Let’s tear down the house of fear and build a house of joy. Last episode we introduced Joy Bonds. Our brains are designed to run on the fuel of joy, but they can default to fear. In this episode we’re looking at the counterpart—fear bonds.
Let’s tear down the house of fear and build a house of joy. Last episode we introduced Joy Bonds. Our brains are designed to run on the fuel of joy, but they can default to fear. In this episode we’re looking at the counterpart—fear bonds.
[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Episode 48. We are continuing our series about joy, and today we are looking at joy’s opposite, fear.
Hello, Father.
[00:31] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.
[00:34] Stephanie: It is official. When this episode is released, I will graduate from seminary.
[00:40] Marcus: Congratulations! We are very proud of you. It’s a Master’s in biblical studies, and it was fun. I got to hang out in one of your classes with you, and got to meet some of your professors through the years. You’ve had a good time here at Asbury, I’m glad this has all worked out.
[00:59] Stephanie: Yes, it’s a very bittersweet parting. I am of course, very excited not to be trying to juggle full time seminary with work and life and all the things. But also I’m going to miss it a lot, the people here and the learning environment and all of that. And so I have strategies for how I’m going to process this season. I feel like we talk about capacity building and weightlifting where you have to let your muscles rest in order to actually build the muscle. And I’m very much looking forward to building some rest into my season.
[01:33] Marcus: Well, it’s one of the reasons we’re talking about joy. Because one of the things we learned was that you have to be intentional about infusing joy into your life, if you want the capacity to deal with everything else going on. That’s been so revolutionary for our whole family.
[01:46] Stephanie: Well, and one of the things that has been impressed upon me lately is that there were a lot of things that I thought, oh, I have that skill. And then realizing well, yes, but it’s like if I’m doing 15 pounds on my arms with weightlifting, it’s time to move up to 20. It’s time to move up to 25. I need to keep growing it and be intentional about growing that capacity. So I think we might actually talk about that later in this episode.
[02:12] Marcus: I think you’re right because it’s such a good analogy. The whole idea is about growing our capacity to handle more and more stuff without getting triggered. And because all of us reach the edge of our capacity now and then, when you’re tired you just can’t handle as much as when you have a lot of energy. There’s a lot of things that factor into how much emotional weight we can handle.
[02:38] Stephanie: Yes. So we really are on the trail together folks. In honor of the release of The 4 Habits of Joy- Filled People, the new book my father wrote with Chris Coursey, we are talking about joy in a new summer series. So before we begin this discussion, I just want to remind everyone that we have a free tool for you that you can access today. It’s never too late to grow your capacity to feel joy because your brain has the capacity to grow joy as long as you live. And it only takes 28 days to form a new habit. So THRIVEtoday and Deeper Walk have partnered to put together a 28 day Joy Challenge for you. You can sign up for free at 4habits.org.
When you sign up you’ll receive 28 days of simple joy exercises straight into your inbox. Plus, you can choose your favorite printable calendar for a physical reminder about each day’s exercise. Take the 28 days to Joy Challenge and you can start at 4 habits.org. Wel,l my father, last episode we talked about joy bonds and we’re going to just keep continuing talking about joy. But in this episode we’re going to look at the flip side. There are two fuels our brains can run on, joy and fear. So we’re going to be talking about the fear fuel today.
[03:57] Marcus: Yeah, the fuel of fear. There are a couple of things that really grabbed a hold of my mental thought life on this one. Joy is largely in the front of my brain and fear is largely in the back of the brain. I like the visual that when I am running on the fuel of joy then I stay in the front part of my brain. Well the front part of my brain is where the command center of my brain is located that remembers who I am and how it’s like me to act. And so when I can be in that part of my brain not only do I live out of my joyful self, but I live out of my relational self, and my true self.
When I don’t live from that part of my brain I get stuck in the back. And when I get stuck in the back that means I’m living out of fear. When I live out of fear then I am in problem solving mode and I treat people like problems to solve, and I will shut down relationally or blow up relationally. I’m not my relational self and this made so much sense. It was really frustrating that as a pastor who’s supposed to be modeling spiritual maturity for people, I could go from being the kind of person who seemed to have it all together, to completely falling apart. And it happened so quickly that I would literally feel like a different person.
And you get done with something and you regret it and you’re going, who was that? You know what was happening there? So the brain picture of leaving the part of my brain that remembered who I was and I lost access to that part of my brain. And that I was functioning at the back of my brain, it was just revolutionary for me. It just made so much sense out of the whole mess. And I’m like, okay, I see what’s going on. I have a hole in my maturity development. When I fall into that hole I turn into a different person and I’m like well, that didn’t fix the problem. So it gave me something to work on and a completely different strategy for how to try to address those issues than I would have without it.
[06:09] Stephanie: Yeah. As we were talking about this series I just kept hearing this famous quote from the book Dune, “Fear is the mind killer.” That works really well actually. And I want you to talk more about the science of joy and fear. And I know you’ve said that joy builds brain cells and fear destroys brain cells. And I think it was the fear destroys brain cells part that I thought, yes, fear is the mind killer.
[06:38] Marcus: Yes it is true at that level. So one of the things I learned from Dr. Wilder was that if I go to sleep in a state of anxiety, it’s like cortisol is going to pump through my brain all night long, and it’s going to kill all the new growth. And so it really does destroy brain cells. And one of the things we want to do here is to distinguish between fear and anxiety, then explain what a fear bond is versus what a joy bond is. So let me start with the difference between fear and anxiety. Anxiety is belief based and comes when I am thinking about the problems in my life and imagining what could happen.
And so beliefs that trigger anxiety almost always start with, “What if”? What if this happens? What if that happens?” So I think of feeling like Peter stepping out of the boat into the storm. And then he looks around and he starts going well, wait a second, what’s going on here? I can actually start to have anxiety thinking about, “what if” I get caught in this situation? And so you think about the things that trigger it and it’s when we’re thinking about the future. And like, what if this relationship doesn’t work? What if I never find a relationship? What if the finances don’t come together? What if my finances are ruined?
And what happens is the more often my brain goes down that pattern of the “what if” anxiety, then that becomes a habit. And so habits are formed in the brain as neurons connect together and form chains. Every time I do something it’s like these neurons connect and form a chain. And the more often that I do it the stronger that chain gets. Then that chain gets wrapped with white matter. And once that chain gets wrapped with white matter I start doing things almost automatically. That’s why we call it a habit. It’s now become an automatic reaction and I’m not thinking about it anymore. So that can happen with my thought life, where I have literally trained myself to go in a negative direction so much that I’m going to have to do something to break that.
And what we found is that the only way to break a bad habit is to build a new one. So I can’t just say, ”I’m going to stop that, I’m going to stop that, I’m going to stop that.” I actually have to build a new neuro highway, wrap that thing in white matter, and build new habits and new patterns in my life. And that’s why we’re focusing on joy here, because I would have thought that the opposite of anxiety was faith. But what I realized is that the part of me that exercises faith and that trusts God is the command center in the front part of my brain. So in other words, to get to the part of myself that trusts God to believe and to have faith, I’ve got to get to that relational center. Which means I’ve got to find joy. And so that’s why joy is actually the antidote to fear at a more primal level than even faith.
[09:27] Stephanie: That’s so fascinating on so many levels. As you read the Bible and look for all the places that joy will start popping out even more, I love it. Can you explain what a fear bond is?
[09:43] Marcus: Yeah. So a fear bond is where I have an attachment with somebody that is based on fear rather than joy. So this can look a lot of different ways. I think of it this way, that among your friends in school there are some people that when you see them you light up with energy and you’re not choosing to do it, like, oh, it’s them I’m going to choose to light up with energy. There’s just this automatic joy because you’ve seen that friend. Now there are other people who walk up to you and you have a different reaction, and it actually can suck the life out of you a little bit because you know that your problems are about to get bigger. Or at least you believe your problems are about to get bigger. So you can even picture when your cell phone lights up, there are some names that pop up on the screen and it’s like, yay. And there’s others that pop up and part of you just sort of goes down.
So when I get in a fear bond with somebody what happens is I don’t believe they are going to be happy to see me. Or I don’t think they’re going to be happy to see me unless, unless I act a certain way, unless I wear a mask, or unless I pretend to be a certain way. In other words, I’m going to have to manage this person. I can’t just relate to them and be myself around them. They’re going to have to be managed. And so a fear bond always leads me to want to manage people. So what happens is that if you find you’re managing everybody in your life, it means that your brain has just learned a fear bond. And one of the things we look at is how do we begin to transform these fear bonds into joy bonds?
[11:17] Stephanie: Yeah. Well, and that pattern of fear bonding leads to fear mapping. And do you want to talk more about that? And maybe how your brain is like an amplifier?
[11:26] Marcus: Yeah. So if I’m fear bonded with a lot of people then what happens is my brain learns, oh, that’s what we’re looking for, we’re looking for things to be afraid of. And since my brain is a natural amplifier, it learns very quickly what it is you look for most naturally and says, “Okay, I can find that for you.” And so if your brain learns we’re supposed to look for things that make us afraid, it’ll get really good at finding things that make you afraid. But if your brain learns we’re supposed to look for things that we can be grateful for and appreciate, then your brain will learn oh, yeah, I can find those things, too.
And the story it always reminds me of is a friend of mine who years ago sold tractors. He said that when he started selling tractors the thing that amazed him the most was how many tractors he started to notice. He had driven by this place all of the time and never even noticed them before. But now that tractors was his business his brain began to amplify it and he started noticing tractors everywhere. So you’ve probably had an experience like that before.
[12:30] Stephanie: Yeah. Or even like we have a new car and it’s this color, and now all of a sudden I’m seeing that color car everywhere. We don’t actually get new cars, we get used cars, so it’s not like it’s just the new thing on the market.
[12:43] Marcus: And so what happens is your brain is learning what it’s supposed to amplify. Amplify means what is it supposed to make big? What is it supposed to bring into focus for you? And so if I have developed fear bonds as the habit in my life then my brain has learned I need to fear map the world. And mapping the world means I am scanning it for what there is to fear. If I am scanning my environment constantly for what there is to fear, I’m going to find it. And if I don’t see it right away then my anxiety will kick in and I’m going, “Yeah, well, I can imagine it being here, I can imagine it coming there.” I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop and all these other things that are now coming. Before I know it I’m now living in a very dark place internally that can be very difficult to get out of because you can’t just choose your way out of that sometimes.
[13:38] Stephanie: And the good news is you can also with your joy bonds, have joy mapping and appreciation mapping. And it’s also not an all or nothing experience. Our capacity affects this and our attachments affect that. Can you talk more about fear and joy bonds, maybe from the angle of the window of tolerance?
[13:57] Marcus: Yeah. Daniel Siegel is one of the neuroscientists that informed the Life Model development talks about the window of tolerance. And what he means by that is how much emotional weight can I tolerate before things start falling apart? And so when I talk about emotional capacity, the window of tolerance is the same thing. So the window of tolerance is how much emotional weight can I handle before I am outside of that window? And if I get outside of that window that’s when things start shutting down and things start blowing up. I start melting down, bad things start happening, and I turn into a different person. All those bad things happen when I get outside that window.
So maturity can be thought of as the process of growing the size of my window of tolerance so that I can handle more and more emotional weight. So when you go from 15 pounds to 20 pounds to 25 pounds, you are doing the same thing. You’re trying to grow that capacity. The other thing you’re trying to do is develop the skills that allow you to get back once you’ve gotten outside of that. So there are some skills that seem obvious once you hear them but at first I didn’t even think about them. And that is one of the reasons why we need to take a break now and then and one of the reasons why we need a breather. We can’t just keep plowing on and plowing on, at some point we have to take breaks.
If we don’t then we’re going to find ourselves just constantly living outside of that window of tolerance. And if you’re constantly living on the edge of your emotional capacity or constantly living just beyond the edge of your emotional capacity, you’re going to be constantly in a state of emotional upset. And when you’re right on the edge like that it doesn’t take as much to blow up at people. It doesn’t take as much to melt down in tears. It doesn’t take as much to get stuck in anxiety and fear because I am keeping myself on the edge of my capacity all of the time. So one of the things we have to do is not only grow that emotional capacity but we also have to learn when to take breaks.
[16:12] Stephanie: And it’s so biblical, so biblical.
[16:15] Marcus: I mean something like Sabbath, I don’t know?
16:17] Stephanie: Yeah, something like Sabbath and don’t cut the corners of your fields and like giving the land time to rest. All the different holidays and festivals. Yes, and again, Sabbath.
[16:32] Marcus: Yeah. And I think that sometimes we miss that rest biblically is actually an act of worship. Because when I rest, what I’m doing is I am saying with my actions that I’m trusting God to take care of me. I don’t have to do everything and that’s huge, right? Because all of us have that temptation that if I don’t trust God then it’s all on me, and I can’t afford to rest because it’s all on me. And so there is something to this idea of establishing a rhythm in our lives. And so we talk about knowing when to take a break, knowing how to have this kind of a rhythm that allows me to keep going. So it’s like we tell the staff at Deeper Walk all the time, we want you to have a rhythm because we want you here for a long time. We don’t want to just chew you up and spit you out and burn you out fast. We want people to want to work here and to find a rhythm that they can maintain for a long time.
[17:25] Stephanie: So before we have our closing thoughts I have another question that I want to make sure we get to. And that is, you have a subheading in The 4 Habits of Joy- Filled People that I love. You talk about tearing down the house of fear and I just love that imagery. Could you talk more about that imagery?
[17:43] Marcus: So in our new book, The 4 Habits of Joy-Filled People, the core image that Chris and I use is that we all have an inner world. And in our inner world you could think of it as like, the house in which I live. It’s either going to be a fear house or a joy house or some kind of a hybrid in between. But to the extent that it is a fear house, I’m not going to want to spend much time there. And so you think about it, if I have a fear house in my inner world then I’m probably going to develop a pretty avoidant lifestyle. I’m not going to want to be alone with my thoughts. I’m not going to want to be alone with myself. I’m not going to want to be quiet, I’m not going to want peace. I have to keep myself distracted, I have to keep myself busy and I have to keep things coming in because if I’m alone with myself, I’m stuck here in this house of fear. Well, who wants that, right?
And so one of the things that we find is a lot of people with a house of fear have never learned to rest, and they have never learned to be quiet or how to turn off the noise and to detach from things. And that’s why it can be a skill and it can become a habit that we have to learn to try to cope with that. So what we want instead in our inner world is to have a joy house. To tear down that fear house and to build a joy house which is a place that we like being. And when that’s the case then we can develop much less avoidant lifestyles and learn to quiet, and be at peace much more readily.
[19:14] Stephanie: And that’s our goal as we’re exploring this on the trail. We are gonna be tearing down some houses of fear and building up some houses of joy, I’m excited for it. So as we come up to the end of this episode and before we get dad’s final thoughts, I just want to remind you to check out the free joy building tool at 4habits.org, And I hope you have so much fun using it to build your joy capacity. So, mi papá, any final thoughts for this episode?
[19:44] Marcus: Well, miha. As I think about this there’s so many different directions it can go but one of the reasons is personal. For most of my life I didn’t think I had any issues. I thought I was about as normal as a normal person could be. And then what happened is as I got into parenting and then into leadership, I started adding more and more weight to my life. It’s like I got to handle the weight from all the expectations at church and handle the weight of all the expectations. And what happens as you start adding more and more weight, your margin gets thinner and thinner. I started developing anxiety and I had never been an anxious person.
And so now I’m like, okay, what’s going on here? And what I realized was I just maxed out my capacity. I’d maxed it out and I didn’t realize what was going on. I needed to kind of reinvent my approach to life. It wasn’t just about taking thoughts captive but that was part of it. There was going to be a whole new approach to life that I was going to have to come to understand. So that’s part of what I wanted to share with folks.
[20:51] Stephanie: Huzzah. We’re going to do it together.
[20:53] Marcus: It’ll be epic.
[20:54] Stephanie: It’ll be epic. Beautiful. Alrighty then. Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk International is a non profit organization, and we partner with people like you in order to do what we do. Some are on the trail with us as official Trailblazers who commit to donating $25 or more per month. We invite you to consider becoming a Trailblazer. You can do this very simply by visiting our website, https://deeperwalk.com/trailblazers/. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the On the Trail podcast, leave a review, and share with your friends.
Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.
© 2025 All rights reserved | Deeper Walk International is a 501(C)(3) nonprofit