The Sense of Self

Contents

e are inundated with messages of fear.¹ From our televisions to our political conversations, we are more afraid of the world and our own neighbours now than we have been in decades. How do we deal with the fear, and the rage that almost always seems to precede it, when it feels as though we are on the brink of chaos, living in an age where society seems to want to rewrite history and to deny truth?

We are watching a moment in history where we cannot trust what we see or read in the media. The truth is no longer true; fake news has become just news. Established facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories, and all of it amplified by the distortion of social media. Even our history isn't history any more, because our human experiences are destined to become ghosts in some digital archive or on a streaming device, simply to be brought back to life as AI bucket slop.

The stage is set for a dystopic diorama, where humanity's present choices sees the future applaud the belief a little fascism can go a long way in political and personal relationships. Social media's cancel culture has made us so obsessed with picking a side that human thinking, instead of progressing, has turned tribal. We alienate the other's belief system, and see compromise as appeasement, rather than an opportunity to avoid disconnect. As connected as we potentially are via the latest technologies, we seem unwilling to open dialogue with those who do not confirm or conform to our own biases. We only want to connect with members from our tribe, so to speak, and cannot accept anything, old or new, real or imagined, which challenges our preconceived notions.

What you have just read is only one, narrow view of the world, but, in a very real sense, we have good reason to be afraid: The fear isn't good for us. In fact, according to neuroscience, the fear is killing us. It serves to progress a significant type of cognitive decline over past experience, and like dementia, we lose our sense of self. People become so frightened they want to forget about the world they no longer understand, and retreat completely to a rosy past that never existed. Nostalgia is no longer a memory but a stark reminder of what has been lost, to be fondly remembered like an hallucinogenic drug that blocks out woes and numbs into a stupor.

Of course in time, no one will remember any different; this era may be relegated to a footnote in some digital book, with future generations looking back on our time with the same nostalgia. Humanity is good at forgetting, especially those things that are out of sight and out of mind. But how do we, in the present everyday, deal with this bombardment of fear and rage and limit its traumatic effect on our minds and bodies? Should we repress it or give voice to it? Or can we, over time, train ourselves to react differently to it?

Work Out Your Fear

...being inundated with messages of fear and constantly processing them prompts tons of negative consequences for your body and psyche. But you don’t have to accept them. You can beat fear; you just need to train yourself. The process of overcoming [this] is known as fear extinction. Fear extinction involves creating a new response to the fear-causing stimulus, meaning making positive associations with the thing that freaked you out.
Laurie Vazquez (What Fear Does to Your Brain - and How to Stop It)

The science shows that if we repress this fear, it comes out in our minds and bodies in all sorts of different ways, i.e., psychological issues such as anxiety, depression and OCD, and physical issues such as migraines, stomach problems and skin rashes. We get so overloaded with life, however, there isn't a safe space to express anything messy to release that fear. For messy, read anger. With current events in the world today, we see how expressing rage in shared spaces, especially on social media, is certainly inadvisable, but it is why anger gets a bad reputation. It's healthy to feel angry, yet when all we see is the outburst, and not the build up, we rightly feel we need to repress those feelings out of concern for public and personal safety.

Science backed research also shows that if we can create a safe space to vent our rage, it can be used as an aid to make us feel calmer and more in control. For example, in the UK there are a small number of venues called rage rooms, where people are choosing to pay to smash old items such as TVs, furniture and crockery whilst in specialist protective gear. Touted as one way to alleviate stress and release pent-up anger, it is not a new concept, but the evidence shows it works. My own favourite workout at the gym is the tyre and sledgehammer, in much the same way. When performed correctly it helps to improve your confidence and boost your mood, but any exercise is beneficial. Your personal lifestyle choices will factor heavily, but when it comes to exercise, researchers have found that most individual types of training reduced the risk of death from any cause, and people who took part in the widest mix of activities fared even better.

Along with the physical release of rage, it prompts the question, can we train ourselves to react differently to the fear we feel, and combat the negative effects of the stress it brings? This is where the approach of building an inner sanctum in our minds comes into play; my answer to an inner sanctum for meditative thought, by writing out my fears as a way to exorcise them and finding things that sustain my soul, combined with intense physical activity, have allowed me to keep my sense of self as our world goes through some tumultuous and turbluent times. By combining the physical with the spiritual, you not only release the fear in a workout for both mind and body, but create a way in which to redirect the focus on what you can change - you.

I can only write from experience, but my shared practices to modern living have helped to armour me for over a decade. What works for one, will not work for another, but that is the beauty of creating your own inner sanctum; it will be personal to you. My own approach has trained me to understand that if I cannot change events, I can change my reactions to them. I am not afraid of our era; I am in awe and full of excitement to see what new development is around the corner. The sudden technological advancements in society might mean having to play catch up with one's own creations, which will invariably cause a mental dent, but isn't it also a chance to begin a new journey of rediscovery? Why be afraid of the opportunity to learn or use something new? Advancements will replace, but they will also enhance many aspects of life, and will help renew us, as long as we are realistic and practical about its applications.

It all centres on where we place our focus: Back at the end of 2010, I wrote about the three eternal goods and new year resolutions as an exercise to renew the self, but current research shows that a significant number of our resolutions are often abandoned shortly after being made. Setting unrealistic or overly broad goals can lead to failure, creating a cycle of disappointment known as "false hope syndrome". If resolutions have an altruistic focus we can invest in - as in "the three goods" of being good to yourself and good to others to then feeling good about the world - rather then a negative outcome, it tends to help us turn good intention into positive action.

Bring Sense to Self, Not Fear

It is only in such a mindful environment one feels empowered enough to change their world view from a negative into a positive one. A connection to a sense of self will mean a stronger connection with the world; alienate yourself from the self and you will alienate yourself from the world. Fear will thrive, unchecked. It will block the path to a true inner sanctum, because to redirect our focus away from the things we cannot change to those we can, requires the ability to open dialogue between the body and mind.

Arguably, in the same vein, our communities today suffer from disconnect because fear is a block to discourse. As the most recent conflicts across the globe highlight, if we are going to peacefully share our private and public spaces, attempting to see the world from the other person's point of view, be they big or small, is key. The inability to accept anything different to ourselves, as mentioned at the start with social media's cancel culture, comes when tolerant human thinking turns tribal. Cancel culture does not eliminate toxic hate speech, it enflames it.

Make no mistake, we should never show tolerance to intolerance nor paint any extreme idealogy on any spectrum as merely misunderstood people frightened because of the threat to their world view. This is just as erroneous as the argument often made that the extremes of left and right of political thought are necessary to find a moderate centre. While it is true that right extremists need left leaning thought to check it before it becomes fascism, a balance is not achieved because of the imbalance, it is achieved despite the imbalance. A right or left wing view in itself might not be wrong; it is the extremes to which it's taken, when the truth is no longer the basis of rational thought but becomes a footnote to its irrational belief, which will make it so.

Rooted in this fundamental error of extremism is the misguided belief that the truth must always be on one side or another, when the very essence of truth is that it takes no side. The employment of rational thought shows us that the truth is always more complex than the two opposing sides of right or wrong, because sometimes the truth itself can simultaneously be right and wrong. It goes on that the problem with any idealogy, which has become just one side vying to win over another, will be its focus on apportioning blame instead of using empirical evidence to prove the truth of its contents. If one side is right then, ergo the other side must be wrong, and the other side will always be to blame. If we are looking for something or someone to blame - even if it's only ourselves - then we are not looking for a solution to any current conflict.

To stop the transference of these outer problems to our inner world, the next question to ask, then, is how can we deal with our own internal affairs to protect the mind and body from this disconnect? Can we connect the spiritual with the physical, to not only prevent the personal stagnation that can come from a fear of diversity and change, but to be able to fearlessly connect our inner world with the outer one?

Let us find out together: One very important way to achieve this quest of self-discovery is said to focus on our common, shared senses. In doing so - and by applying ancient wisdom and modern practical tips - it is believed we can clear the pathways that lead to the self, the innermost sanctum we have.

The next three chapters will focus on this relationship we have we our own body and mind.

Published 23 January, 2026

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1. Laurie Vazquez, What Fear Does to Your Brain - and How to Stop It, Big Think, 2016

The Inner Sanctum >>