How I Rewired My Brain to Use Fear as Fuel

There's a psychological strategy that can completely change your life and the way that you deal with fear.

And most people run from discomfort and fear and anxiety their entire lives, and that is the exact reason why they stay stuck.

But there's a simple shift, a psychological trick that flips fear on its head and actually turns it into your biggest advantage.

It's not motivation or willpower or just forcing yourself to do it.

It's something much deeper in your psychology, and once you understand this strategy, you'll never look at your fear or anxiety the same again.

And it is a simple psychological trick that is really, really easy to understand, and if you can master this, honestly, can completely change your life.

Because most people run from their fear and anxiety and discomfort.

And I've done it for years, I still find myself accidentally doing it until I become conscious that I'm doing it, is that I will kind of go into my comfort zone and I want to find the the path of least resistance.

But if you're listening to this right now, you're here because you want to improve yourself, you want to improve your life for yourself, for your bank account, for your family, for everyone that you love, maybe even for the world. And one aspect of that, maybe the most important aspect of that, is you getting past your fears so that you can create the life that you want.

And so, what if I told you that if you were to be able to learn to lean into your fear, rather than avoiding the fear, is the key to get everything that you want?

Well, there's a psychological trick that's called the reversal of desire that turns resistance that you have into action.

And so, it's rooted in the psychological idea of reframing your relationship with fear and anxiety and discomfort.

So, normally, if I say go up to someone on the street and say, what's your, what do you think about fear? What do you think about anxiety? What do you think about discomfort? What do you think, what's the first thing that pops into your head when you hear those?

People have a really bad relationship with those.

And so, the reversal of desire helps us approach these challenges that we have with fear and anxiety with a little bit of a sense of eagerness and excitement rather than dread.

And so, the psychology behind the reversal of desire is this.

The reversal of desire is grounded in the understanding that our brains are wired to avoid pain and discomfort.

You know that, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that we are wired to avoid pain or discomfort and to stay inside of our comfort zone because our brain is designed to keep us safe, it is an evolutionary trait designed to keep us safe.

This mechanism, though, leads to us avoiding not just like physical pain and being attacked by a lion, but emotional or psychological discomfort as well.

So, like, yeah, you don't want to be attacked by a lion, but you also don't want emotional pain of somebody judging you.

And so, if we continue to clump those two together of, you know, physical pain and emotional pain, over time, we'll start to avoid things, and this avoidance builds patterns into us like procrastination and not taking action and fear of everything and stagnation, and those are the biggest things that are stopping you from the life that you want.

So, what we need to do is we need to reframe discomfort as a actual positive signal in our brains and a signal of growth.

And by deliberately embracing this discomfort, we recondition our brains, not immediately, it's not going to happen the first time you do it, it's not going to happen the first month, but over time, you actually recondition your brain to turn what is right now, most likely a negative stimulus in your brain into a positive stimulus and an opportunity for reward for your brain as well, which I'll teach you how to do that.

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So, with that, let's go back to the show.

And so, the the techniques really particularly effective because it addresses two really critical aspects of human psychology.

Number one, fear is amplified through avoidance. It is study after study after study show that when you avoid something that you fear, you actually become more fearful of it, the more that you avoid it.

When we avoid discomfort, the fear around that thing that's going to make us uncomfortable,

ends up getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

That's why they say you're making a mountain out of a molehill, right?

So, by learning to lean into discomfort and to get your brain to want to lean into discomfort,

it actually shrinks that fear.

Which proves to our brain that the pain that we thought we were going to be anticipating is rarely as bad as we imagine, and we learn not to trust the pain that we're projecting into the future and to to not really listen to it as much.

So, that's the first thing is that fear actually amplifies through avoidance, and the second thing that it works off of is action dissolves anxiety.

Action replaces anxiety with a sense of accomplishment, and this gradually rewires our emotional response to challenging situations.

And so, let me show you how this actually works in practice, right?

So, the reversal of desire works this way.

What you want to do is you want to first off, identify the source of your discomfort or resistance, because a lot of times, people don't know exactly what's making them discomfort or fear or anxiety.

They just feel it in their body and they freeze.

And so, they feel fear and they're like, something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong, I need to stop doing whatever I'm doing.

What we need to do is notice our our body is getting flooded with these feelings.

And go, okay, hold on.

Something's happening, I feel different.

What am I thinking about? Like, in in cognitive behavioral therapy,

when you notice your body shift, the first question you'd ask yourself is, what was I just thinking?

What am I thinking about?

What am I afraid of?

You start to find that thing.

So you have more awareness of yourself.

And so, what we're trying to do is we're trying to get the feeling that's coming up inside of us

to actually be associated with a thought that came before it.

So, we need to first off, identify the source of our resistance.

Then, once we've identified the source of it,

we want to visualize the uncomfortable experience as vividly as possible.

Now, that might sound weird.

You're like, well, don't I want to just visualize the best things always happening?

Sure, that's really good to do.

But there's also a thing in psychology that's called negative visualization, where it is very, very beneficial to actually visualize what you're most afraid of happening in your life and just playing it out.

So, you want to visualize the uncomfortable experience as vividly as you possibly can.

The next thing that you want to do is to say to yourself out loud some sort of positive affirmation.

Like, bring it on, I want this, I got this, I can do this, I trust myself.

And then what you're doing is you're actually saying out loud to yourself some sort of positive affirmation,

which is the exact opposite of what you've always been doing.

Because you've been visualizing fear, you know, probably in your head unconsciously,

and thinking, oh my God, I need to coil away, I need to I need to hide.

I shouldn't be able to do this.

And you're retraining your brain to be like, I got this, I can do this, I believe in myself.

And you're going to say it out loud.

And then what you do is you visualize what it looks like to break past that discomfort and what it would look like to succeed.

And so, you're visualizing the uncomfortable thing as vividly as you possibly can.

Then you're giving yourself a positive affirmation.

And then you're visualizing it all going better than you could possibly imagine.

And then what you do after that is you, you know,

because most of the time our brain is unintentionally visualizing failure after failure after failure.

We want to just kind of retrain our brain just a little bit with that point.

And then what we want to train ourselves to do, we open our eyes and we take action.

Just a small step, moving toward the discomfort with intention.

Instead of feeling discomfort and doing nothing, we're actually feeling discomfort.

And moving just a little bit towards it.

So, let me give you a couple of examples of what those look like, right?

Let's say that you have like real bad procrastination.

So, I'll give you like a an example.

Let's make a fictitious person, Sarah.

Sarah is a freelance writer, and she struggles with starting her projects.

And so, she gets down to sit at her computer, and she looks at the blank page,

and she just feels overwhelmed just looking at the blank page.

And you have to understand, nobody just looks at a blank page and they're overwhelmed.

There's something, there's some sort of story, something happening in the background,

that you need to become aware of.

But she feels the blank page, oh, it's so overwhelming, I don't know what to do.

And she finds herself avoiding work, and, you know, let's say she scrolls on social media,

or she cleans her house instead of actually taking the action.

That's her version of procrastination.

I'm sure you've done something like that before, right?

So, the way that you're going to actually do this, if you were Sarah,

is instead of avoiding the discomfort of starting, what Sarah's going to do is acknowledge it head on and actually work through it.

So, now she's sitting there, she's feeling the overwhelming feelings of the blank page.

She's going to sit there and she's going to be like, hold on.

There's no way that just a white page and a blinking cursor makes me feel this way.

There's something going on in my head.

What was I just thinking?

What am I thinking about?

What am I afraid of?

You start to try to find that thing so you have more awareness of yourself.

And she notices, okay, this is what's going on in my head.

And she figures it out, and she sits down and she closes her eyes and she says, okay.

She imagines the resistance that she feels when sitting down to write.

And she imagines, she feels the uncertainty of not knowing how to begin and the initial frustration of crafting a rough design.

And she feels the feelings of, oh my gosh, what if I make this thing and then my customer hates it?

What if what if they they say they want a refund?

And you know, she starts going through the story, it's going on in her head.

She starts to visualize it as much as she possibly can.

She says out loud to herself, bring it on.

I can do this, I want to feel this awkwardness.

Because it means that I'm about to start making progress.

And so, she gives herself some sort of positive affirmation.

And then she visualizes herself sitting down and typing and just crushing it.

And just just finishing the project she's working on.

What it would feel like to be so proud of herself to finish it early,

to give it to the the customer and for the customer to be like, oh my God, Sarah,

this is the best thing that's ever been written.

And so, by embracing the discomfort, Sarah ends up finding out that the hardest part, which is starting,

is over quickly.

And over time, if she does this over and over and over and over again and then takes action just to decide to write one sentence,

over time, this emotional weight of her avoidance that she's built up over years diminishes,

and writing becomes less of a daunting task over time because she has changed her relationship with starting and with what happens at the end.

Whatever she was originally afraid of.

Action makes it all seem smaller.

Let's say somebody has social anxiety.

So, like Tony, he's always felt nervous in social situations,

especially when he's like out meeting new people.

And so, he avoids going to friends' houses or networking events because he'd prefer to stay in his comfort zone.

He thinks he's awkward and doesn't want people to judge him.

And so, using this technique, what he does is he visualizes the discomfort that he would feel

at the start of a conversation, going and actually trying to figure out what to say in front of this person.

Those awkward pauses, the fear of saying something wrong, looking like an idiot,

you know, them walking away from him and then he thinks about it at night when he leaves.

And then instead of him feeling this feeling and then retreating, he leans into it and he just says, I got this.

I can do this, I'm confident.

This nervous energy is just a sign that I'm out of my comfort zone.

And I need to get out of my comfort zone and change my life.

So, bring it on, I want to feel it.

And then he visualizes himself going to this networking event,

meeting somebody new, working through the awkwardness, making a new friend that he goes and gets coffee with the next day,

and they become really close to each other.

And then he says, okay, I'm going to go to this event.

You know, he goes to whatever event's going on tonight.

At his next event, he gets the the feeling, he's like, I need to approach this person.

He approaches someone new, fully expecting he's going to feel nervous.

And then to his surprise, like the conversation isn't as uncomfortable as he imagined.

And he leaves the event feeling like he did something well.

And each time he repeats this process, he reconditions his mind to this thing that he's so afraid of.

His his social anxiety starts to diminish.

And then he grows more confident in himself and also unfamiliar situations.

And so, let me explain to you why this actually works, right?

It reframes discomfort as a positive signal over time.

Because we have discomfort being, oh, I don't want to be uncomfortable.

So, over time, it reframes it as a positive signal.

It's not like the first time you do it, it automatically does it.

But if you do it consistently enough, it reframes it over time.

Humans are wired to avoid pain and discomfort.

Evolution has helped that as well.

But in modern life, like discomfort is often the signal that you're growing and you're putting yourself out of your comfort zone.

Not that you're in some physical danger of being attacked by something.

So, the reversal of desire actually flips this narrative.

So, instead of associating with discomfort with failure or fear or being rejected or looking like an idiot,

you begin to actually see the discomfort and associate the discomfort as evidence that you're stretching yourself, that you're growing yourself, that there is some positivity behind it.

And it taps into a motivational principle that's known as cognitive reappraisal,

where we reinterpret a negative experience in a more empowering light.

So, that's the first reason why it works.

The second reason why is because it neutralizes your fear over time through exposure.

It uses something that's called exposure therapy,

which means you don't have to physically be in front of this thing for it to happen.

You can, you know, mentally think about it.

But exposure therapy is just a psychological technique that is used to treat anxiety disorders.

The more that you do something, the more that you're around the thing that you're afraid of,

the less you actually have fear around it.

So, if you're afraid of rejection, putting yourself deliberately in situations where rejection is possible,

and then surviving and not dying and being okay,

teaches your brain that, oh, rejection isn't fatal.

It's actually not something I should really be afraid of.

You know, I was afraid of rejection, I actually got accepted.

That's actually a positive thing.

And if you visualize it and you don't actually put yourself in the situations, you feel like you've done it,

even though you haven't done it.

The next reason why it works is because it also activates your brain's reward system.

So, it creates from what was a negative feedback loop,

it creates a positive feedback loop around being uncomfortable.

So, you feel uncomfortable, you feel discomfort.

You embrace discomfort.

You act and achieve some sort of result.

Your brain then goes, wow, that was pretty good.

It rewards you with dopamine.

Gives you a drip of dopamine in your brain.

Your brain then goes, that was good, I like dopamine, and I want more.

And it starts to reinforce that behavior over time.

And then over six months, a year, a couple years, you're more likely to lean into discomfort again and again in the future.

And so, the reason why this works is because of neuroplasticity.

When you repeatedly respond to discomfort with curiosity and with action, rather than avoidance,

you create new neural circuits that reinforce that behavior.

Most people feel fear and then they back away, and that's become a habit, like an unconscious habit for us.

So, it's so habitual that most of the time you don't even notice that you are feeling fear and you're backing away.

And so, this new reappraisal that you're doing allows you to start to break the habit,

to build a new one, which is to feel the fear and to step forward just a little bit into that fear.

And with a lot of practice, these behaviors, these things that you you struggle with over time,

like something that's hard to do, something that you're afraid of, procrastination, whatever it might be,

the new thing that you start doing, it starts to become more automatic.

And so, the thing that I'll recommend is this.

If you're going to start trying this this this uh reversal of desire,

try to start small for a little while.

Like, choose manageable challenges at first.

Like, if you know, if you're afraid of public speaking and that terrifies you, like don't go into a huge group,

like try to talk in front of 100 people.

Talk in front of two people.

And start to get better at that way.

The next thing you want to really do is try to commit to as much repetition as you possibly can.

Uh, when you look at repetitions, like they always say, repetition is the mother of any skill.

Like any skill, the reversal of desire gets easier the more that you practice it, the more that you do it.

The more that you do it and the more it bats you get with putting yourself out there and leaning into discomfort,

the less you will actually feel uncomfortable.

And so, the more that you face this discomfort head on, the less intimidating all of it will become.

And then a really important process is to celebrate this.

Instead of, you know, focusing like solely on outcomes, like take pride, be proud of yourself when you lean into discomfort.

Talk to yourself, you're doing so good, I'm so proud of you.

This shift actually reinforces your commitment to growth and lets your brain release dopamine,

which is the chemical of motivation, a feel-good chemical that says, I like this, I want to do it again.

And so, the reversal of desire is a really powerful shift in perspective.

And when you can lean into discomfort rather than just avoiding it all out like you probably have been, you free yourself from this mental chains of of procrastination and fear and anxiety and discomfort.

So, whether it's a a difficult conversation, a huge project at work, a physical challenge,

the technique is used to empower you to take action with intention and resilience versus backing away.

So, the next time you feel resistance creeping in,

just pause for a second, reflect.

What am I feeling?

Why am I feeling this way?

What am I thinking about?

Visualize the discomforting thing that you're about to face.

And then give yourself a positive affirmation.

Bring it on, I want this, I trust myself, I got this.

And then take small step in the right direction.

And over time, you're going to start to notice the thing that was so uncomfortable for you,

you don't have fear around it anymore, or very, very little fear.

And the important part about that is that you'll learn to grow.

And you'll become better.

And your growth doesn't come from avoiding fear, it comes from actually noticing the fear and stepping past it.

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