If you live with anxiety, you’ll know this feeling well:

Your body is tense.
Your chest is tight.
Your mind is racing through every worst-case scenario it can find.

And yet, if you pause for just a second and look around…
Right now, in this exact moment, nothing terrible is actually happening.

That gap – between what’s happening and what we’re imagining – is where fear lives.

Fear’s Favourite Place: The Unknown Future

One of the most important things I ever saw about fear is this:
Fear only exists in the future.

Even when you imagine yourself standing in front of a tiger, the fear doesn’t come from the tiger itself. It comes from the thought:
“What if it attacks me?”
“What if I don’t get away?”
“What if this is it?”
The tiger hasn’t done anything yet.

But our mind travels into an imagined future and lives it as if it’s real.

It’s exactly the same with health anxiety, money worries, relationship fear – all of it.
“What if the scan is bad?”
“What if this pain means something serious?”
“What if I can’t cope?”
“What if everything falls apart?”

We are rarely afraid of what is.

We’re afraid of what we think might be.

Health Anxiety, Scans, and the Stories We Tell

In a recent session inside OUR Membership, someone shared that they have a breast cyst being monitored, and it triggers health anxiety almost every day. They wanted to know: how do the Principles apply here – and how do I get free of the fear?

The tricky part is: we can’t be free of fear, while we’re still creating it.

Every time we jump into:

Imagining the worst
Trying to predict outcomes
Rehearsing bad news
Playing out future scenarios

…we’re innocently frightening ourselves with our own thinking.

It doesn’t mean we’re silly or weak. It means we’re human.

I’ve walked through cancer diagnosis and treatment myself. There were scans, waiting periods, phone calls, letters. The temptation to live three weeks ahead was enormous. And yet, the only way I ever found peace was by coming back to now.

What do I actually know in this moment?
What’s actually happening right now?

The future is unknown – for all of us.
And weirdly, that’s where our freedom lies.

You Don’t Need to Know the Future to Be Okay

The Three Principles point to Mind (the intelligence behind life), Thought, and Consciousness (read more about those here). Part of what that understanding gave me, especially through my own health journey, was this simple but life-changing insight:

I don’t need to know what’s coming to know I’ll be okay.

Not “okay” as in “everything goes how I want”.

“Okay” in the much deeper sense that:
There is something in me (and you) that knows what to do when we get there.

Wisdom shows up in the moment we need it, not in the moment we try to pre-plan it.

Our true essence isn’t fragile, even when our circumstances are.

Even on the day our human life ends, that deeper “okay-ness” is still intact. That might sound big and existential, but for me, seeing that took a huge amount of fear out of the whole subject of illness and death.

Health anxiety is ultimately a fear of death and loss.

The Principles gently show us that what we really are can’t be taken from us.

Fear Is Your Sign You’ve Jumped Ahead

I often say to people:
If you notice fear on board, you can be almost certain you’ve jumped out of the present moment.

Fear is a brilliant indicator:

It tells you, “You’ve wandered into imagined territory.”
It lets you know, “You’re treating guesses as guarantees.”
It shows, “You’re arguing with uncertainty, instead of resting in it.”

Rather than trying to manage fear directly, it can be far simpler to notice what it’s pointing to.

“Oh. Right. I’ve gone racing down the ‘what if’ track again.”

That noticing itself begins to loosen the grip.

So How Do I “Come Back to Now”?

You don’t need a long practice or a ten-step framework to come back to the present.

Sometimes it’s as simple as just noticing, or maybe you can quietly ask yourself:

“Right in this moment, am I okay?”
“What is actually happening now, not in my imagination?”

Most of the time the answer is: Yes. I’m alive. I’m breathing. I’m here.

The mind will quickly try to add “…but what if…” – that’s just more future-thinking. You don’t have to wrestle with it. Just see it for what it is.

The more often we see:
“Oh, this fear is coming from thought, not from reality,”
…the more the volume slowly turns down.

Not because we fought it, but because we stopped taking it so seriously.

You’re Allowed to Feel Scared (And Still Be Safe)

This isn’t about being fearless or spiritually “above” worry.

I still have moments where my thinking runs away with me and I feel utterly rubbish.

The difference now is:

I know what’s creating that experience.
I don’t see it as a sign I’m doomed or broken.
I know I’m only ever one fresh thought away from a different feeling.

Fear becomes less of a monster and more of a weather pattern. Intense at times, but always moving through.

If fear and anxious “what ifs” are running your life, I’d love to support you more deeply.

My Signature Eight Week Course is designed to help you understand anxiety and fear from the inside-out, so you’re no longer at the mercy of every scary thought your mind throws at you.

You don’t have to wait until you feel fearless to live your life.
You just need to see that fear only lives where you’re not. 💚