Robin Ferrier - One Small Step

09/12/2025

You Get What You Tolerate

There comes a moment when we must stop lying to ourselves. Not the lies we tell the world, but the quiet ones we whisper in the dark, the ones we hope will stay buried.

We love to praise tolerance. But the most dangerous tolerance is what we allow in ourselves. The slow, silent permission we give to our own suffering.

We tolerate our anger, the anger we refuse to name, even as it burns the people we love.
We tolerate our loneliness, woven into our days until it feels like a personality.
We tolerate our sorrow, old, familiar, heavy.

And then we wonder why life feels tight, airless, unkind.

Here’s the truth: what we tolerate becomes our life.
Many of us have shaped our entire existence around old wounds we’ve never dared to face.

Not seeking therapy when we know something in us is breaking isn’t strength. It isn’t humility. It isn’t grace.

It’s delusion.

Because our pain doesn’t stay contained. It spills into our tone, our choices, our relationships. The people closest to us feel the weight of the things we refuse to confront.

But we were not born to tolerate our own undoing.

Healing begins the moment we tell the truth about what hurts — and allow someone to walk with us toward something better.

So ask yourself:
What am I tolerating that is quietly unraveling me?
And who might I become if I finally stopped?

You get what you tolerate.
And you deserve far more than a life built from pain.

08/12/2025

https://www.robinferrier.co.uk/post/positive-approaches-to-coping-with-adversity

Life is full of unexpected challenges. Whether it’s personal loss, career setbacks, or health issues, adversity can strike anyone at any time. How we respond to these difficulties shapes our mental and emotional well-being. Developing positive adversity coping strategies is essential to navigate t...

06/12/2025

The noise isn’t danger ... it’s your nervous system asking for reassurance.

If you live with a fear of flying, you don’t just hear a noise, you feel it.
A small thump becomes: “Is something wrong?”
A gentle vibration becomes: “Is this the moment everything changes?”
The sound isn’t the problem. It’s the story your brain tells in the half-second that follows.

And that story often comes from a place of exhaustion, past scares, perfectionism, or simply being someone who feels everything deeply.

So let me offer you another way to meet those moments:

• The “clunk” beneath your feet
Your mind may hear danger.
But your body is reacting to uncertainty, the feeling of being out of control.
In reality? It’s just the aircraft shifting systems as it gets ready. A routine, predictable part of every flight.

• The sudden whirr or hum during takeoff
Your chest tightens because your brain leaps to the worst explanation.
Not because you’re weak, but because you’re wired for survival.
Mechanically, this is often the air system adjusting, a normal pressurisation change. But psychologically, it’s your nervous system saying, “Please tell me I’m safe.”

• The vibration or rattle mid-air
Your stomach drops, not because the plane is in danger, but because you feel powerless.
This is turbulence speaking its usual language… but your brain may be replaying old fears or imagining future ones.

Here’s the truth:
Most people with flight anxiety aren’t afraid of the plane.
They’re afraid of the moment they think they’ll lose control.

So the next time a noise stirs panic, try saying this softly to yourself:

“My mind is reacting to uncertainty.
This noise is routine.
The story is fear, not danger.”

Every time you do this, you’re strengthening a new pathway in the brain, one where you can notice fear without becoming it. One where noises lose their power. One where you start to feel like you again, even at 35,000 feet.

You’re not broken. You’re human.
And this is entirely workable.

The Fear of Flying Guy

05/12/2025

So many of us are walking around blind.
Blind to the thoughts that stir us,
blind to the emotions that rise,
blind to the actions we unleash before we even know why.

Awareness is the pause, the moment we see the spark before it becomes a fire.
It is noticing the thought before it fuels the feeling,
the feeling before it drives the action,
the action before it spills into the world.
It is meeting ourselves in motion,
instead of being swept along like leaves in a storm.

Walk blind, and the cost is brutal:
friendships fray, love is lost, opportunities vanish, and we wound others, and ourselves, without ever seeing the hand we played.

Awareness is not soft.
It is power.
It is freedom.
It is the chance to respond, not react;
to connect, not collide;
to choose, not repeat.

Walk blind, and the world will punish you.
See, and you may change everything.

03/12/2025

The Story of an Average Man

There’s a man I know.
You probably know him too.

He’s the sort of man who says he isn’t afraid of anything.
He’s just busy.
Just stressed.
Just tired.
Just trying to keep it together.

If you asked him directly about fear, he’d laugh.
Fear is for other people.

But his life tells a different story.

He wakes with his jaw clenched.
His patience is thin.
He snaps at his partner without meaning to.
He works late because the thought of slowing down makes him restless.
He checks his phone a hundred times a day, searching for something he can’t name.
And when the world pushes in too close, he gets angry, because anger feels safer than admitting he’s overwhelmed.

He doesn’t see any of this as fear.
But science does.

Chronic stress activates the amygdala, the threat detector of the brain.
It keeps the body braced, the mind narrowed, the heart defended.
Fear doesn’t always announce itself.
More often, it hides behind irritation, control, distraction, and silence.

This man isn’t weak.
He’s human.
He’s living with a nervous system taught to stay alert, even when there is no danger.

But here’s the quiet truth:
when he finally allows himself to pause, breathe, and soften… something changes.

His shoulders drop.
His thoughts loosen.
The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that restores perspective and empathy, switches back on.
He becomes calmer.
Kinder.
More connected.
More like the man he always thought he was.

And the world around him feels less sharp, less hostile, less heavy.

The story of this man is the story of millions.
Not fearless, just unaware of how fear has been shaping their behaviour.
But when we recognise the fear we didn’t know we carried, we gain the power to choose differently.

Perhaps this is where healing begins:
one person noticing the tension in their own life…
and realising that on the other side of that fear is the life, and the humanity that they’ve been missing.

02/12/2025

Trauma, Control & the Sky: When Old Pain Boards the Aircraft With You

If you’ve ever wondered why your fear of flying feels so personal, so raw, so disproportionate… it’s because the aircraft isn’t the problem.

It’s your history.

If you grew up with unpredictability, emotional volatility, or situations where you had to be hyper-aware to stay safe, then surrendering control now feels like exposure. Flying forces you to do exactly that: hand over control, sit still, trust the unknown.

It’s the one environment where your nervous system can’t negotiate.
And for many people, that’s unbearable.

Turbulence isn’t the trigger.
Helplessness is.
Not being able to “get out” is.
That old fear of being trapped, unseen, powerless—that’s what wakes up the moment the doors close.

Fear of flying often isn’t fear of flying.
It’s fear of overwhelm.
Fear of losing composure.
Fear that the emotions you’ve managed on the ground might finally spill over in the sky.

And that’s why the fear feels so brutally unfair: the aircraft exposes the parts of you that needed safety before you ever set foot on it.

But here’s the hope, real, solid, grounded hope:

When you work on the nervous system…
When you teach it that stillness doesn’t equal danger…
When you update the old programming…

You don’t just become a calm flyer.
You become a calmer human.
You reclaim your sense of safety, not just in the cabin, but in your life.

And that changes everything.

01/12/2025

How People Sabotage Therapy After the Session Ends

The real work begins once you step out of the room.
And this is where most people unintentionally undo their progress.

Here’s how:

1. Walking straight back into the exact same environment
If everything around you stays the same, your routines, your habits, the people who drain you—don’t be surprised when you slide back into the old self.

2. Not practising the new identity
Therapy gives you a blueprint, but you still have to build the structure.
Confidence, boundaries, courage, these don’t magically sustain themselves.
You have to embody them. Daily.

3. Reaching for old coping strategies
Avoidance. Overthinking. Rescue-seeking.
These are familiar, yes.
But they belong to the version of you who was struggling, not the version you’re trying to become.

4. Treating setbacks like failure
A wobble is not a relapse.
It’s your nervous system reorganising itself.
But people often use it as proof that “nothing’s changed,” and then behave accordingly.

5. Expecting life to change without changing how they show up
The session opens the door.
You still have to walk through it.
And keep walking.

Healing isn’t fragile.
It’s a direction. A practice. A choice you make repeatedly until the new way of being becomes home.

30/11/2025

How Media Misinformation Hijacks Your Nervous System

Most people inherit their fear of flying. Not from experience, but from nonsense.

And I say that as someone who’s flown these machines for a living. The sheer volume of garbage online about aviation is staggering. We live in a world where a perfectly normal diversion gets reported as a “terrifying mid-air emergency” and where TikTok creators slap horror-movie music on a video of mild turbulence to farm likes.

Your nervous system doesn’t know it’s watching clickbait.
It just absorbs the threat.

The amygdala fires.
Your baseline anxiety rises.
Your tolerance for uncertainty falls through the floor.

And suddenly, a routine flight feels like Russian roulette.

I’ve seen people lose years of their lives to the stories they’ve consumed, stories written by people who have absolutely no idea how an aircraft works. Media noise convinces you that flying is fragile. That pilots are panicking. That the systems are unreliable.
None of that is true.

But here’s the real tragedy:
Your body reacts as though it is.

And those reactions are what keep you home. They stop you visiting family, seeing the world, saying yes to opportunities… even pursuing love that requires crossing an ocean.

Fear that comes from misinformation is still fear.
It still hurts.

But once you detox from the noise and retrain the nervous system, the fear collapses. The facts win. And flying becomes what it always was: a safe, engineered, boring mode of transport that simply takes you where your life wants to go.

29/11/2025

How People Sabotage Therapy While They’re in the Room

Self-sabotage during therapy is rarely dramatic.
It’s subtle. Civilised.
It hides behind good manners and polished sentences.

Here’s what it looks like:

1. Being polite instead of honest
You’re not there to protect my feelings.
Say what’s actually true, not what sounds tidy.

2. Editing out the uncomfortable bits
People leave out the shameful parts, the contradictory parts, the “this makes me look mad” parts.
But those are the keys to the lock.

3. Saying “I don’t know” when you absolutely do
It’s not ignorance, it’s fear.
Fear of naming the real thing.
Fear of what it means if you finally admit it.

4. Telling long stories instead of touching the wound
Background, detail, justification… all useful to a degree.
But when someone circles and circles and never lands, that’s avoidance dressed as explanation.

5. Expecting fireworks
People think change must feel explosive or cinematic.
Actually, the real shifts often begin quietly, like a room you didn’t realise had light until someone switched it on.

6. Arguing for your limitations
“This is just who I am.”
“I can’t help it.”
“It always comes back.”
When you defend your chains, you keep them.

Therapy works when you stop performing and start telling the unfiltered truth.
That’s where the breakthroughs live.

28/11/2025

Catastrophising & the Brain’s Meaning-Making Machine

One of the most painful parts of fear of flying is this: your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do… but it’s doing it in the wrong century.

Up there in the cruise, at 36–38,000 feet, nothing dramatic is happening. The aircraft is stable, the systems are humming along, and the pilots are probably discussing what they’re having for dinner later. And yet your brain is busy stitching together disaster.

When turbulence hits, your amygdala reacts as if you’ve just stepped onto the edge of a cliff. The anterior insula scans every corner of your body for discomfort and magnifies it. And the prefrontal cortex, the rational part that should remind you you’re safe, gets hijacked by emotion and starts inventing its own screenplay.

And it’s never a happy one.

Your brain doesn’t say, “Oh, lovely, a bit of unstable air.”
It says, “THIS. IS. IT.”

You don’t hear the flap motors. You hear failure.
You don’t sense a vibration. You sense freefall.
You don’t feel a flutter in your chest. You feel imminent disaster.

And then, without meaning to, you live inside the story.
You hold your breath.
You grip the armrests.
You shrink into yourself, ashamed of what no one else can see.

This is catastrophising. It’s not stupidity. It’s not weakness.
It’s a habit, forged by an overprotective brain that never learned the difference between possibility and probability.

But habits can be rewired.
When you train your nervous system to respond differently, the whole narrative changes. The noise softens. The sky becomes bigger than the fear. And you begin, quietly, powerfully, to trust yourself again.

27/11/2025

How People Sabotage Therapy Before They Even Start

Most people think the difficulty begins once they sit down in front of the therapist.
It doesn’t.
The sabotage often begins long before the first session.

Here’s what I see constantly:

1. Waiting for the perfect moment
There is no perfect moment.
If you’re waiting for life to be calm before you start healing… you’ll wait forever.
Life doesn’t pause. But suffering will keep renewing itself until you intervene.

2. Coming in half-committed
A part of you wants to change.
Another part wants to cling to what’s familiar.
That inner conflict is the first barrier, not the issue you’re seeking help for.

3. Deciding it won’t work before giving it a chance
Past disappointments whisper, “Don’t get your hopes up.”
Fine. But if you walk in already defeated, your mind will make sure you’re right.

4. Wanting the therapist to do the heavy lifting
I’m good at what I do, but I’m not a magician.
Healing is a collaboration.
If you outsource all responsibility, you also outsource your transformation.

5. Fear of the consequences of getting better
Most people don’t admit this, even to themselves.
“What if I grow? What if others don’t like the new me?”
The fear of change can be stronger than the pain of staying the same.

Awareness is the starting line.
If you recognise yourself here, you’re already doing better than most.