Hi friends and welcome back to the podcast. This is what's next with me Michelle Reid. I'm so happy that you're here.

Today's episode is honestly not going to be probably the most light-hearted episode if you're in the mood for something really light-hearted because it's all about fear.

I wanted to talk a lot about addressing fears and addressing things that scare us like irrational fears and also just normal fears to have as well as what makes us anxious and actually overcoming fears.

I was reflecting on my life in the past few years or so and how there are a lot of things that I used to be scared of that I no longer am and it just made me think how good it feels when you actually face your fears and get past them.

I was looking at my old episodes and I really haven't talked about this in depth and so I thought it would be just a nice episode to do in depth.

I'm going to be getting pretty vulnerable to and just sharing things that I personally have always been afraid of.

There are a few things that I've overcome but of course fear is something that is actually a really good instinct that protects us but it also does keep us from doing a lot of things that could be good for us.

And so I have a lot of fears that I still have not overcome.

And so for the outline of this I'm going to be talking about my fears.

I also actually asked you guys on Instagram if you guys could share some of the things that you fear in your life whether they're irrational, whether they are normal fears, big or small.

And then I also asked for submissions if you guys needed any advice on fear related topics and then I'm going to go into kind of steps practical ways of actually facing your fears.

I used to be someone who was so timid and shy and just afraid of things I would say in high school.

Throughout college moving to New York I think that really helped me a lot kind of become a stronger person.

And so I felt like this was a good episode to do but I do just want to say from the start I am not someone who discounts mental health in all of this.

I think that there's a point that you might actually have something where you need to seek help whether that be a doctor, medication, whether that be therapy.

I totally, totally believe that mental health is a very real thing.

And I also think as a Christian I think that there's a point where God gives us science to actually help with a lot of these things.

And I'm not the kind of person who just thinks you should like pray your way out of these struggles that's not to discount the power of prayer, power of reading the word, all of that.

I'm someone who is definitely very aware of the very realness of mental health and mental health struggles.

So this isn't just discount any of that. I just wanted to say that from the beginning.

I don't want this episode to come off as me just saying you can overcome all your fears but I do think there are a lot of things that we can work at to overcome.

Not perfect. Like always. Again, very horrible episode. But yeah, that's the summary of today's episode. I do have a lot of kind of faith-based approaches to this.

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