Doubt breeds worry, anxiety, and panic attacks. But doubt is manageable, and you can be liberated from it. The skill to face doubt is to stop overthinking. It’s about getting out of the mind where the enemy resides and acting upon what you fear. Doubt is a perception of danger that paralyses, causing you to feel hopelessness, hide, and procrastinate instead of dealing with it.

Your body creates cortisol, its way of fighting danger. This prepares you to fight, fly, or get frightened when facing danger. Once your body gets flooded with cortisol, the blood leaves your main organs, causing heart palpitations, shakiness, sweating under the pits, and a shortness of breath that makes you dizzy. Also, the oxygen leaves the brain and stops you from thinking logically because the blood has gone to the extremities.

This reaction in the body takes 90 seconds to connect to the brain. The brain intellectualises the perceived danger with evidence of past-anchored beliefs and focuses on anxieties about past unchecked worries. This is called the spotlight bias, which means that what you think about draws near.

Remember, it takes 90 seconds to connect the bodily agitation to the mind. This reaction comes as an out-of-mind and body experience, compared to a prolonged feeling of nearly being struck by a car. The body defaults to fear, but you can’t see the danger around you; you just dramatize fear without connection to reality. The brain tells your body's defence mechanism to watch out; for an oncoming car, you’re going to die.

Your body and mind are at a high level of negative arousal, charged by past failures. People might say, "Calm down," but you can’t at such a high vibration. Though you try to lower the vibration, you cannot.

This high-aroused state of panic has a science. It starts with continuous overthinking. The negative thoughts become habits. The habit gets stored at the back of the brain, in the part called the limbic system, which has the job of organising and storing memory. Then it usually obtains memories when the brain is in an emotional state. It connects to the conscious, which intellectualises the memory and then attaches it to the cerebral cortex. It becomes unconscious and functions automatically as part of the brain stem. So, the negativity of the past is engrained in your brain.

Though you may have a negative tape running saying, “Be careful,” you have a choice to reframe the fear of panic into excitement.

Magic! You get out of the anxiety of what could go wrong and into the excitement of what could make you happy in the future. By using Mel Robbins’ 5-second rule and moving the anxiety from the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex of the brain,.

This means shifting the mental gears of your past failures and the overthinking of the present to become conscious and act towards fulfilment.

You can make a list of some pre-thought-out activities to do when your body gets triggered and is about to go into panic mode. For example, move your body into nature, into the greenery and expansiveness of hope.

In nature, stand up straight with your shoulders back. As Jordan Peterson says, Put your hands on your hips, which is a superman/woman pose. Your body will then increase testosterone, a confidence-boosting hormone, as it perceives being in control and viewing the world in a different light. In parallel, it will lower cortisol levels, leading to a more relaxed posture with shoulders down and a sense of ease. This upright pose unblocks the flow of energy from the stomach, which stores our fears. This leads to the chest, which stores our sadness, limitations, and breathiness. Following it unblocks your throat, where you have swallowed some negative past events that have chocked you and were kept in the body by clenching the jaws.

You send a message to the brain and fuel it with excitement, and you replace the fear. You are now a superhero and comfortable, like a warrior, ready to combat. You give yourself permission to feel high vibration; your body has the reason why it is excited. The body's physiological stance is the same when it is excited and fearful, so you can trick the brain into feeling excited and overjoyed about the future.

Going to the list of pre-thought-out ideas of hope for the future gives you the tools to create the protection you need to succeed:

  • A super tip is in the 90-second window when fear is escalating, and before your mind processes it, hook the trigger of overthinking or doubt.

  • Manage it by using the 5-second rule to move the habit from the back of the brain to the front part of the brain. Become aware and take your pre-thought action instead.

  • Put your cape on “metaphorically speaking,” then stand up in a superhero stance.

  • Next, move into nature for 3-5 minutes of breathing, and with your hands on your hips, breathe in and out, deeply visualising the empowered future opportunities.

Get excited about performing an activity that you fear, like seeing that you have achieved a promotion at work that scares you to ask for.

By repeating another action instead of being in the habit of the past, you will slowly manage your panic attacks and live a more manageable and fulfilled life.