It’s Halloween! Also my wife’s birthday. It’s a time when we make peace with fear. We invite fear into our lives. So what might we learn from that for the rest of our lives?
The speaker opens with a Halloween greeting and briefly states the video’s theme: exploring what it means to invite fear in. This orients viewers to the subject and tone.
The presenter reflects on how fear shapes life and points out the irony that on Halloween we deliberately invite fear. He introduces the idea that much fear is 'false evidence appearing real,' setting up a reframing.
A personal narrative describes pervasive anxiety, panic, and attempts to self-medicate in youth, illustrating how fear dominated his life and survived into sobriety. This grounds the topic in lived experience.
Using Halloween examples like haunted houses and scary movies, the speaker argues that much fear is an inaccurate story that creates feelings rather than reflecting real danger. This reframes common anxious reactions.
He describes the internal narratives that used to trigger fear in new situations and notes a shift: he no longer feels dominated by those stories. He emphasizes noticing fear without attaching to it.
The presenter suggests treating everyday life like Halloween by inviting fear in, making peace with it, and refusing to give it excessive power. He frames fear as a signal rather than a boogeyman and encourages living despite it.
A brief wrap-up with Happy Halloween wishes and a personal birthday shout-out, followed by a friendly goodbye.
All right, happy Halloween, everybody. Happy Halloween from Los Angeles. And today I'm talking about inviting the fear in. This just really occurred to me last night as I was thinking about the topic that I was going to do. And I was like, fear is very interesting, right? Because fear can have a massive, massive impact on our lives and who we are, right? Like when I was a teenager, fear dominated my life. And yet in Halloween, we go out of our way to invite fear in, to seek fear, to look for fear, to be scared.
And most of the time it's because we know we're safe, we know we're okay, and we just want like a little fear. But what if we were able to do that with fear, period? What if we were able to use that acronym, right, of fear, false evidence appearing real? False evidence appearing real. And what if we're just able to kind of see through it? It's just like a movie we're watching. It's not that big of a deal. 9% of our fear is smoke, right? It's just, it's not an accurate picture of what's happening.
So when I was a teenager, fear took over my life. I was afraid everywhere I went. I would have huge anxiety attacks, sometimes panic attacks. I was scared at night. I was scared at school, scared at parties, just scared, just scared. And I had no peace with that fear. I believed that fear. That fear followed me to college. I was using all kinds of drugs. The drugs probably didn't help the fear, But it didn't get rid of the fear. Sometimes I hear people say, oh God, I had all this fear and then I got high and it went away.
Oh, it didn't go away for me. You know, I had incredible paranoia. Then I got sober, right? Age 21, that was a long time ago. And I still had fear and I had tons of fear in sobriety. But what I didn't do most of the time was just make peace with it, treat it like a friend, notice it, invite it in like we do on Halloween. In Halloween, we're like, yeah, I'm scared. Yeah, I'm supposed to be scared. Yeah, I'm looking to get scared. Hey, let's watch that scary movie. Let's watch another scary movie.
Let's go to a horror house or a haunted house and get scared. And what if all fear is really like that, Because most of it is just the wrong story that I'm telling myself and the feelings that are coming as a result. Going into a new situation, I used to get afraid all the time. And what was the story I was telling myself? I'm not going to fit in, they're not going to like me, blah, blah, blah, right? And then that created the fear. And I was thinking about this earlier this week, right? When somebody was talking to me and sharing about all the fear in their life today.
And what I realized was I don't have that anymore. And maybe it's because I made peace with the fear. Maybe it's because of some of the other work that I've done that it's just kind of gone away, that those thoughts and those stories don't dominate my life. But I think a big part of it, right, is that fear doesn't this may sound weird, but fear doesn't scare me the way it used to. I just, I notice it and then I don't attach to it and I don't feed it. And I kind of invite it in, I kind of just say, oh, there it is.
Yep, I'm going into this situation where I don't know anybody and I'm just feeling like a little bit of fear. That's cool. That's okay. You know, and like that's That's the gift. So that's my thought. Like what if, what if what we do on Halloween we could just do every day? It's just fear and it's okay. And notice it, invite it in, make peace with it and live the rest of your life. You know, I cannot think of the number of hours, days, weeks of my life that I've squandered because I did not make peace with fear because I let fear keep me from doing things, making decisions for me.
Fear was not fun. Fear was not entertainment. Fear was not something that I could invite in. I just didn't think that I could. So that's my thought for today is, hey, what? if we were to just do that? What if we were to treat every day in many ways like Halloween and invite the fear in and not make it bigger than it is and sometimes laugh, let it go, do whatever we need to do, but just to realize fear is not a boogeyman, that we have to give too much power to. It's a message, it's a signal, it's just a little indication.
And then we get to live the rest of our lives as we were intended. So happy Halloween, happy birthday to my amazing, beautiful wife. And yeah, take care, everybody.
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