Fear of Fear, When the Expectation Is Worse Than the Event

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The fear of fear is often greater than what we were originally afraid of.

Many of my clients describe it in much the same way: The actual situation, the presentation, the drive, the supermarket, the flight, may only last ten minutes. But the fear of it begins days, sometimes weeks in advance. And it is this fear, not the event itself, that makes life smaller.

Anyone who has ever had a panic attack often knows this particularly well. The next panic attack is not really the problem. The real problem is the constant inner question: When will it come back? The brain has experienced once how threatening one's own body can feel, and stays on guard from that moment on.

When the body reacts before anything happens

What is so uncomfortable about the fear of fear is that it is not just a thought. As soon as we think of the situation, the body responds: The heart beats faster, breathing becomes shallow, muscles tense. And this is where the trap begins, because the nervous system cannot tell whether the danger is actually present or whether we are only imagining it.

For the brain, the physical reaction is proof: You see, it really is threatening. This creates a cycle in which the expectation produces the symptoms and the symptoms confirm the expectation. The more often this happens, the faster and more reliably it runs.

Why avoidance makes the fear grow

When we avoid a situation we no longer feel up to, we feel short-term relief. That is understandable, and it is exactly why avoidance is so attractive and at the same time so treacherous. Because every time we step aside, it is a quiet confirmation for the brain: Good that we didn't do that, it would definitely have gone badly.

So the radius in which we still feel safe gets smaller over time. And the fear of leaving it grows larger. Some of my clients tell me: "Actually, I'm not afraid of driving any more, I'm just afraid of having a panic attack in the car." That is the core of the fear of fear.

It is not the situation that is the problem, but the memory of how it felt last time.

How the cycle can be broken

The good news is that the body can learn again. Not through willpower, not by "pulling yourself together," but by offering the nervous system new experiences. There are several ways to do this. In my work I combine different methods depending on the person, WingWave and NLP to decouple the physical stress response directly, IFS and The Work to understand the inner voices that keep feeding the expectation, and hypnosis or TRT when deeper imprints are involved.

What all of these approaches have in common: They do not work against the fear, but with the part of you that originally created it for a good reason. The fear of fear is not a character flaw. It is your nervous system's attempt to protect you, just an attempt that has gone off course. And that is exactly what can be changed.

Related Topics

• Complex Anxiety Cycle – How anxiety reinforces itself
• Understanding Panic Attacks – Building deeper understanding
• Why Relaxation Is Not Enough – The limits of pure relaxation
• Panic Attacks (topic page) – Treatment and ways out