Moving forward when we are afraid

A lot of the time, what we define as 'hard', or 'scary' is actually just the unknown. It's hard, because we've never done it before. Because of this, our brain is fighting us before we even begin.

This is why anything new, a job, a relationship, a new skill or environment can feel hard, even when those things might be well within our capacity.

Our brains constantly work to reduce uncertainty by attempting to predict outcomes, so our nervous system flags 'I don't know what will happen' as danger.

If you understand this, then the answer is obvious, if 'hard'='unknown', then to make it easy, we need to learn.

When you increase knowledge and familiarity, the brain will down-regulate your fear circuits, so it wont feel so 'hard' anymore.

During uncertainty, your brain increases attention, information seeking, and learning rate. So this built-in survival mechanism will actually help you learn faster.

So the answer is, we use our nervous energy to research, learn, study, ask questions and be curious.

By doing this, uncertainty decreases, familiarity increases and our bodies will regulate.

So rather than running from what we fear, we can use that nervous energy to learn. We can turn the nervous energy into our fuel.