Curiosity

Countermeasure #4

Most people often overlook two obvious truths regarding how best to counter fear. The first is that its opposite is not courage, as we tend to think. Courage can undoubtedly be useful and is worthy of praise. But bravery is acting despite fear. Being afraid is a prerequisite. Valor is also a temporary fix that has zero impact on chronic fear. Consider those with dangerous professions who suffer from hypervigilance. These people are undoubtedly courageous. Yet despite their heroic actions at times, many still walk around with persistent limbic system impairment.

The second is that nothing is innately scary. Some people are terrified of spiders, while others study them for a living. Many people fear flying. Others are pilots. We see the same juxtaposition in humanity’s attitudes towards snakes, heights, and countless other things. Of course, any of those can present a situation worthy of a time-bound fear-based response. However, none of them are somehow imbued with an inherent scariness quality. We only choose to view them that way.

Armed with these facts (that fear is usually unjustified outside of truly perilous scenarios and that we need a strategy other than courage to counteract unhealthy or unwarranted forms), we must seek an alternative. I first found one thanks to a man named Charles Linden.

When I started experiencing perplexing physical sensations around the time I was exiting active duty, I initially sought medical testing to diagnose the problem. It seemed like the clear place to look but yielded no answers. So, after a few months, I started Googling for them. Typically, this is a highly ill-advised course of action as it can further scare you into thinking you have every disease on the planet. While part of me did believe that, luckily, I also assumed that some portion of my condition was mental health-related and searched the internet accordingly.

The results presented me with something called The Linden Method. Decades earlier, its eponymous creator suffered from severe anxiety. He spent years convinced he was dying while experiencing debilitating symptoms that, in his mind, confirmed this belief. He took various medications that didn’t help and, in many ways, made things worse. Meanwhile, his fears only intensified.

After years of suffering like this with no improvement, he eventually decided to take a completely different approach. He quit all his prescription drugs, which were aimed at treating symptoms, and instead started focusing on addressing his anxiety head-on as the root cause. What Linden posited was that maybe his mind was the real culprit behind his entire condition. What if constantly thinking this way had somehow created the somatic sensations he felt, and worrying about them merely fueled the fire?

The crux of his theory was that substantially repetitive conscious thoughts can get offloaded to the subconscious like a software program running in the background. It’s the same as any other skill the brain learns and wants to make automatic so it can focus on something else. Driving is a perfect example of how this process typically works. It's a deliberate act when you first try to operate a motor vehicle. You must pay attention and concentrate on every move you make. But after hundreds of hours, you no longer have to think about it. You can cruise down the road and even parallel park while talking on the phone, playing with the radio, and drinking coffee. It’s subconscious behavior now.

Linden surmised that the same thing can happen with anything we do often enough, including thinking. In fact, the typical patterns of behavior that make us feel like ourselves are simply the result of repetitive action. So, if we spend long enough in a state of fear, eventually, it runs on autopilot as part of our standard subroutine. Now, we are an “anxious person.” And given fear's somatic effects, it can wreak havoc on you physically. This is what he postulated had happened to him.

Somehow, he needed to overwrite the destructive program. Eventually, he discovered effective methods through trial and error and fully recovered. The critical component he realized was that he couldn’t simply think his way out of it. It took action. He had to do things differently if we were to develop new subconscious patterns.

His story read like an autobiography of my life at the time. Everything he had experienced was exactly what I was feeling. But I had never fathomed that your mind could have that kind of power over your body from a symptomatic standpoint. I thought if I experienced physical dysfunction, it had to have an equally physical cause. He was the first person who opened my eyes to the fact that this isn’t always true.

Thanks to his method, I made substantial improvements. Years later, when faced with an even more severe chronic illness, I would need to adopt additional systems and exercises aimed at calming my limbic system to recover. Below, I will recommend some of these in addition to Linden’s. But first, I need to discuss the overarching countermeasure to fear that his content revealed for me—curiosity.

The Linden Method is anchored around the concept that engaging in an activity like a new skill or hobby requires conscious attention that does not allow deleterious subconscious patterns to get up to their old tricks. If you do this enough and expand that attitude to everything you do, interest eventually replaces fear as your standard operating condition. You become a curious person instead of an anxious one. It takes a lot of repetition and commitment, and depending on your level of dysfunction, this can be much easier said than done, but it is possible.

Kids act like this naturally. My youngest son is twelve. He’s been scared plenty of times in his life thus far. But he’s never anxious. This is because he’s too busy being amazed. He walks around with a sense of awe about the world around him. It can be as simple as a giant icicle hanging off a building, and his response will always be, “Whoa, look at the size of that!” He never thinks, “That might fall off and hurt someone.” Linden’s brand of curiosity is similar and focuses on external interests as a form of distraction. By getting out of your head and placing your focus elsewhere with an aura of wonder, you can break free from the downward spiral of anxiety.

But you can also take this tact with your own anxious thoughts and become curious about them. As with other emotions like sorrow and anger, our initial reaction isn’t the problem. Fear is natural and sometimes wholly appropriate. But how we respond to that impulse, especially when it’s unwarranted, makes all the difference in the world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” However, in the context of mental health, it’s the only thing we shouldn’t fear. Fear itself can’t hurt you, and fearing fear is often what sends us down a dark path.

Instead, we must also cultivate curiosity about our internal workings in addition to external interests. Dr. Russell Kennedy, another long-time health anxiety sufferer, describes anxiety as an “alarm” in his book Anxiety Rx. It’s a warning system and a feeling (not a thought) that your body (not your mind) has developed over time. So, when that feeling presents itself, the worst response is resisting it or pushing it away. That’s just another form of fear. Think of anxiety like a small child who is upset. You don’t get them to calm down by screaming at them to stop. You do it by taking an interest in what’s bothering them, reassuring them, and lovingly wrapping your arms around them. When we repeatedly do the same thing with our fears over time, this shifts our brain into a rational mode and eventually convinces our limbic system that it’s safe and no longer needs to stay on high alert.

This is especially true for physical sensations we may experience because of chronic fear. Every time we push against them, they intensify. If we consequently resist them even more, it creates a snowball effect. The solution is to do the opposite. Look at those symptoms as just sensations. Treat them with curiosity and even go one step further and become comfortable with them.

When I was in the midst of ketamine treatments back in 2021, one day, I remarked to my facilitator buddy about the grip anxiety held on me. He said, “Stop giving away your power.” He meant that my condition only had as much influence over me as I chose to give it. The sooner I realized I was in control, the sooner I could start changing my approach to the situation. The second you take imagined threats and turn them into objects of interest, you begin to understand them instead of fearing them. And as the familiar axiom goes, knowledge is power.

A year or so later, I was at a dinner party speaking with a woman I had just met about mental health and my journey. She expressed to me how she suffered from panic attacks and worried often about when one might strike. I jotted a note down on a yellow stickie and gave it to her. It said, so what? “Next time you have a panic attack,” I stated, “take this attitude. The problem isn’t the attack itself. It’s how you are responding. I used to have panic attacks, too. I don’t anymore because I finally realized they can’t harm me. Instead, I became curious about them. Don’t give them any power they don’t deserve. Say to yourself, ‘I’m having a panic attack. That’s interesting. But so what?’”

Exercises

I don’t want to minimize how challenging it can be to overcome fear. I know firsthand the insidious way it can permeate your life and the difficulties in reprogramming yourself. It takes time, but even for those with debilitating limbic system impairment, it can be done with enough tenacity and commitment to the process. From methods like Linden’s to breathwork to journaling to neural retraining, here are the most effective countermeasure exercises I’ve found, from the easiest and least amount of time involved to the most demanding. All include links to more detailed descriptions and guided tracks where appropriate. Some of these work directly with curiosity, while others help change your biology to make you more resilient in the face of stress. The goal of these is twofold: break the cycle and turn off the alarm. Depending on where you fall on the fear spectrum, you may need to go deep with these practices. As always, seek for yourself and know yourself.

Statement of Intent

This exercise complements the statement of gratitude. Here, you are focusing on the future instead of the past. First thing in the morning, write a simple declaration on a yellow stickie about how you intend to act that day. Make it positive, hopeful, and optimistic. For example:

• I intend to assume the best-case scenario in all circumstances.

• I intend to give the best possible interpretation of situations.

As before, place it somewhere you see often. If you put your statement of gratitude on the bottom left of your computer monitor, put this one on the right. As any anxious thought arises during the day, change it to this declaration.

Fear-Setting

This exercise comes from a TED Talk by Tim Ferriss and is excellent if you are prone to catastrophizing. It’s a version of the Stoic practice of premeditatio malorum, which means “the premeditation of evils.” Simply put, it’s envisioning the worst-case scenario so you are best prepared if it transpires. I’ve modified Ferriss’ exercise slightly, and it involves creating four columns on a sheet of paper or in a journal as follows:

1. DEFINE. What is it you are worried might happen? List out as many of these as possible in detail.

2. PREVENT. For each, establish a mitigation measure to prevent or decrease the likelihood of that outcome.

3. REPAIR. If that doesn’t work, what could you do to repair the damage caused by the fear coming true?

4. ANALYZE. When the scenario in question came to pass, what actually happened?

This fourth component is the crucial one I added. Most calamities you have anticipated didn’t occur. Fear-setting is a way to show us this objectively so we stop focusing on imagined tragedies with such trepidation. That column allows you to see this for yourself. Maybe it’s time to stop assuming the worst.

Box Breathing

We can use breathwork for various reasons. In the case of Integration, the goal was energy flow. Here, it’s to make us more resilient to anticipated stress. Box breathing is a simple technique done before a situation you know might make you nervous to help reduce that response. Breathe in, hold, breathe out, and hold, each for a four-count repeatedly. These segments represent the figurative box's side, top, side, and bottom. As always, breathe quietly from your diaphragm and through your nose. Try it for five to ten minutes before a big game, presentation, or other situation where you might be on edge.

Resonance Breathing

Resonance breathing is a technique developed by Dr. Leah Lagos, detailed in her book Heart Breath Mind. It consists of a four-second inhale through the nose and a six-second exhale through the mouth. Lagos guides readers through a ten-week protocol based on this practice, doing it twenty minutes twice daily. This exercise strengthens your natural resilience to stress by increasing your heart rate variability (HRV). When done correctly, things naturally won’t bother you as much. And that happens without you having to think any differently about them.

Skill Development

Much like The Linden Method, finding a skill you are passionate about and devoting focused energy to it daily can temporarily distract your subconscious mind away from anxiety and eventually shift it toward curiosity and interest. When starting, it helps to dedicate a fixed amount of time to this hobby. Commit to thirty minutes every day for a month and see if it changes how you feel, specifically while engaged in the activity.

Past Visualization

Your brain can’t distinguish between what it perceives in reality and what it vividly imagines. If you can engross yourself in a favorable scenario from your past, this reassures your mind that it’s safe and needn’t be on guard. The trick is to describe the situation verbally and tap into your five senses as part of the process.

Pull up an especially joyous memory, close your eyes, and imagine you are there. Detail what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch out loud. If you are on a beach somewhere, conjure up the feeling of sand under your toes, including texture and temperature, the way the waves sound, and the smell of the sea. The more immersive, the better. Remind your brain that there’s nothing to worry about and everything is OK.

Neural Retraining

Several systems are specifically designed for those suffering from limbic system impairment in the form of chronic illness. They include Annie Hoppers’ DNRS, Ashok Gupta’s The Gupta Program, and Ben Ahren’s re-origin. All of them are self-paced video courses that expand upon the spoken visualization described above to re-program the limbic system back to an appropriate baseline.

Each method requires varying levels of commitment, from thirty to sixty minutes a day for up to six months or more. But they do work and have brought profound improvements to those who have struggled for years with mysterious conditions. Participants can also sign up for group sessions or individual coaching with their staff. I’m partial to re-origin as I think it’s the simplest approach.

Somatic Tracking

Curable is an app based on “somatic tracking,” detailed in the book The Way Out by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv. The authors derived their method from work done by Dr. John Sarno. He studied how patients would undergo back surgery to relieve pain, but it would persist. Much like chronic illness conditions, he theorized that the feeling of pain could get locked into the nervous system by the brain even after the injury was gone. This is similar to the way an amputee can experience phantom limbs. Dr. Sarno called this condition Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS). To me, this is yet another form of chronic fear. Accordingly, Curable uses techniques similar to other neural training programs that shift people from fear-based responses to curiosity-based ones about their pain.

Closing Thought

When I think of fear personified, it’s the images of Evgeny Stepanovich Kobytev, a Soviet soldier from World War II. Two photos taken four years apart show the toll that the war, including time in a concentration camp, took on him. In the first picture, he is young, good-looking, and calm. In the second, it looks like a shotgun blast went off in his face. His forehead is wrinkled, his eyes wide and haunted, and he’s locked in hypervigilance.

Fear is something that can get coded into your very being. You carry it around even when you don’t consciously sense it. The only way out is to start taking an interest in what’s happening and changing your relationship with it. By and large, the world is pretty safe these days. And so are you. Fear itself isn’t dangerous. Any “symptoms” you feel are just sensations. Don’t treat them as threats. Don’t resist them. Welcome them. Love them. Become a curious observer.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.