears of like, who am I to do this? Or what if I fail? Or what will people think of me? Those are kind of those again, social fears and fears that often keep us stuck from doing things that we really want to do. So again, I actually am really excited about this mini series of podcast episodes.

And I truly, truly pray that this episode will help a lot of women in my own life. This has been an issue that I’ve really struggled with for many, many years. And I’ve learned some really helpful tools that have helped me to manage the emotion of fear so much better. And it’s given me a lot of freedom in my life and a lot more joy and peace. And this is what I want for others that may struggle with this as well. And I know that I’m not the only one that has struggled in this area because I’ve coached a number of women on this topic. So I think that this is something that not all of us deal with, not all of us struggle with, but there is, I think a lot of women, particularly mothers can really identify with this struggle. And so my hope for all of us is that we will have more peace, more joy, more freedom, and that we will truly be able to enjoy the beautiful lives that God has given to us. So let’s just start with the basics. What is fear? Fear is simply an emotion that is it.

But if you’ve been following this podcast for a while, you understand that every emotion comes from a thought. And so every time we experience the emotion of fear or worry or anxiety, which is really tied into fear and worry when we struggle with this, it’s always caused by a thought or a series of thoughts. Now, before I go any further, it’s really important for us to understand how our brain works and ultimately to understand our brain’s most important function, which is to keep us alive. And for millions of years, it’s been doing that. And if you look over the course of the, you know, the existence of human beings, we can see that throughout history and really up until very modern times, the human race had to deal with a lot in regards to survival. And so the brain ‘s natural default mode is to constantly be scanning for danger, scanning for harm, and constantly warning us about any potential danger that might happen. Our ancestors were probably oftentimes on a daily basis faced with very legitimate dangers and, and obstacles to their survival.

Everything from being attacked by wild animals, to living through extreme weather conditions, to, you know, maybe eating the wrong berries on a Bush and dying like right. The brain is always looking for any, anything that may harm us in any way. Now, the primitive part of our brain that’s just wired for survival has not really caught up to the 21st century where now we, as human beings, are living, especially in our country and in, where we live, where we’re not faced with such extreme situations of day to day survival. Now it doesn’t mean that bad things don’t sometimes happen or people have accidents or that there’s never any danger. It just means that for the most part, we live in a society that’s fairly safe and that we don’t always have to be in survival mode. So it’s just important to understand what our brain’s default mode is. And in a way we wanna kind of say, thank you brain. We can look at our world today and see that there’s 7 billion people living in the world. So all of our brains throughout history, they’ve done a fairly decent job of keeping the human race going. So good job brains. Yeah. Let’s celebrate that for a moment.

But what happens when those fears take over? And again, this is what I was talking about earlier, where fear is just an emotion caused by a thought. But what happens when we find ourselves starting to spin in many thoughts of fear, and this is an experience that I’ve known very well in my life. I’m gonna share with you about that in a minute, but it’s very easy to see that if we don’t manage our minds, well, then it’s very easy for that default part of our brain to kick in, to signal some sort of fear or some sort of a possibility of danger, maybe not even now, but down the road. And it’s just trying to get our attention saying, Hey, I just wanna bring this to your attention so that you can be aware of it. And then what we sometimes do is we lock onto that and we start thinking about it over and over. And this is my sister’s in Christ. This is where our imagination can be very powerful because a lot of times then our imagination takes over. We start envisioning things and it’s very easy to allow our imagination to just run with it and imagine the worst case scenario, the worst thing that could happen. And we envision it, we feel it.

We feel all those emotions in our body and we have a strong reaction to it. And then it kind of sets us into a circular experience where it almost snowballs out of control. And then on top of that, we have media at our fingertips 24 hours a day, seven days a week on TV, on our phones, our devices, all of it, that’s bombarding us mostly with negative information, things that might scare us. Now, listen, the media knows our brain psychology very well. It knows that it’s wired for fear and danger and survival. So it is putting out content that will trigger that default mode because if we find ourselves being afraid or scared, we tend to pay more attention to that. So it locks us in, it gets us hooked. And yet we have this information, this media, all of this negative source of news coming at us all the time and our brains aren’t wired for that. I mean, can you imagine it’s really just been in the last 20 years that we, as human species have had access to worldwide, constant, ongoing streaming, negative media and news, that just evokes all those thoughts and all those emotions. And it’s very easy for us to start spinning in it. In fact, the definition of anxiety itself is simply the excessive worry, fear or nervousness about something that has an uncertain outcome. And we can look around the world today and see that anxiety has really plagued so many of us because we have these excessive fears, these excessive worries about something bad that might happen. And so really what we wanna do is in order to manage all of those emotions that come with that fear.

So we want to really manage our minds, manage our thoughts, but for me in my life, it wasn’t until quite recently within the last five or so years that I’ve actually really learned how to do this for me in my life. Ever since I was a little girl, I was someone that was very sensitive to the emotion of fear. I was always very cautious. I was very careful. I never did things that could be dangerous. And I, I think I just had a heightened awareness of those emotions and those thoughts, even when I was a child, I remember being a small child and watching a TV show once. And there was a commercial that came on about a missing child. And I remember feeling that emotion of fear around that. I Ima imagine my, my, again, my imagination kind of went to this place of imagining what that child must be feeling and thinking and what the, the terror of what they’re going through. And then I remember spending so much time worrying about that. What if I get kidnapped and let my imagination just go with that and imagine it, that fear stays with me for many, many years. And it was like always kind of in the background, I always had fears of getting hurt or getting lost from my parents or something bad happening to me. I remember being a teenager and even oftentimes having a bit of a sense of envy of some of my friends that didn’t seem to be, being so plagued by these fears. They were doing adventurous things and trying new things and stepping outta their comfort zone.

And we would go to amusement parks and I would be terrified to go on the roller coasters and they would be dare doubles and doing all the things. And I remember deep down inside thinking, gosh, I wish I could be a little bit more like that. Even my own sister is like the complete opposite of me. She was this big snowboarder and, you know, into extreme sports and doing all of these crazy things and deep down inside, I was like, oh my goodness. I wish I could be more like that. But for me and my life fear has kind of been an underlying emotion that has impacted me in a lot of ways. And again, I don’t think I’m the only one that has struggled with this. I remember being in my early twenties when nine 11 happened and being so devastated, just like everyone else in the country by that. And I remember from that moment in like almost trying like, again, my imagination taking over and I would sit and I would imagine being in those airplanes and what it must have felt like, and the terror that those people must have experienced. And I would play it out over and over in my mind, like a movie and I would feel it so intensely in my body. And of course you could only imagine that eventually like doing that enough times led me to a real fear of flying, because again, our imagination, like we can imagine something bad happening and our, our brain is so powerful. Like it pictures it. And then because of those thoughts, we have these intense emotions.

And especially when there are these negative emotions, they can impact us so significantly. And so I struggled with this and then I got married and I started having children. And I kind of had hoped that maybe I would’ve outgrown some of those fears, but something really profound happened when I started having children. First of all, my heart exploded with love. Like when that, when my first child came into this world, my heart grew enormously and I never knew that I was capable of loving another human being like that. But with that great love also like the fear intensified and magnified in my brain, because now all of a sudden, I wasn’t just worried about bad things happening to me. I was worried now about bad things happening to my children. And in some ways those fears became even worse. And I remember all of a sudden, just being plagued with all of these thoughts of, you know, what if, what if he dies in the middle of the night, like an infant, or like, what if it was all these, what ifs, what if this happens? What if this happens? What if he rolls off the changing table? What if, you know, as he got older, as my children started growing older, what if they got kidnapped? Like all of these childhood fears came back.

And again, at the time I didn’t have the tools. I didn’t have the knowledge to know how to interrupt those thought cycles. All I would do is like, I would think about something and then my imagination would take over and I would start spinning in them. And I would feel terrible. It would create an emotional firestorm in my body where every sense, every like firing of these neurons in my body would just take over. And I was always in a heightened state of fear and anxiety. And I remember thinking at times that I ended up having this belief system that as long as I was in a heightened state of fear or worry that somehow it was making me more alert to any dangers or harm so that I could better protect my children. And I remember even thinking at times, if I ever let my guard down, if I ever stopped worrying about them, that’s when something bad would happen. And so this like deep inner belief kind of held onto fear almost as a life preserver in my life. Like as long as I just hold onto it, as long as I imagine all the worst case scenarios and all the bad things that could happen, then somehow I would be able to protect my children from that.

And yet that belief, it’s a false belief because as we all know, we can’t always protect our children from everything, right? Like it is still possible that something bad might happen, no matter how much I worry about it or how much I obsess over it. The other thing that was happening to me that I could really realize is that it was robbing me of all the peace and all the joy and all of the fun moments that I believe that God wanted me to have with my children. I was always in a state of heightened fear. And I remember at times talking to my husband about this, I was like, don’t you lay awake at night and worry about something bad happening to the kids. And he would look at me like I was crazy. Like, no, I don’t ever think about things like that. I don’t sit around worrying about stuff like that. And when I would bring things to his attention, like if there was something really bothering me or things I was really worried about, he would look at me and say, Larissa, just stop thinking about it. Just, just turn your brain off. And I remember being so frustrated with that answer because I wanted so badly to be able to shut it off. I wanted to be like, I wanted so badly to stop worrying so much, but I just didn’t know how I just didn’t have the tools to do it. And the thing is, the more we think about something, the more we focus on it, the more like our brain just naturally goes to that.

So without even really realizing it, I was the one that was creating these thought loops and these intense neural pathways that my brain was just naturally going to on a regular basis. I remember at times taking this struggle to confession because that was the only place that I could think to go for help. And I would go to confession and I would confess these excessive fears and the constant worry and all of it. And you might say to yourself, well, why would you take that to confession, Larissa? Like, is that a sin? And I don’t quite know the answer to it. And I don’t even necessarily know if I believed in the moment that it was a sin, but I did know that the sacrament of confession and reconciliation is a sacrament of healing. And I knew that I needed God’s grace. And I knew that I needed his healing in this area if I was ever gonna overcome it. And in some ways I think deep down inside, I did believe that there was some sense of sin there because I kept trying to surrender this to God. But then a lot of times I would pick it back up again. I just didn’t know how to handle it.

I didn’t know how to manage my mind. I didn’t know how to take control of those thoughts. And I remember one time in confession, a priest said to me that I needed to take this struggle to our blessing mother. And so that was part of my penance. He said, I want you to go and pray in front of a statue of Mary and give this over to her because she is a mother and she knows what it’s like to love her son. And she even experienced great suffering and pain in her life. So take this struggle to her and ask for her prayers in her session. And so I started to do that. I started like every day, Mary, please pray for me. Please help me to overcome these deep seated fears. And I have to tell you, like, I prayed that for years. It was always there. And I did get some relief from it. And I do know that the grace from those prayers and the grace from the sacrament of reconciliation helped me. But what I really believe Mary did in, in her, in guiding me to the answer to those prayers was leading me to these life coaching tools, where for the first time in my life, I was actually given something that helped me to know that I could actually take control of my thoughts and therefore I could, could manage my emotions better by doing that.

And of course I learned the model, which is what we teach in masters. And we’ve talked about that a lot in this podcast, but really how to separate ourselves from our thoughts and to have self-awareness around our thoughts, to be able to question our thoughts, to see what thoughts really serve us or what thoughts might be actually hurting us, or keeping us stuck or causing us to have emotions that we don’t wanna have. And so when I discovered really how to take more control of those thoughts, how to take them captive, you’ll hear Sterling. And I say that a lot, take them captive for Christ and really be intentional about the thoughts that I want to choose to have. I was truly able to significantly overcome my struggles with excessive fear and excessive worry. And so I wanna share some of those strategies with you today. First of all, when we experience the emotion of fear that comes upon us, it can come upon us quite fast. A lot of times we recognize it in our bodies. First, we feel it maybe in our chest, in the pit of our stomach, maybe our heart races, maybe we get hot. What’s actually happening is we’re having a thought. Our brain is signaling some sort of danger or fear or worry or something. And it’s causing, again, a physiological effect in our body. Our brain is re releasing either cortisol or adrenaline or some other chemical into our body.

That’s heightening our senses and causing us to be very attentive to some sort of possible danger or threat. Now, of course, if there is imminent danger, then what is very fascinating and cool and really good is that our body and our brain naturally will just jump into problem solving mode and we will do whatever we can to avoid that danger or fear. So that’s really cool. And we want to recognize that we have the ability to do that. That’s really important to understand that if we actually are in real danger, like for example, let’s say you go on a hike with your family and you’re hiking, you know, in the foothills or in the forest or whatever. And all of a sudden, maybe you hear the sound of a rattlesnake. You want your brain to kick in and say, Hey, danger, you may wanna go a different direction. You may wanna get out of here as quickly as possible. You want your brain to kick into that mode. It’s doing its job. It’s trying to keep you safe. And so that’s a really great thing, but what about all the thoughts and all the fears that come up about just something that might happen down the road. That’s very easy for us to worry excessively about, or we start spinning in. These are the steps that I wanna give you to help with that.

First of all, once you feel that emotion of fear, you feel it in your body. I just want you to become aware of it. And I want you to name it. I want you to just stop for a moment and say, what am I feeling right now? Oh, I’m feeling fear or I’m feeling worried, or I’m feeling anxious, recognize it in your body and say it even out loud. If you can just bring the emotion to your awareness, to the part of your brain, the executive functioning part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex brings it to a conscientious state where you can actually look at it. You can actually analyze it a little bit. And this is what we do with a model. We say, okay, what am I feeling right now? We wanna get really clear with the emotion and identify it. We can’t manage the emotion if we don’t really know what it is. And so once we have a chance to say, okay, this is what I’m feeling. Then we can say to ourselves, what am I thinking? What is the thought that’s causing this emotion again? You wanna bring that thought to the light. It might be hovering somewhere in your subconsciousness and you wanna really bring it to the light and look at it. Just this process alone allows us to also separate from it for a moment when we’re in the midst of it.

When we’re just feeling the fear, we just experience it. But when we start to look at it, we kind of pull away from it and we pull it to the surface and we start to have some curiosity around it. And we just look at it now, again, if it’s an imminent danger, you just have to deal with it right in your body in your brain will just work with it. But most of the time when we have these fears or worries, it’s not an imminent danger situation. And so we can slow our brain down a little bit and kind of calm ourselves down just by looking at what is this fear we can ask ourselves? Is this fear a legitimate fear? Is this something that’s imminent? Is this something that might be dangerous that right now I need to deal with? And the moment you answer that question by saying, no, this isn’t an imminent danger. I’m not faced with this danger at this moment immediately. It causes the brain to calm down. And so in this moment, the next step that you want to do is just to look at it and say to your brain, thank you brain. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Thank you for wanting to protect me or somebody that I love by bringing this to my attention.

Now, I know this might seem counterintuitive or counterproductive doing this, but really it’s very fascinating because really, truly your brain is just trying to do its job. And in recognizing that you can say to your brain, thank you for bringing this to my attention, but everything is okay right now. And again, that’s the next step is looking at what your brain is trying to tell you. And then two, recognizing that it’s just trying to keep you safe or trying to protect somebody that you love and care about. But three in recognizing, Hey, you’re just doing your job. I get it. The primitive part of my brain is just doing its job, but now I’m gonna step into the executive functioning part of my brain. And now I’m gonna take control. And this is where the very like conscious part of your brain says, thank you brain. But everything right now at this moment is okay.

And this is like, you really wanna tell yourself, everything’s okay. I’m not in danger right now. There’s nothing to be afraid of. And all of a sudden, again, your brain will start to calm down and then you’ll want to tell your brain why you believe that you will be safe from whatever danger it’s bringing up. So for example, a couple months ago, we went on a family vacation and we booked plane tickets to fly to California. And I remember literally a few moments after booking those plane tickets. My brain kind of freaked out, we were a big family. We don’t fly very often. And instantly I booked those tickets. And some of those fears from my past, just like a wave of them came up. And all of a sudden I found myself worrying about, is this a safe thing to do? I don’t know if I wanna fly the fears from nine 11. All of that came up and instantly I practiced this. I could feel the fear in my body. I could feel that knot in my stomach. And I did this process. I just looked at it like, what am I feeling here? Oh, I just booked these plane tickets. Those fears from my past are coming back up. And then I really thought, what am I thinking? What is the thought?

And truly the thought was, what if you die in a plane crash? Like that was the thought. And I just looked at it. I brought it to the light. I brought it to the surface and I just looked at it. And again, I said to my brain, thank you brain for bringing this to my attention. I know that this is a fear that we used to deal with a lot in the past. And there is a possibility there are plane wrecks in the world at times. So I thanked my brain for warning me of this danger. And then I took a moment to remind my brain that right now in this moment, I’m totally safe. We’re not gonna go on the flight for three more months. So I don’t need to be afraid right now. So that was like the first thing I said, like right now, I’m safe right now. We’re totally okay. I then started telling my brain that actually flying is one of the safest ways to travel. And I told my brain that the flight from Boise to California happens every single day from our airport. Like flights take place every day from Boise to California. And the airline that we were gonna be going on has been flying this flight hundreds, thousands of times, back and forth every single day. And there has never, ever been a plane wreck from Boise to California, that this flight is a very short flight. It’s a safe flight. And there has never been a plane crash from Boise to California in this route. And then I remembered my brain. We’re flying in the middle of summer.

We’re not gonna be facing any extreme weather conditions, all of these things. So I just spent literally 30 to 45 seconds telling my brain why flying was gonna be safe for us and why I felt that this was going to be a safe option for our family. And instantly in that moment, all of the, the fears, the wave of all those fears that had come upon me minutes before all of a sudden just started to subside in this moment. I took those thoughts captive, and I, instead of spinning in an imagination loop where I was just creating more fear because the past version of me, when those fears would come up, I would allow my imagination to take me to the worst case scenario. I would picture myself on a plane with all my children and then all of a sudden something terrible happened and the pilot coming on and the engine going out and the, the, you know, the wing catching on fire. And I would sit and spin in that for hours and hours till I would make myself sick over it. But in this moment, I knew exactly what my brain was doing and was trying to protect me. And I, I changed the course of those thoughts so that they would serve me and so that I would take them captive. And I literally coached myself in the moment to overcome those fears and essentially put them to rest. And literally I’ve been able to use these steps in so many circumstances.

In so many situations, I used to be terrified to go to places with crowds, with my children again, because I was terrified that children might be kidnapped or taken or something bad might happen to them. In the summers. I would always get very scared about our kids being around swimming pools, because I would fear them drowning. And again, I would let my imagination run wild. And now I’ve used these tools to help me walk through those fears. Anytime I have a fear, that’s not an imminent fear. Like it’s not happening at the moment, but it’s the possibility of something bad happening to them down the road. I walk through these steps again, just to recap, first of all, you wanna identify the emotion? What am I feeling? And then you wanna bring the thought to the service. What thought is causing me to feel this? Then you wanna thank your brain. Thank you brain for bringing this to my attention. I appreciate you doing your job, but now I’m gonna take control. And I’m going to tell you why we are safe. I’m gonna reassure you that right now at this moment, we’re safe. I can’t always predict that we’re gonna always be safe, but right now we’re safe. And we’re okay. And I’m gonna tell you the reasons why I feel like this fear that you’re bringing to my attention, that the likelihood of it happening is small. And this is why, because we’re taking these precautions.

When I go to a big event with a lot of people I’m gonna be holding my child’s hand, or we’re gonna be walking with them. I’m gonna be keeping an eye on my children. We’ve been to other big events in the past, and everything’s been okay. I have a plan with my children. If we get separated, this is what we do. Things like that, right? So I tell myself, I coach myself why we are safe. And then finally, I wanna give you one more little brain hack tool. And this is it. If our imagination can cause us to spin in worry and fear and evoke all of those emotions, why can’t we put our imagination to use for us to help us to also feel safe? So if we go to the example of flying in an airplane, one of the things that I did through that process was instead of imagining the plane catching on fire or wrecking or things like that, I can actually use my imagination to imagine a really wonderful, safe flight.

And I can picture that in my mind, which I did. Just a couple months ago when I went on this flight, I imagined taking off with my family and I imagined my four year old daughter. Who’s never been on a flight before looking out the window and seeing the clouds and experiencing the wonder and the awe of flying for the first time. And I imagined sitting with my kids and talking to them. And I imagine having a really smooth flight and seeing the clouds and imagining heaven, which is one of the things that I love to do when I’m on flights. And just enjoying a really amazing flight, imagining a wonderful landing and like a smooth flight, all of that. And then getting off the flight and enjoying an amazing vacation. So we can put our imagination to work for us in a really powerful way. And this is another thing that I’ve done more and more in my life, instead of just imagining the worst case scenario. What if we were to imagine the best case scenario, what if we were to imagine good things happening to us, and when we put our imagination to work for us, not only does it evoke emotions of peace and calm, joy, and excitement, all of these other emotions.

And when we imagine them, we start looking forward to things in our lives and it start getting excited about the possibilities of the, the good things that can happen. And so my sisters in Christ, this is the work of managing our minds, managing our thoughts, and we have to practice this on a day to day basis. And if you’re someone that can relate to kind of my story about constantly living in a state of fear, this work is going to require a lot of intentionality to it. You’re gonna have to say, okay, I’m gonna practice this every time I feel out emotion of fear. I’m gonna practice these steps of feeling it, bringing it to light, thanking my brain, and then coaching myself really on why I’m safe and using my imagination to work for me, to serve me in a powerful way to help bring me the peace and the joy that I want. And again, these are the moments too, that we can turn to God. We can ask for his grace. We can ask him to give us the truth and we can place our trust in him that if, and when we are faced with a scary or difficult or challenging or fearful situation, that

He will help us in the moment that he will give us everything that we need to show up exactly how we need to show up to handle that situation and that we will trust that he will never abandon us, that we, that he will be there with us, even in the most challenging of situations. The thing is, is that our Lord doesn’t want us to be robbed of all the joy in our lives by constantly thinking about the possibility of the fears that might happen when we do that, we simply Rob ourselves of all that God wants to give us in the present moment. So staying in that present moment, trusting that we are exactly where we’re meant to be, and that God is gonna give us everything we need. And so in managing our minds and taking our thoughts captive and using these tools to separate ourselves from the thoughts a little bit, to look at them, to analyze them, to take control of them is really one of the most powerful gifts we can give to ourselves.

And my sister in Christ. If you want more help on how to do this, I wanna encourage you to join us in masters, where this is the work that we dive into with a powerful community of Catholic moms who are all committed to doing this thought work, to pulling those thoughts out and taking them captive for Christ. This is truly the path to the peace that he desires for all of us. And I leave you with that. My sister’s in Christ. I hope you have an amazing week. Remember that you are not made for comfort, but you are Made for Greatness. God bless.