Mental/Emotional Health Review & FEAR

Mental/Emotional Health Review

Emotion Focus: Fear

Self Esteem

• How you feel about yourself

• Key conditions of Self-Esteem

• 1) Knowing one's Personal Strengths and weaknesses

• 2) Having Positive Role Models

• 3) Sense of Belonging

• 4) Sense of Power

Multiple Choice

What is Self-Esteem?

• How you feel about yourself

• How you feel about others

• How others Feel about you

• How you feel about the World

Standards

• Often adopted from people who you admire

• Guidelines in holding ourselves to a higher quality

• help us make decisions and judgements

• Our mental and emotional health are compromised when our actions do not reflect our standards

• Strong Sense of Standards = Higher Self Esteem = Less Stress

• Difficult Decisions = Standards are in conflict

• We should prioritize our standards in order to avoid conflicts

Multiple Select

Having a strong sense of Standards will (Check all that apply)

• Lower Stress

• Raise Self Esteem

• Raise Stress

• Lower Self Esteem

• Increase Mental Health

Emotional Awareness

• Being able to identify HOW & WHY we feel the way we do

• Helps us

• Know what we need and want (and what we don't)

• Build better relationships

• express our feelings more clearly

• Avoid or resolve Conflicts

• Get passed difficult feelings easier

Emotional Intelligence - EQ

• Ability to UNDERSTAND, MANAGE and USE our emotions

• Helps us

• Build stronger relationships

• React to our emotions more positively

• Deal with difficult situations

• get through social and emotional situations

Multiple Choice

Which of the following is our ability to understand, manage, and use our emotions?

• Emotional Awareness

• Emotional Intelligence

Emotions

• We have emotions to handle fundamental life tasks

• They help us survive

• They play an important role in how we think and behave.

• When we build our EQ, we can use our Emotions to build success.

• If we do not Manage our Emotions, then we are subject to letting our Emotions control our actions which can result negatively.

• REMEMBER: Everyone reacts to situations differently, with different emotions, and different intensities.

• People also respond differently to the same emotions. for example FEAR, some people enjoy the feeling (people who enjoy roller coasters, horror movies) then there are those who avoid the feeling of fear at all costs. There is no right or wrong

Multiple Choice

There are no correct or wrong Emotions.... But Positive and negative ways we react to our emotions

• True

• False

FEAR

Fear arises with the threat of harm, either physical, emotional, or psychological, real or imagined.

The universal function of fear is to avoid or reduce harm. 

FIGHT/FLIGHT/FREEZE/FAWN

FEAR: Your body in Action

• 1- Something happens to make you feel like you are in danger. Could be real or all in your head.

• 2 - Physical Changes brought on by the Nervous system

• Adrenaline kicks in: Rapid Heart rate, Sweating, Muscles Tense, make shake, Pupils dilate.

• 3 - Mental Changes

• Stress in the form of nervousness can increase the intensity your fear, or your mind may become blank, making it difficult to decide what to do next, you might start feeling anxious

• This give us a chance to overcome danger or escape it so we can stay alive.

• These responses can also be triggered at times when they aren't needed. When that happens, these drastic changes can damage our physical and mental health.

FIGHT/FLIGHT/FREEZE/FAWN

• When you feel threatened, your body immediately responds to the danger. Whether you spring into fight, flight, freeze, or even fawn, your underlying goal is to minimize, end, or avoid the danger and return to a feeling of calm and control. While you have a natural inclination toward these responses, (HABITS)... with practice and building our EQ we can choose which responses we take that grant us the most Positive Results.

FIGHT: _{Confronting a threat aggressively.}

• If you believe you can conquer the danger, your body will jump into fight mode.

• you'll attack the source of the danger.

• The fight response can be extremely beneficial under certain circumstances.

• Fight does not Always been a fist fight... It means go into Action, physicaly face the fear head on

• The healthiest scenario is that you display flexibility in your responses. If you can overcome the danger, you stay and fight it. If you can't, and there's a way out, you run

FLIGHT: _{means you run from the danger}

•  if you believe there's no hope of defeating the threat, you'll naturally respond by running away.

• Sometimes, running away is your best option. After all, unless you're a firefighter, you probably want to run out of a burning building

• The healthiest scenario is that you display flexibility in your responses. If you can overcome the danger, you stay and fight it. If you can't, and there's a way out, you run.

Freeze: _{you find yourself unable to move or act against the threat.}

•  it usually indicates you feel you can't win either by fighting or running

• Sometimes you best chance of surviving a threat is to do nothing at all...

• An example of this is being in a store being robbed... Trying to attack the culprit and trying to run out of the store can both result in a negative consequence for your well being.

FAWN: _{is the response of complying with the danger/threat to save yourself.}

• When you've tried fight, flight, or freeze several times without success, you may find yourself using the fawn response.

• People who tend to fawn typically are the recipients in an abusive situations.

•  You can recognize this if you notice that no matter how poorly someone treats you, you are more concerned about making them happy than about doing what's right for you.

• This is very negative Physically, Mentally, and Emotionally.

Benefits of Fear

_{(Fight or Flight)}

Fear serves an important role in keeping us safe.

Fear can actually save our lives by forcing us to react without having to think about it (e.g., jumping out of the way of a car coming at us).

Negative effects of choosing the wrong way of dealing with Fear

The problem for many people is that they respond one way when a different response would serve them better. These inappropriate responses can lead to mental and emotional disorders.

Some disorders tend to be associated with certain stress response patterns. Here are a few of the ones that have been identified:

1) Fight type: Abusive towards others

2) Flight type: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

3)Freeze type: Dissociative Disorders

4)Fawn type: Codependency

Negative Responses to Fear

• 1. Making an Inappropriate Choice: example if you fight an unwinnable battle when running would have been more appropriate, you may increase your danger rather than minimize it.

• 2. Not Being FLEXIBLE: If you face danger daily, you may come to rely on habitual responses instead of the responses most appropriate for each threatening situation.

• 3. Perceiving Threat Where There Is None: There may be a time when you feel threatened where no threat exists. When that happens, it's nearly always an inappropriate response.

What we can do with our Feelings of Fear

• 1) Recognize the Difference between Real and Imagined Threats

• 2) Calm or Act Reasonably

• To help the stress response pass, you can breathe deeply, practice mindfulness of the present moment, meditate, pray, sing, write, or talk.

•  if the threat is real and you can do something about it, you need to act reasonably . by acting, you release the physiological burden of the stress response.