How to Stop Living in Fear and Start Embracing the Challenge

In this episode, I explore how fear keeps us stuck in survival mode, why stress can work against us, and how reframing challenges can help us feel calmer, stronger and more capable. Whether you're worried about your health, navigating a stressful season at work, renovating your home, or simply feeling overwhelmed by life, this episode will encourage you to stop seeing obstacles as threats and start seeing them as opportunities to grow.

I'll also share why our mindset has such a powerful impact on our energy, confidence and resilience, and how making one small shift in the way we speak to ourselves can completely change how we show up in the world.

In this episode, I chat about:

•  Why fear can keep us stuck in survival mode. 
•  The connection between stress, mindset and resilience. 
•  Why reframing problems as challenges helps build confidence. 
•  How this mindset applies to work, health, relationships and everyday life. 
•  Simple ways to interrupt overthinking before it takes over. 
•  How to create more positive momentum using the power of your thoughts. 

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who needs this reminder today. Don't forget to follow Mind Your Own Beeswax so you never miss an episode, and if you're loving the podcast, leaving a review is one of the best ways you spread the love!

Follow me for more on Instagram @mindyourownbeeswaxpodcast & TikTok: @mindyourownbeeswaxpod

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Mind your own beeswax. Hey, count out. Lean back.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Mind Your Own Beeswax, the podcast where I, Grace, give you my hot tips, my hot takes, and I teach you how to change your mindset and change your life. Who is feeling good today? I hope this episode finds you at a time that you need it the most. Thank you for joining me here today. I am on the road to getting a thousand downloads on this podcast, and we are getting close. So thank you so much for making the effort to push play on this episode today. I am truly, truly thankful for your support. And of course, I hope this episode brings you joy, teaches you something new, and inspires you to just get out there, live your best life, change your mindset, and become the best version of yourself. Because who doesn't want to be the best version of themselves? Am I right? Let's get into it. Currently, at my time of recording, it is winter here in Australia, and we are very lucky that even though winter is still quite cold, the skies are blue, the weather is still lovely, but it is a bit cold. And of course, in winter, it is cold and flu season, and I feel like there are definitely a few people I know that are starting to get hit with the cold and flu. And touch wood, I'm very grateful. I have not yet been sick. And hopefully I will not get sick this flu season. But I felt about a fortnight ago, I felt like I was getting a bit of a scratchy throat. You know, when you start to feel those kind of like early symptoms of a cold or flu, and you're like, oh my god, is this it? Am I about to go down? And I have this medication that I swear by that is like a preventative for a cold and flu. So I started taking that. I took that medication for a couple of days and I never ended up getting sick. So maybe I wasn't getting sick, or maybe the medication worked. We'll never know. But I went to my acupuncture appointment, and as you guys know, I love acupuncture. I feel like my acupuncturist is just so wise. And of course, I went to this appointment and my mind was blown. So I mentioned to her that I'd been taking these tablets because I was unsure if I was feeling sick. And she said to me, She's like, Oh, that's interesting. Um, let's like check your body. And in acupuncture, they check your tongue and they check your pulse. And she said, She's like, I don't think you are sick, I think you're fine. And I was like, Yeah, I do feel fine, like I think I'm okay. But anyway, we got to chatting and she said, she's like, when you think that you are gonna get sick, or perhaps you're around someone that is sick, you start to get really fearful. And I'm totally guilty of that, right? You see someone sniffle and you're like, oh my god, I'm gonna get sick. But what if you could change that fear into a challenge? And so my acupuncturist said to me, She said, What I've been saying to myself is I welcome the challenge to my immune system. So if you see someone cough or sneeze, or if you feel like you're a little bit run down, you say to yourself, I welcome the challenge to my immune system. And I really sat with that, and it's been a fortnight now since this appointment, and I have said that so many times. And to paint the picture, over the last two weeks, my partner's had gastro. I've been in contact with someone who's had the flu. The lady next to me in Pilates was blowing her nose, and I feel like I've had the odd scratchy throat, felt tired and run down. And so there's been multiple times when I've had that spike of, oh my god, am I getting sick? Is this it? Am I going down? But instead of that, I've just said to myself, I welcome the challenge on my immune system, and I haven't got sick. So I actually think this bloody works. But I've just been saying it over and over and over. And I actually went to acupuncture again today. And when she was doing my needling, she coughed and she said, I'm not sick. And I said, It's all good. I welcome the challenge to my immune system. And she was very proud of me. And I'm just living by this quote. But it really got me thinking, how much we live in fear about our health. And I think this is for me, is like I think about COVID and like post-COVID now. That has definitely traumatized us because COVID for me was so fearful. Like at the start of COVID, it felt like if you were gonna get COVID, you were just gonna drop dead and die, and it would be the end of the human race. Very dramatic. But I think there is still a little bit of COVID overhang fear, you know? Like if you're if someone's sick at work, I'm so mad. I'm like, how dare you come into this office and be sick? Like, that's disgusting. Put a mask on or get out. And that's not necessarily fair, right? That is not necessarily how sick someone is. They might not be contagious, maybe they're just run down, you know, maybe they've got hay fever. I know a lot of people that suffer from hay fever, and they probably get judged all the time for being sick, but it's not contagious, you can't catch a hay fever attack, thank God. But it made me think, we're living in this state of fear. Can we turn it into a challenge? And when I sort of did a bit of research for this episode, when you are having that state of panic and you're really fearful and you're thinking, oh my god, am I gonna get sick? That's obviously something that just then sits in the back of your mind. And it's this energy that you're carrying with you, always thinking, Am I getting sick? And when you have that state of panic, it triggers a cortisol spike. And then you might be experiencing high stress and you're probably experiencing anxiety. And stress and anxiety literally depress the immune system. So by fearing the illness, you're almost inviting it into your body on a cellular level by causing your body stress and lowering that immunity. So it's very much counterintuitive to be in a state of panic. So if we reframe our thinking and let's think about the difference between a threat and a challenge, a threat is gonna cause you to freeze or flee. So you're in that state of panic, you're like, am I getting sick? Should I get out of here? You're overthinking, your body's going into overdrive, versus a state of challenge which really activates our inner strength and gets us ready to protect. So even when you explain it like that, you're like a state of threat, you're freezing, you're fleeing, your cortisol is spiking, versus a challenge when you're really activating yourself to perform. Upon researching for this episode, I read about how incredible the immune system is. It's actually a super elite, well-trained thing within your body, and it actually needs those immunity challenges to stay strong. It's just like a muscle. So you've got to challenge it and it will grow, and it will challenge it and it will grow. And if you're never in touch with germs or you never experience any bacteria, it's not gonna help it get stronger. It's gonna make it weaker. So literally by saying, I welcome the challenge, I welcome the germs almost, if you want to take it that far, it helps you to stop viewing that sickness or that sick person as a threat, and it starts activating within your body. I'm powerful, I'm healthy, I'm strong, I can fight this. And you shift from that state of, oh, I'm a victim, I'm gonna get sick, poor me, to a state of yes, I'm healthy, I'm strong, my body is incredible. And as they say, where attention goes, your energy flows. So if you're just like sitting around thinking about being sick, you're gonna be like almost like scanning your body. You're like, oh, is that a sniffle? I feel, or my eyes feel watery, or do I feel hot? Do I feel cold? Oh my god, I feel a bit tired. Is this it? Am I going down? You're gonna spend a few days obsessing over whether that person you connected with that was sick actually infected you. And perhaps you even start to like manifest that into reality. You start to think that maybe you just had a bad night's sleep, maybe that tiredness, you're like, oh my god, this is it, I'm going down, you're panicking. It's just like crazy. And maybe you don't live to this extreme, but I guess I am someone that does. And again, post-COVID, we're all just a bit traumatized. Every time you hear a sniffle or a cough, you're like, oh my god, this is it. And of course, this example is very specific to health, right? But it can be applicable to every other area of your life. So when you notice yourself feeling that moment of panic, maybe you're at work, and you know, when you like realize, oh, you haven't done something or you've missed something, or you you feel like you might have fucked up, and you have that moment of panic, and you're like, oh my god, oh my god, and you start to spiral. And again, that affects your body, that affects your energy, that affects your vibes that you're putting out to people, and you will become in this state of anxiety and lack of confidence, and then you might show up at work for the rest of the day or the rest of the week as a low vibe. You might not be your best self, you might not give your best self, and who knows what that flow-on effect could be. All because you were in that state of panic over something, and you really let it affect your body, you let those emotions and that energy live in your body, that then flowed on and it really affected you. And maybe you even took those feelings home. You know, you're laying awake at night overthinking. So not only are you feeling anxious, you're feeling tired, you're not well rested, maybe you are irritable and you have a fight with your partner or your kids because you haven't slept, you feel run down. You can see that flow on effect. So that's where we need to catch that moment of panic. So when you catch yourself going, oh my god, fuck, fuck, fuck, catch yourself. Whether it's uh you think you're gonna get sick, whether you think something's wrong, whatever it is, the key is catching that moment of panic. Just feel it, acknowledge it. And that is where we then turn the panic into a challenge. So you can think to yourself, all right, I'm panicking because I think I've done something wrong. Turn it into a challenge. So say to yourself, okay, what do I need to do? Can I be proactive? Can I find a solution? Or can I use this as an opportunity? Maybe this is gonna teach me how to be more time efficient or how to be more confident, or it's gonna teach me to never do that thing again. Let it be a challenge and accept the challenge. And when you accept that challenge, that gets your body into that state of powering up, solving the problems, healing. It is such an incredible place to be. And I think even mentally, when you set yourself a challenge, even just calling it a challenge is so motivating. Like, yes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna slay this challenge, you know. Think about if you sign up to something at the gym, it's always called a challenge because you're challenging yourself to lose weight, you're challenging yourself to get stronger. And the vibes around a challenge are just so good. That's so exciting, it's so empowering. Set yourself a challenge. No matter where you're at, whether you're scared like me of picking up a cold, whether you're having a rough day at work, whether your kids are challenging you, whether there's things happening outside of your control, can you shift that fear and that stress and call it a challenge? You know, maybe I'm renovating my house, right? And I always talk about this. Renovating can be really hard, renovating can be really stressful. I think about when we renovated our kitchen as a really good example here. I personally, I think when you're renovating, having no kitchen and no bathroom is the hardest two things because we all gotta eat and we all gotta wash. So living without those two things is really hard. And if you're going through that right now, respect to you, my friend. But when we had no kitchen, I like took on this challenge to be able to cook as much as I could on our barbecue. I was like, right, I'm gonna take this as a challenge and I'm gonna use our Weber barbecue and I'm gonna make everything on it. I'm gonna learn how to bake a cake on it, I'm gonna make pasta on it, you name it, I'm gonna do it on the Weber barbecue. And I took it on as this challenge. And so every night when I would go to cook dinner or on the weekends when I would meal prep on this barbecue, I was so excited and I was so proud of myself to be able to make like a pasta bake on a barbecue. Like who would have thought that you could do that? Um, and it was bloody delicious. But doing that, I was so proud of myself, I was so motivated, I was so excited, and I just rose to the challenge. Had I have not had that mindset, I would have been a victim. I would have felt sorry for myself. I probably would have just had Uber Eats every night or eaten two-minute noodles, microwave meals, and eating like that would have made me feel shit, and then feeling shit would make me think more negatively of myself, and it would become like this vicious cycle. Feeling sorry for myself, so I eat shit, and then because you eat shit, you feel sorry for yourself. We go round and round in circles. What is something that you are going through in your life right now? What is something that is tough that is challenging you? Can you accept the challenge? Shift gears. Can you be in your challenge era? Is that an era that we could have? I'm not sure, but I'm bloody here for it. I love a challenge. And tell me that calling something a challenge does not motivate you so much more. And like I said, if you take it on a spiritual or energetic level, within your body, it's gonna activate the strength, the fun, the high vibrations, the motivation, it's gonna activate all those good feelings in your body. And I'm a big believer in the law of attraction. Like attracts like. So if you are thinking fearful thoughts and you're thinking about getting sick, thinking about worst case scenario, fear, worry, stress, anxiety, you're gonna attract more of that. You're gonna hear things that are negative, you're gonna say things that are negative, you're just gonna live in that negative, low vibration. But like attracts like, so say positive things. Say I welcome the challenge. Say I know I can do this. Have a go, have a crack, make a start, take the challenge, and I guarantee it will attract more good things in your life. And then the next time the same thing happens, you'll have already got the confidence that you know you can accept the challenge, or it won't even be a challenge because you'll be like, oh yeah, all good, no worries, jog on with my life. I hope you've enjoyed this episode today and it has inspired you to change your mindset and accept the challenge. I hope you have a beautiful day. Thank you so much for listening to me. As always, love you. Bye.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Mind your own beeswax. Hey, counting out. Lean back.