Fear of what others may think

The idea that others may comment negatively upon, or find something to criticise in, our actions can give rise to fear. This fear can effectively harass us to the point that we lose our vitality and give up our motivation. It paralyses our spirit to act. A speaker fumbles on the stage because he fears the opinions of his listeners. A cook doesn’t know which menu to choose because he fears the comments of his guests. A student doesn’t take up a favourite subject because he fears what his peers will think. Fear arising from assumptions on what people may possibly say or think becomes the hurdle that stops you embarking upon an action.

If someone thinks you are a donkey will you start growing long ears and a tail? The perceptions that others entertain in their minds do not become your reality. You create your own reality as the ancient Upanishad asserts:

You are what your deep, driving desire is
As your desire is, so is your will
As your will is, so is your deed
As your deed is, so is your destiny

- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 4:4.5

Enquire as to whether the thoughts about others’ opinions make any positive contribution to what you want to do. Your assumptions of what others may think of your performance or choice may or may not be true. Yet that should not be allowed to decide your course of action. Consider whether the action is required and act on that basis.

Of course, the counsel of the wise and experienced is always worth our consideration as it helps clarify what our course of action should be and is built upon life’s realities. By contrast, letting fear of other people’s opinions decide an action is something very different: it focuses on our ego and is built upon mental assumptions. Ego is nothing but our sense of separate identity. It weakens our ability to make clear decisions because these fears are thoughts that calculate the merits gained by our ego. It does not discriminate the value of the action. In fact fear is just an extension of our ego. When we experience fear, there is the subject who is the ‘fearer’ and there is the object of fear. The ego is the entity that plays the role of an agent of fear or the fearer. Fear resides in the subject which is the ego and not in the object of fear. A fear thought becomes effective only after it is identified with the ego in the sense of ‘I fear’.

Our ego will always demand a false sense of security to safeguard against any attack on its image. The ego is the culprit who turns every situation into a judgement of one’s own pride and creates a tussle between concepts of right and wrong. Our ideas of right and wrong are constructs of the mind which can never satisfy everyone. The true principle of acting is to be free from such ego-driven duality and simply to do what ought to be done regardless of how others may judge it.

The understanding and acceptance of action and its limitations and implications it has for oneself and everyone else, is critical for knowing what ought to be done. What ought to be done at a given moment becomes what is right for that moment. Paying attention to the action of that moment releases us from the ego-driven fear which is hopelessly connected to a dead past or to an imaginary future but never to the reality of the present moment.

Of course we may make mistakes while performing action. The sheer thought of making a mistake can immediately give the ego an opportunity to whisper “what will others think?” – a perfect recipe for creating fear and restraining us from action. The truth is that making a mistake in action by itself does not create as much fear as to the possibility of someone else knowing about our mistake.

Once we acknowledge that in life making mistakes is natural, we can then orientate our mind to view mistakes as a useful process that we need to go through to evolve in a continuously evolving universe. Unfortunately when we allow the ego to capitalise on the idea that a mistake is as a weapon for others to think negative thoughts about us, then our fear, which leads to irrationality, takes precedence. We will then try to control everything. To escape from that fear, the mind gets caught in the false idea that everything must be certain in life before choosing to act and this causes most people to drop their action plans simply because they are burdened by the labour of building an imaginary certainty.

Action that ought to be done is abandoned because of the speculation that it may not go as expected. The truth is that we will never know the outcome unless we perform the action. It does not take much self-introspection of our past experiences to discover that we cannot possibly be certain of the result that each action will produce.

Uncertainty is the true law of life. Those who see it as an inevitable fact of life and action, learn to overcome worries and refuse to become paranoid of what people may think not only of the choice of our action but also of any mistake we commit in doing that action. We learn to act with a sense of surrender to life because we know it is always worth doing what we ought to do. Rather than living in suppression, explore life courageously and freely. Let’s do whatever we ought to do now.

Mental Fatigue

Fatigue is not a disease but a natural psychobiological warning system. Fatigue can be both physical and mental and can also be associated with certain diseases and syndromes. We all tend to blame fatigue on a busy lifestyle and of course we are right most of the time.

Adjustments to our lifestyle can help.  General remedies that would normally help us combat fatigue include: making an effort to have better dietary nourishment and avoiding a breakfast high in sugar; enhancing the quality of our sleep and even practising short naps; performing low-intensity exercises; reducing our workload through better planning; sticking to priorities; delegating work and giving up unnecessary multitasking gymnastics and unrealistic work commitments; and cutting down on alcohol.

When fatigue becomes a regular occurrence and the common remedies fail to yield positive results, we should get professional medical help as this could be the sign of a more serious medical condition. Doctors tells us that fatigue can point to a long list of medical conditions like anaemia, iron overload, intestinal dysbiosis, sleep apnea, underactive thyroid, food allergies and even serious afflictions like heart problems and cancer.

Nevertheless recurring fatigue can also indicate that we are suffering from mental fatigue. If a medical assessment concludes that it is not linked to any disease then the possibility of the problem being emotional and psychological should not be dismissed.  When outer lifestyle adjustments designed to address the causes of fatigue do not provide the needed relief, it is all the more likely to be due to emotional and psychological reasons.

Mental fatigue causes perceived physical exhaustion and can lead us to mistakenly believe that we are suffering physical fatigue. Among other possible symptoms of mental fatigue are the inability to focus on a task, making more mistakes than usual in our regular tasks, impaired memory and slowed reasoning and even dizziness. It is true that strenuous mental work and excessive stress contribute to mental fatigue yet a subtler cause can be related to our emotional health.

Hindu yogis have always taught that thought-activities consume more energy compared to other activities of the human body. This is also what modern scientific analysis reveals where it is said that the brain consumes up to 20% of the energy used by the body, more than any other organ, and yet it represents only 2% of the body weight.  The brain receives much of our oxygen and glucose consumption.

Vedanta philosophy speaks of the mind as an inner instrument with various mental functions. The conscious part of human mind termed manas in Sanskrit does only a segment of the total work performed by the mental factory. The manas is constantly gurgling out fractions of thoughts from a deeper region of the mind termed citta. Citta is identified as memory and can also refer to the sub-conscious mind where much of the instinctive functions of the psycho-physical body are regulated. Equally important is that citta also consists of much of our submerged experiences and memories and works to resolve unsettled memories.

Swami Sivananda explains “The mental processes are not limited to the field of consciousness alone. The field of subconscious mentation is of a much greater extent than that of conscious mentation. The mind is not conscious of the greater portion of its own activities. As man can hold in consciousness but one fact at a time, only a fraction of our knowledge can be in the field of consciousness at any one moment. Only ten per cent of mental activities come into the field of consciousness. Ninety per cent of the mental activities takes place in the subconscious mind. Messages, when ready, come out like a flash from the subconscious mind to the surface of the conscious mind through the trapdoor in the subconscious mind.”

Negative emotions are those thoughts that create instability and stress in the mind.  Our natural response to this is to eliminate it by brooding over it again and again in the hope that we will find a solution to it. Even though we do sometimes stop thinking those emotional thoughts, they actually sink and continue to whirl about in the deeper region of the mind, emerging onto the conscious mind surface from time to time.

Inner emotional turmoil, unresolved conflicts, confusion, depression, fear and other negative emotions are very forceful thoughts which the Gita classifies as rajasic and tamasic in nature. Rajasic thoughts create noise and agitation in the mind. Tamasic thoughts create dullness and heaviness in the mind. The continuous inner struggle to eliminate unpleasant emotions can tax our mental energy store.

Further yoga teaches that thoughts transmit in all direction as a ripple on the surface of water. Every thought travels through the nerves and influences every cell in the body. Worries, fears and other negative thoughts adversely affect the functioning of the cells and render them inefficient. Fatigue is the body’s way of warning of possible damage to health that can invite illness.

Until the healing takes place in the emotional mind, our central nervous system will continue to trigger the fatigue alert.  Yoga postures and pranayama can set the proper mental climate for the real healing of the emotions to take place. Hatha yoga practices – especially those that improve oxygen levels in the bloodstream, increase oxygenated blood flow to the brain and promote better blood circulation – will help to release the blockages in the nadis (the energy channels), remove toxins in the blood and supply new energy to the mind and body. This will also provide immediate relieve from exhaustion, subside the mental noise, cultivate steadiness and remove the dross in the mind.

Discerning our emotional issues clearly and having an objective understanding of the issues will help us in putting things in perspective and in achieving conflict resolution, direction and inner balance quickly. The practice of Vedantic nonjudgmental awareness meditation and the effort to abide in the feeling of Divine presence through surrender will support us in this endeavour. It is also important to have the right emotional support system and wise guidance. Seek ways to get inspired and infuse the mind with new positive moods. When the mind finds rest, the body will also find rest.

Acceptance

When we learn to accept ourselves as we are then we will be able to accept others as they are. Acceptance of one’s own self (body-mind organism) means being clear about the uniqueness of one’s own inner nature, talents and purpose.

Acceptance is to understand that this uniqueness is a gift from nature. It is a gift because it has been given to us for our own goodness. Whatever we have is what we need to walk in this path of life. It is especially designed for us by the Cosmic Intelligence. Nothing is created in vain. It is also what the Cosmic Intelligence needs to keep the wheel of life in balance. Everyone and everything is important in this cosmos.

When we do not have sufficient acceptance of ourselves, of what is, we create an imaginary sense of lack. It propels us into a state of constant judgment and comparison with others. This creates a state of inner conflict and confuses our life’s purpose.

We deny what is and compare ourselves with our ideas of what others are, which are most often based on some superficial outer judgments and speculations. Caught in the internal struggle of denial and comparison, we brood over these conflicting ideas and dwell in the false sense of lack. We lose sight of what is true and unique within us and what can truly make us happy.

The sense of lack buries our true sense of purpose in life. It is an illusionary gap created in our mind and we are always trying to find external images to fit into it. We lose confidence, inspiration and motivation to be our own self. We continue to be hypnotised by the outside world, by the illusions of the ideals and definitions of success and glamour set by others living it, by the images projected in the media, the opinions of society and others. Our lives become a perpetual struggle to become like others. Yet no external image seems to fill the gap in our hearts because the gap is an illusion. This leads to frustration and disappointment.

This becomes a distraction from our own purpose in life and from what we truly want to do in life. We plough a ground that will never give us satisfaction. When we realise this and remove the illusionary gap, we find ourselves comfortably being our own self. We regain new energy and direction. Having arrived at this wisdom, we come to accept our self in total. Self judgment, self pity and self condemnation cease. We become free of the psychological burden of trying to escape from our true design and wanting to be something else. We begin to celebrate the uniqueness that is us, as part of this wonderful existence.

If we have this understanding that we are not separate from the total Existence, from God, and if we have this insight that the very source from which we have arisen has supplied us with everything in life and has all the time walked beside us, we will discover a new strength to walk the rest of our life without fear. Our hearts will only be filled with trust and gratitude towards God, a trust arising out of understanding and acceptance in the wisdom of Existence. We enter into the awareness that there is a benevolent purpose behind the cosmic scheme. We are grateful because we know that being a part of that source, whatever it designs for us is for our own goodness.

Having that inner equanimity and balance, our mind becomes receptive to seeing others as they are, with the equal understanding that each of us is uniquely designed and that the uniqueness of another is what is best for him or her. We do not expect another’s design to be in us or a different design to be in others. We have the openness to accept others as they are, to acknowledge the uniqueness in others and even to admire the best things present in others without having it disturb our own inner balance because we no longer compare. Acceptance pervades our being.