The Fear Bubble: Harness Fear and Live Without Limits

by Ant Middleton

fear is like a wild horse. You can let it trample all over you, or you can put a harness on it and let it carry you forwards, blasting you unscathed through the finish line.

developed the ability to grab hold of the incredible power of human fear and let it take me where I wanted to go. I’ve now got to a place where I rely on fear. When it goes missing from my life I find myself becoming anxious and dissatisfied.

Without fear, there’s no challenge. Without challenge, there’s no growth. Without growth, there’s no life.

I did something new. I visualised the bubble. I could actually see the fear, right there at the place where my life would be in danger. Not where I was standing, ten metres away from it, but over there where the threat actually, truly was. And nor was that fear happening right now, at this moment. I would feel it a few seconds later, when I made the conscious decision to go over there and step into the bubble.

That visualisation changed everything. Fear was no longer a vague, fuzzy concept with the power to utterly overwhelm me like an endless storm. Fear was a place. And fear was a time. That place was not here. And that time was not now. It was over there. I could see it. Shimmering and glinting and throbbing and grinding, and waiting patiently for my arrival.

That night I managed to break my experiences of fear down into episodes that lasted mere minutes – and sometimes just a few seconds. Whereas I’d once treated entire six-month tours as enormous, life-sapping fear bubbles, I’d now reduced them to manageable packets and made my relationship with fear completely rational and functional.

It was just a case of working out exactly where the fear was in space and time, then visualising it, before making a conscious choice to step into it and – finally – doing what had to be done.

I realised that it was extremely important not to remain in any fear bubble for too long. If I did, those dreadful emotions

and sensations would start to drain me. They’d become overwhelming. Then I’d start overthinking my situation and the fear would just grab me and hold me there, frozen to the spot, as all my courage began to weep away.

This is when it starts changing your life. When you manage to harness the power of your own fear and go looking for bubbles to pop, amazing things begin to happen.

This is all of human life. We live our days in a corridor that’s lined with doors. Each one of those doors is frightening to open. This is why, nine times out of ten, we choose to step back from them, leaving them closed. But whenever we muster the courage to step through them, we emerge into a new and better corridor, one that’s lined with even more doors that are even scarier to open. Becoming the person we want to be, with the life we’ve always dreamed of living, is simply a matter of developing the courage to open more doors.

Living in fear is corrosive. It creates negativity that spreads throughout a whole life and actually changes the way you perceive reality.

This is why living in fear creates a victim mindset – a mindset that’s spreading like wildfire in today’s society, creating

a generation of men and women who seem motivated only to stamp their feet and hope that everyone else will take responsibility for them.

I’ll then take a deep look into the three kinds of fear: fear of suffering, fear of failure and fear of conflict. I’ll explain how exactly the same fear underlies all of these – the fear that you’re not good enough. If you can learn to harness t...

When you let fear overwhelm you like that, it’s as if the whole world rearranges itself in opposition to you. It feels like

you’re utterly surrounded by traps and enemies, as though the purpose of the universe itself is to take you down. It feels personal.

Some of us are positive thinkers. We tend to see the world as a place filled with challenges and charge at it, excited about the possibilities that every new day brings. We love being in that corridor of life, busting through door after door and changing and growing as we step into new corridor after new corridor. We fall down and fail as much as anyone else. But when we do, we don’t take it personally. We pick ourselves up, chalk it up to experience and crack on.

thinkers. They see the world as full of danger, and are daunted by the threats and hurdles that every new day brings. They’re stuck in the same corridor, day after day, year after year, never opening any of the doors that are presented to them. Whenever they fall down and fail, they take it personally. Things went wrong because this person is out to get them, or that person is a bully or a bigot or a bitch or a bastard, or because the system is unfair and fixed against them, or because of something bad that happened to them twenty, thirty, forty years ago. Sadly this seems to be a much more common way of viewing reality. And it’s spreading.

They see the world as dangerous, threatening and, all too often, overwhelming. Life itself is too much for them to cope with. Why do they think this? Because that’s what their brains are constantly telling them. How did their brains become filled with this information? Because that’s what they’ve been told at crucial points in their lives.

‘Be careful.’

Our default mindset becomes one of deep fear, and that fear stops us living the lives we’re truly capable of. Many of us spend every day of our earthly existence stuck in that default mindset. The good news is, it’s surprisingly easy to snap out of it.

Life is full of doors that are a bit like this – but they’re doors behind which there are not terrorists but amazing new adventures and opportunities. The default mindset doesn’t want you to open them. It wants to keep you in your corridor because it’s familiar with where it’s already at and knows that you’re safe. But you don’t have to nod your head like a good boy or girl and accept that mindset. You can throw it off. You can accept that you’re not that child any more who needs to be constantly told, ‘Be careful.’

Staying in that corridor doesn’t just mean remaining where you are, being the same person forever. It means you shrink. You get weaker. More pathetic. Fear is a magic shrinking potion. If you don’t learn to harness it, it will make you smaller and smaller and smaller.

Your mindset has now become negative. You’ve turned yourself into a victim.