The five major ways you react to fear are fight, flight, freeze, fix, and familiar. Most of these happen habitually. They are triggered by your subconscious mind without you even realizing it’s happening until you’re right in the middle of it.

Fix reactions will include wanting to influence, arrange, manage, control, convince, limit, manipulate, maneuver, or compromise. Fix will feel like you are trying to maintain what you are comfortable with by controlling your environment, people, or situations.

Choose this Fix sequence when you want to control or manage conflict by limiting the relative movement of the people, things, situations, thoughts, or feelings near you.

Fix fear feels like you want to influence, manage, or control.

Five F’s Fix Reset Sequence

Detect Fear

The first step is to realize you feel like you want to influence, arrange, manage, control, convince, limit, manipulate, maneuver, or compromise. If you feel your energy ramping up toward anxiety, your subconscious mind will look for a familiar fear pattern to assign. Your fear signal may typically be fix or it may be one of the others and the desire to fix may only come up with certain people, places, or situations.

Acknowledge Fix Signal

Your fear triggers will be habitual. In every situation, you will have a defensive pattern that is waiting to be triggered. When you feel your energy starting to build and it starts to feel uncomfortable, feel for the specific fear signal your subconscious mind is demanding.

If it is fix, your mind will be telling you that you should take charge and do something to alter or maintain circumstances. Fix demands will want you to influence, manage, or control. You will want to convince.

Name Preferred Action

After you detect fear rising in your system, decide what you would rather be doing or feeling. The Fix fear signal is unique because it is telling you what you should do. With Fix, give yourself the permission to not control, to not have a destination. Let your preferred destination, action, goal, or intention be to allow opportunities to unfold without manipulation. Focusing on allowing the discomfort of not fixing will help your mind begin to reconfigure away from the fix anxiety and toward effortless existence. Choosing healthy discomfort creates a trajectory your energy will try to accommodate. Fix fears create limits, not fixing allows the mental and emotional feeling of expansiveness.

(After each step, listen to your internal signals. If it feels like you are ready to reengage with your intended tasks, shift to getting things done. If you still feel hesitant or resistant, go on to the next step.)

Indulge Fix Demand

After you determine that you feel the need to fix and have accepted that you can continue to exist without fixing, look for a physical way to indulge the fix demand. Give your subconscious mind the feeling of fix without stopping or collapsing. Find something that requires balance and the amount of energy necessary to match or exceed your fix signal. In the fitness world, this has the obvious name of balance training.

What that is will depend on your general health, fitness level, and any specific physical limitations. The simplest example would be standing on one foot. Balance exercises require that you engage your core muscles. That engagement is what indulges the fix fear. Look for movements that require you to control your core.

With a fix fear, you won’t be looking for a movement to mimic. Take 30 seconds to feel what you are feeling and then determine you are going to allow yourself to challenge your physical balance instead. This is part of the practice of decision and determination. If you are coming to this practice after your anxiety has already blossomed, the specific fix demand might be obvious. It will require more will power to override it with an alternative balancing movement.

Be creative. Look for balancing movements challenge your current ability. Regular, healthy balancing movements lead to increases in strength and coordination.  They will exercise your core and the rest of the muscles that help keep you stable. Making healthy physical efforts part of your daily life will also help to down-regulate your nervous system, lowering your need to fix.

As you indulge the fear signal with balancing movements, your fix anxiety will wane. You are burning up the energy you have stored which satisfies your subconscious mind. If it doesn’t feel like you are getting less anxious, you may not have done a challenging enough balancing movement or you may have another fear signal (fight, flight, freeze, or familiar) that needs to be satisfied. Check-in with what you are feeling. If it still feels like you have some need to fix, find something else balancing to do.

Your balancing movement needs to be a challenge. The challenge is what will indulge the fear, not the balancing.

If simple balancing movements don’t exhaust your anxious energy, add a second variable. Balance on a Bosu Balance Ball or similar. Balance on the toes or heel of your foot. Swing the opposite leg. Or for something really challenging, close your eyes. Hold a weight in one hand or transfer it from one hand to the other. You are looking for increasingly difficult challenges to your balance and your core muscles.

(Listen to your internal signals. If it feels like you are ready to reengage with your intended tasks, shift to getting things done. If you still feel hesitant or resistant, go on to the next step.)

Redirect Fix Movement

After it feels like you have exhausted your anxious energy, the next step will be to add unpredictability. You want to shift away from the controlling and limiting nature of the fix signal by allowing yourself to embrace the unpredictability.

Your indulge movement mimicked your desire to control. To redirect that signal, balance, close your eyes and then don’t control your balance and allow yourself to fall in whichever direction your imbalance takes you. Allow yourself to find ecstatic movements. Get wild and crazy. Try something completely new or foreign. Add something unpredictable to your balance movement. Maybe put on some unfamiliar music and then dance in a way you haven’t danced before.

Be spontaneous, playful, and unstructured. They teach your systems that not controlling, predicting, and managing can be safe. Being playfully spontaneous and doing unstructured things changes the entrenched fix patterns.

Feel for the mental and emotional qualities that accompany the need to control and then contrast them with the sensations of being playful, unstructured, and spontaneous. Controlling thoughts and emotions will feel hard and sharp. Playful will feel soft and fluid. Spontaneous will feel light and effortless.

The goal is to feel your sensations that accompany the change in attitude and disposition as you shift from control to spontaneity and playfulness.

(Listen to your internal signals. If it feels like you are ready to reengage with your intended tasks, shift to getting things done. If you still feel hesitant or resistant, go on to the next step.)

Transitional Fix Movement

Next, take another step away from your fear by gradually organizing your movements into short inspired bursts that challenge your habitual patterns.

Think of movements that spiral out. You might start dancing ecstatically and then organize the dance into circular patterns that transform into outward spiraling patterns. Free form movements like Parkour, Freeform dance, or the BowmToon Stuffle (don’t bother Googling, I just made that one up). You are aiming to stop aiming. You want to teach yourself to loosen up, let go, and playfully exist without trying to have a plan or library of rules. Allow the chaotic movements to resolve in ways that you have never imagined.

The goal is to engage your creative mind so completely that your controlling mind is left penniless, alone and hungry, living under a bridge without bathing or hair care products. You want to go from fixed to unstructured to imaginative. Embrace Chaos and then wrangle it into new creations!

This will be hard. Probably the hardest of the 5 F’s Fear Movements because it requires that movements be internally derived. You are searching for the ability to be spontaneously creative, imaginative, and inspired.

In this step, you are learning to be expansive, to unlimit the images and beliefs you hold. Fix energy feels tight and restrictive. You want to feel an overwhelming sense of wonder. You are feeling for sensations and inspiration in ways you have not previously experienced. You are opening yourself up to epiphanies and revelations.

As I began to write my first book, The Discomfort of Happiness, I found myself in the place I describe above while hiking. In a flash or maybe thunderbolt of inspiration, the question “What if everything I believe is wrong?” came to me. It opened up a floodgate.

Switches flipped in my head, my internal Rubik’s Cube spun into place. I started to examine every belief I had. I looked at my truths, which I discovered were mostly other people’s opinions that I had co-opted and accepted as fact. When I deconstructed these truths, I found fiction, dogma, and hyperbole.

I came to realize my truths weren’t factual – they were familiar.

That idea, familiar as truth, led me to ask why I wanted familiarity. How did typical serve me? And if it didn’t serve me, why did I keep doing it.

As I looked at my truths, I also looked at social truths. I deconstructed collective beliefs and found them to be non-factual. I discovered most truths primarily served to reconfirm the range of familiar and typical sensations, emotions and thoughts. Beliefs are habitual.

Walking in the woods in the fall of 2013 with an overwhelming sense of wonder altered the path of my life. Allow the chaos of the inconceivable to resolve into newly recognizable patterns. Let your life be a revelation.

You will probably have a ton of entrenched resistance to this way of being. It is a new paradigm that your system will gradually adapt to. Begin by loosening your internal reins. Horse around with it until it begins to feel easier. Playfulness will be a huge part of your success. Reach out if you get stuck.

Take Action

Ready, set, GO! You are ready to do the thing you named above in the Name Preferred Action. Allow yourself to hold onto the feeling you created in the previous step and seamlessly flow back into getting things done.

Following the above suggestions will get a lot of energy moving. Use it productively. If you don’t, it will build up in your system and your mind will want to label it as anxiety. As you transition back into your everyday activities, feel the energy and momentum as fuel. Feel it as life force or vitality. Feel it like a superpower. Save the world, do the laundry, paint a masterpiece, create a spreadsheet, go to the gym, but do something beneficial. Do something that has value to you. Use your superpower wisely, don’t let it reconfigure to anxiety

Your long-term goal will be to go through your day building and expending your energy as efficiently and productively as possible. When you rest, feel the rejuvenation it allows, not as weakness or lack of will. Every time you feel your energy start to build toward anxiety, start at the beginning of this movement and follow the steps. The sooner you decide to move away from your anxiety habit, the easier it will be to transition back to productivity.