Fear has never been the real problem. In this powerful conversation with neuroscientist Dr. Jeffrey Fannin, we go beneath behavior, beyond mindset, and into the human system itself. What we uncover is simple but transformative: most people aren’t stuck because they lack motivation or discipline—they’re stuck because their system isn’t ready. We explore the science of fear as a protective mechanism, how subconscious patterns shape our reactions, and why effort alone doesn’t create lasting change. This episode bridges neuroscience, energy, and human behavior to reveal what’s actually driving performance, burnout, and emotional overwhelm. If you’re a parent, educator, or leader trying to create real change, this conversation will shift how you see everything. Because once the system is ready, everything begins to flow.
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The Truth About Fear: What’s Really Holding Us Back With Dr. Jeffrey Fannin
Thank you for all the comments and DMs that you've been sending me. Amazing. I'm in the airport, but I wanted to make this introduction to the episode because why? It's with Dr. Fannin, one of the neuroscientists that I worked with in the past. I just learned that he passed away in July of 2025, and it was heartbreaking for me because he worked with me on validating my process and my methodology. Now it's a revolutionary process, so I wish he was here to see this, but he's not.
I did go to an event where he was part of a movie called Pillars of Power. It was beautiful. It was amazing to honor him and his business partner, Sherry. I wanted to air an episode I did with him in the past so that you can see how he talks about fear and how to become fearless, because that was my show back then. That's going to be what I'm going to be airing, but I just wanted to make this intro.
Why I'm showing this is because in memory of him and in honor of him because he did come to where I lived and spent so much time with me to really go through the process of my methodology and validate. For that, I thank him and I thank you for all your support and we're on a great start. It's just so epic.
I just finished signing up the school in Sun City in Arizona, so there are more people asking for our process to be part of the system. Dr. Fannin was one of those people who validated it, so he's big part of my growth and where I am now. Thank you, and thank you all of you for your support. Continue reading. This is an episode that I did with him in the past and let me know what you think in the comments. Thank you so much.
Welcome back to From Fear to Fearless Show where we share the incredible stories of ordinary individuals who have achieved extraordinary things despite their fears. Fear is a natural part of growth and change but it can hold us back, especially children. Our mission is to share the stories of those who have pushed past their fears and accomplished amazing things to inspire and empower parents and family members to do the same with their children in their lives. Join us as we share stories that will ignite your imagination, inspire you to take action and empower you to influence and impact the children in your life to achieve great things despite fear.
Our guest is Jeffrey Fannin. He holds phd in Psychology, MBA and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communication. He is the Founder of a clinic and a research center called Thought Genius in Glendale, Arizona. He has worked in the neuroscience field researching and training the brain for over 29 years. Dr. Fannin is an International Speaker, Authority and an Author in the field of optimal brain performance and cutting-edge neuroscience research. He has been in a movie PGS Intuition that has been playing in theaters all over the world.
Dr. Fannin has published three books, Commanding the Power of Thought - Volume 1, Commanding the Power of Thought - Volume 2 and Under the Influence: The Secret to Creating a Meaningful Life, Family, Career, Spirituality, and Friendship. He has traveled the world doing brain maps on over 4,000 individuals as well as doing consults with them. He also works in his clinic with ADD, ADHD, anxiety, depression and many conditions. Dr. Fannin was part of a research team at Arizona University, researching neuroscience and leadership focusing on research accomplished at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
He has appeared on Quantum World TV, the TV Frontier and Awakening also in Gaia TV, You Are Not Your Brain. His work has been featured in local media, international media such at Wall Street Journal, Fox News, ABC Daily, Business Week, London Financial Times, in Singapore Weekend Edition, BBC Radio and many more. Dr. Fannin is also hosted the popular weekly radio show, My Thoughts Are Holding Me Hostage. Dr. Fannin is no stranger to me as he had done brain mapping for my students and I had the privilege to work with them. I am so excited, welcome, Dr. Fannin.
Kohila, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it and it's good to see you again. Thank you so much.
Amazing. Thank you. I want to start off, Dr. Fannin, you have done so much study on human brain. Can you tell me why does fear hold us back?
Founded Fear Vs. Unfounded Fear And Subconscious Beliefs
I think that's probably the question we've all been trying to answer for many years. Why does it hold us back? I think because it's an innate function of being a human being, that fear is a protection mechanism, so it's going to kick in whether we want to or not. When we deal with fear, we have founded fear and we have unfounded fear. If I'm standing out in the middle of the freeway and the cars are whizzing by and I'm afraid, that's a founded fear. I have a subconscious belief that is driving that fear.
Fear is a protection mechanism, so it will kick in whether we want it to or not.
The subconscious belief is actually a thought that we have again and again that gets recorded down in our subconscious. When the thinking part of our brain says, "I want to be safe," or "I want this," or "I want to have that kind life," whatever it is, then that is an unfounded fear with a subconscious belief. We have the ability when we have an experience in life and we put a meaning to that experience and then it records an emotion.
If fear happens to be that emotion that gets triggered with that cognition, whether it's founded or unfounded, it doesn't matter. It's going to just trigger whatever it is. We have to change our subconscious belief in order to get from that natural fear that is a protection mechanism more to how we function in our daily life so that we can overcome those fears that are unfounded and then deal with the ones that are founded in a natural protection sense.
How do we discover that?
A lot of it is just being aware of what's going on around you. As I say, if you're standing out in the middle of the freeway and the cars are whizzing by and you're afraid, you should be afraid. That is a founded fear, that's something to be afraid of. If you're going into a math class because it's unfamiliar, because you're not sure what it is that you need to do and you have that kind of fear, that is an unfounded fear. That's something that we can overcome based on these subconscious beliefs.
So we can change the event in life, the meaning that we give that event, and then that emotion that gets in our brain. That is called a cognition and that's what fires off. We can learn to overcome that, we can create a new pathway so that the unfounded fear is not triggering and it's okay for a founded fear to trigger because that's what keeps us safe. It's just knowing the difference between the two.
You've done so much in the study of brain and neuroscience. Was there anything that held you back in your path?
Deciding To Fight Or Flight During Life Crisis
Many times. I remember when I was, I became an airline pilot for a while, but on my way to becoming an airline pilot, I quit flying probably at least a half a dozen times because I was afraid that I couldn't do it, that I couldn't cut it. I’ll share this with you because it really illustrates the point we're trying to get across here. Not too long ago, I had had a stroke and I never saw it coming, and while I was in the hospital because I had to move and I had to put all my household goods, my furniture, all of that into storage, that because I was in the hospital, the storage company auctioned off all of my goods.
Here I was, Cortez coming to the New World and he got all of his men off the ship and then had them all except one ship go out in the ocean, they burned them and sank them to the bottom of the ocean so that they couldn't argue with the situation they were dealing with. That's where I was at. I I couldn't deal with anything, I had lost everything that I had to deal with and had no place to live, all of this stuff.
I had to decide am I going to deal with this situation or am I going to run away from it? That's what the amygdala of the brain does. It's a fight or flight thing. We have the fight or flight, we have to decide are we going to stay and deal with this or are we going to run away from it? Once that decision's made, then the next issue is what is our subconscious belief? What is our belief about it? If I’ve lost everything, there's no use in living anymore. I can't go on, I can't do whatever.
Yet I said, "Okay, I'm going to deal with the situation," and started coming back from that in order to build a new life, to decide who am I, what am I going to do, what am I going to stand for, what am I not going to stand for? Beginning to look at all of these things that made up this person that I know as Jeffrey Fannin. Deciding where do you go, what do you do? How do you get rid of the things that aren't working for you? How do you change your circumstances so that you can deal with these subconscious beliefs that are now that inner part of you and help you know where to go, what to do, and what you'll stand for and what you won't.
That was my next question was how do you overcome, but you've answered it in that many you gave lots information. Let's go back to you said you were trying to be a flight pilot, being a pilot and you didn't go to many of them. Did you ever ended up overcoming that fear too?
Yes, I did. When I was stationed in the Air Force in Germany, that's where I got my pilot's license, but I was able to continue to get more and more ratings and finally got to the point where I was flying for US Air. I became an airline pilot for a number of years. They started having layoffs and so that put me on a different direction of working and training with the brain, because that's about the time I got acquainted with brain mapping and brain function, I said, "This is really interesting. I really enjoyed this." that's the path I began to follow, which led me here now.
Tell me, I know you so fascinated with the brain that's why you work so much in it and with it. How do you help someone overcome fear now? I know you're working hard on that.
Utilizing Universal Laws, Energy, Frequency, And Vibration To Change Subconscious Beliefs
Yeah, I’ve been on a long journey here in doing brain maps with people like we did with your students and so forth, but then going beyond that. When you have the information, then what? And so that's when I started to get more involved with what we'll call universal laws, energy, frequency and vibration. Everything has a frequency and a vibration as we are dealing with. If you have a thought and it's going to vibrate at a certain rate and if you hold that thought for 16 to 17 seconds, other thoughts or energy like that will be attracted to it.
If you have a thought, it carries a certain vibrational frequency—and if you hold that thought for 16 to 17 seconds, similar thoughts or energies are drawn to it.
When they come together, it begins to amass that energy, so we start developing this push-pull effect. If our brain is saying, "I want this," it is the thinking part of the brain that is doing that wanting or the desiring. It is the subconscious part of the brain or where our rules are, and actually those rules start beginning to form in the third trimester before we're being born, when we're being conceived.
For example, I used to joke about this until I realized how true it was that when I was being conceived and if my mother was fearful and anxious, then that vibration was in my cells. When I was born, then I would have this actual tendency to be fearful and anxious about things. I would have to change that subconscious belief so that I could overcome those things.
Now we all have the ability to do that, most of us just don't know that we can do that and that's where we have the experience in life, the meaning of that experience and then add the emotion. Those are bound together with a neurotransmitter that we call acetylcholine. When we cause a second burst of acetylcholine, it dislodges the emotion. The event it doesn't erase the event or the meaning of that event, it's just we don't have the emotional connection to that.
If we have fear mixed in with, that's why we're going to respond with a fearful response rather than, "I'm going to overcome that." some people do, they can do that almost instantaneously. Now I'm going to jump a little bit into some physics here, so don't get too alarmed. I did a study with a group of people called Vibravision. These are people who can put adhesive bandages over their eyes, put a blindfold on top of that.
They can drive a go-kart around an oval track without crashing, you can drop colored bean bags in their hands and they can tell you what color it is before it hits their hand. Now the issue was how do they do that? There's a couple of issues that go on here and everybody has the ability to do this. One is called the morphogenetic field.
This was discovered in 1910 by Alexander Gurwitsch and as he was looking at embryonic cells and that thing. Basically, it is the field that we have around us, this energy. Along came a guy by the name of Rupert Sheldrake and he was doing a lot of work with the paranormal kinds of activities, that's a much longer story.
The issue is, so when you would drop a colored bean bag in the person's hand and they could tell you what color, it was not the field. They would generate this field around them in about three feet in all directions. It is the morphic resonance or the color of that bean bag that they were picking up on, they didn't know that they were picking up on that, but that's how they could do it.
Some people could do it very well and some people couldn't because they had trained their brain to do that. In the brain maps like we did with your students, we were looking at why is it that the coaching that you were doing was so successful? What we were able to determine from that, it was not only the morphic field that every student had around them, but when they would get in the vicinity of say your morphic field, the morphic resonance from the coaching that you were doing would kick in and that's why they would be responsive to that and perform differently than they would then by themselves because of the other subconscious beliefs that maybe they had. Does that make sense?
Yes, absolutely. Thank you. You're doing something now with what you were saying to me earlier to help kids especially with Autism, ADHD, AD overcome their fear. Can you share a little bit about that?
Using Voice Imprint Technology To Rebalance The Brain
I think it's a really profound thing because we've seen this with a whole lot of not just kids but adults as well. When we look at the energy, the frequency and the vibration, one of the things that we're able to do is if we have with this scanner, and there's a lot more to that, but let's just confine it to the work that I'm doing with kids and adults that have problems with focus, concentration or have autism or things like that, they're on that spectrum. Those are all frequencies and energy that they're dealing with.
What they can do is they can call this phone number, we've automated this so instead of having to just get their 10 seconds of their voice imprint, the scanner will then measure where they are in this moment and then we can push what's called a button on the scanner that says optimize. It will take the frequencies of where they are and produce four MP3s or audios that they can listen to that brings them back into balance.
Let me give you a story here. Some of the people that I’ve worked with and the process is the same, so they call the number, they give their name and their phone number twice. That gives us 10 seconds of their voice imprint and then it will produce the 4 MP3s that we can email to them. When they get the MP3s, then they listen to those on their phone with a noise-canceling headphones or earbuds whatever or just through the speakers on their phone and it will bring their brain into balance. If they're out of balance over here and this is where they're balance.
The scientists have put a lot of this together, they were able to catalog over 120,000 different frequencies. If they're over here, they're saying, "Go this way." those MP3s have the frequency and the vibration to bring them into balance. Now we know that we get out of balance all the time and that's why we automated this too, so they can just call the voice line with anybody that we're working with in order to record that. If they've had a difficult day or they failed a test at school or whatever, their brain is going to get out of balance and our emotions are actually embedded in our voice. The emotions are in the voice so when we rebalance that, it causes that individual.
Maybe they had a tough day at school, they come home they listen to their MP3s, now they're ready to do their homework, their brain is in balance. We'll see kids that maybe have behavioral issues and so when they get out of balance, then they become demanding, they become controlling and they only want to do it their way based on some of the subconscious beliefs and things we were talking about.
When they listen to their MP3s, then it will bring them back into balance. Sometimes they have food sensitivities and they don't know that they have food sensitivities. Some of the other features in this scanner we're able to look at those and say for one individual, he would go through that situation we just described.
We found out he was taking in too much sugar and peanuts were actually causing the problem. When he went off of those, then he began to act more normal. There's a process in our gene that we call methylation and being able to get that gene to perform the way that it should based on the energy, the frequency and the vibration of what is going on. They can take an over-the-counter enzyme to do what's called scrubbing that gene.
That allows the gene, it's called the MTHFR gene and males are more susceptible to the 677T gene whereas females are more susceptible to the 1298C. When you see the expression of the gene, that means our behavior is going to react in a certain way. With females, some of them may get breast cancer, that's an expression of the gene because the gene is out of balance. The longer it stays out of balance, then the more things can happen in terms of we are not feeling well, we get sick.
There are seven different layers of energy field around all of us. If there is a discordance between the fourth and the fifth energy field, I know this is getting deep, but just hang with me for a minute here. If that's out of balance then that's where illness begins to occur. If we are functioning in the sixth or the seventh energy field, then we can function as human beings and normal and overcome a lot of these subconscious beliefs things we talked about there.
The seventh field is the intuition, the stuff that comes to us in our inner soul our inner being saying, "Do this, don't do that. Follow this, go here. There's a parking place right around the corner, go there." those things begin to happen. Most of us have had those experiences, we just aren't aware that those are happening but when we start to get tuned into that, it happens with everybody all the time. We just need to be aware of it.
Yes, absolutely. Thank you. One of the things that I always fascinate with whenever we talk is about you talking about the energy and how much that other energies can influence your fear. That's why sometimes it's almost like other person's fear can induce your own fear.
Other People's Fear And Energy Can Influence And Trigger Our Own Fear
Absolutely and that happens all the time. We may not recognize that's where it's coming from, but somebody else's fear can influence us. That is the key word here, influence us, so that it will trigger the fear within ourselves and so then we begin to be subject to their fear even though it's not a founded fear, it's an unfounded fear.
Someone else’s fear can influence us, triggering fear within ourselves. We then begin to carry their fear, even when it is unfounded.
It happens with sometimes I’ve seen it with even teachers who are not very competent in their own material if they start teaching someone with that fear of not knowing, it starts to...
Yeah, been there done that I got the t-shirt, where the teacher might be two pages ahead of the students. They're not certain and that becomes that subconscious belief. They are not certain about their own stuff so the uncertainty is what is triggering. The person, their energy field is picking up on that uncertainty which is then triggering the uncertainty within themselves, and so they really don't know who they are what they're doing or how they're going about it. The energy, the frequency and the vibration becomes very important.
That's why the MP3s that we're working with in what we call the inner voice, and that's the process that produces these MP3s so that people of all ages, it doesn't matter what you are, but your brain and your body have certain frequencies that you deal with that. In fact, we have a video on our website that people can watch and understand this entire process and why it's important because all of us are subject to that, that's why the name of my third book is Under the Influence. We're under the influence of energy frequency and vibration all the time because those are universal laws.
It's a little bit like the Law of Gravity. We know what the Law of Gravity is. We may not be able to explain how or why it works, but we know it's there. It keeps us from flying off into the space and out into the universe. Gravity keeps us there, but we understand the principles of that from Einstein and what he was talking about, the function of gravity and where it comes from.
Now we can say, "I don't believe in gravity," and climb to the top of the highest building around us and jump off and declare, "I don't believe in gravity." all the way down, but gravity's still going to work. All of these universal laws are the things that we are subject to, we are under the influence of those all the time. It's just a question are they founded or unfounded? They're going to work whether we believe in them or not, whether we understand them or not, they're still going to work.
Yeah, it's almost like we have to reframe with this energy work, isn't it? We haven't looked at it that way, we always think something is wrong with us but it's the energy.
Yeah, we live in a different era now from the time that I was growing up and we won't mention that I was born in 1950. I am actually 72 years old, but I'm still under the influence of a lot of those things but there are many of them that I’ve been able to change or we live in the world of technology now where we can use things like the MP3s to change the frequency and the vibration so that it affects our thinking, our behavior and our understanding of all of these things.
Amazingly, we live in that world of technology now that even five years ago wasn't there. A lot of the things that I’ve been talking about were actually developed over twenty years ago. We're just getting to the point now in the way the world works and what we understand and shifts of this energy and the conditions in the world we live in, all of that thing. Things are changing. I think when I was a kid they said that the information that is out there was being doubled about every 90 days. Now in the world we live in, all of that energy and information is being doubled about every 90 seconds.
You think about the internet. You go on the internet and I have yet to have something ever come back if I put a question out there, I always get an answer. It may not be the right answer, it may be somebody's opinion or whatever, but the information is there. We are living in a totally different world where we have to pay more attention to the energy, the frequency and the vibration of not only what's going on around us, who we're hanging out with, the kinds of things that we are being subjected to, but the kinds of things that are happening to our brain and our body and all of that thing.
That's why we are putting processes and understanding and teachings together for people so they can know, "Okay, what do I do about that?" Just like with the scans that we do, there's over 120,000 different frequencies and it's hard to keep track of that. We're trying to help people understand this is what you do, this is how you go about it, this is what you need to deal with. We now have reports and things that will tell people "You have too much stress. You're not drinking enough water. You you need to get rid of some of these subconscious beliefs." Stuff like that, so that we can live in this incredible era that we're living in, rather than just going along for the ride here.
You talked about your young self like ‘50s to now you've seen major shift and change in what we do and how we do things and how fast we do things. I wanted to ask you this question, this is a very important question to our readers. What would you tell your younger self about fear?
My younger self wouldn't know what I know now. I wish I could go back and know what I know now back when I was younger, but I didn't. We have to rely on society and the world and the knowledge at the time to help us understand what it is that we're dealing with. If I was relying on my caregivers, my parents to tell me this is the way things work, they could only tell me based on their knowledge and their understanding.
If they were lacking, my father was sixteen when World War II was on and he ended up being on a submarine and had a lot of depth charges dropped on him and stuff like that. When he was only 16 and as I grew up and got older, he did not know how to tell me how to live in the world because the world he grew up in, being 16 years old and being on a submarine and having depth charge dropped on you, you didn't know whether the next moment was going to be your last or not. That's the world, that's the knowledge base that he grew up in.
Adults Must Be Open To New Ideas And Technology To Overcome Fear
Transform forward that to now. We have a new knowledge base. We have different understanding. We have different science that is available. The science of what we know now was not even available back then. We barely even understood this thing called quantum mechanics until really the ‘70s and on into the ‘80s. In the meantime, the world is continuing to progress and develop. I think it is really a requirement of adults to get on board with the things they don't know, the things they need to learn. Where can I learn those, how can I function in this world?
What we're seeing ever since the pandemic is that people are building walls around themselves in order to keep things the way they are. As human beings, we hate change, we avoid change. We build these walls about who we think we are, then we wander around inside this box thinking, "Why isn't the world different?" and we keep getting the same thing again and again and we get frustrated, we don't understand, we don't know where to go, we don't know how to deal with it because we're dealing with old knowledge and old technology or we're dealing with fallacious knowledge, it's not understood.
Now let me give you an example of that. When we look at something called the free radicals and the antioxidants. What we were taught back in the day when I was growing up is if you eat enough fruits and vegetables, it is going to kill off the antioxidants that are causing problems in your body. That's only partially true. The science of it nowadays that we know is that any given moment, in your brain and your body, you can have over 300 septillion free radicals running around in your brain and your body. Now that's the number 300 with 24 zeros after it.
You and I cannot eat enough fruits and vegetables to keep that in balance because what we were taught is one antioxidant will kill one free radical, that's a one-to-one ratio. If you have that many free radicals running around in your brain and your body, we end up with more demand on our body than we have resources to meet that demand. We have the ability now from science to actually activate these areas of our body we call NRF1, NRF2 pathways to have a million-to-one ratio instead of a one-to-one ratio. That's not a million to one per day, it's a million to one antioxidants killing free radicals a million to one per second.
That's bringing us back into balance. We go back into this balance and lack of balance in our frequency our cells, our body, that sort of thing. That's the era that we live in. We want to get balance, that's the desire we all have. Get balance whether I'm taking a math test or whether I'm dealing with my friends and family or whatever it is. We want to be balanced but we don't know how to do that because we're dealing on old ideas and old technology. It is each of our responsibility to get to a point where we are able to bring in some of the new ideas, the new technology, the new functions so that we know what we're dealing with and that we can have more control over our thoughts our behaviors and what we say.
We often struggle to achieve balance because we’re working with old ideas and outdated systems. It’s our responsibility to integrate new ideas, technology, and ways of thinking so we can better understand what we face and have more control over our thoughts, behaviors, and words.
Yes, absolutely. Being open to change.
Growth And Change Are Inevitable
Exactly. That's a hard thing to do because we don't like change. We want to stay the same. What we do know, there are two things that are certain in life. One is death and one is taxes. Same thing with this, all facetiousness aside here and that is that being able to understand and to grow within ourselves, that growth and that change is inevitable.
We must be able to deal not only with the change back when I was a child but also now and that's why I try to keep up on things and why we're trying to develop different ideas, programs and functions for people who maybe don't have that education, who don't have a PhD, who aren't sure what to do or how to go about it. They have to rely on people who are have overcome some of those things in their own life and be able to teach other people how to do what they need to do.
I love what you're doing. Your Thought Genius is where they can find everything that you're doing to help people overcome and stay with change and open to change, isn't it?
Exactly. ThoughtGenius.com. You can go there and we'll always have information or videos or things that you can look at. We are putting up an education function where people can get more knowledge about these things and learn at their own rate whenever they feel like it or they need to review. We have a total of 14 classes, a couple of them are just introductory energy, frequency, vibration stuff. The others are things that, "What can I do about this stuff?"
These are courses that they can take on their own time, they can go back, they can review and we're just getting those totally up and running. We've got about three-fourths of it all completed at this point. We'll have that online, but to find out about how that's coming or what you can do about it or if you want to get a download a free chapter in my new book, go to the website ThoughtGenius.com and you can download that. You can watch the videos things like that and just keep in touch with us or get on our mailing list and we'll be able to keep you informed of about everything so that you and your family know what to do.
Without fear. Thank you so much. I always love talking to you because you have such a gift for this knowledge.
I don't know where that comes from. I just know that I'm here to do that, and so I do and I keep doing it and keep learning. I just know that's what my job is here. That to be here to do that to help other people and so that they can know what they need to do and how to go about it and how to deal with this fast-functioning life that we're in now.
Yes, thank you for sharing your story and inspiring our readers. Thank you everyone for tuning into our show. We hope that you found our stories inspiring and empowering. We'll be right back for another episode. If you're interested in making learning easy for your child, don't forget to check out our weekly masterclass.
Remember, fear is a natural part of growth and change, as just Dr. Fannin just told us, but it doesn't have to hold us back. We don't need to be a hostage. Let's help our kids learn and grow fearlessly by igniting their imagination, inspiring them to take action and empowering them to see the unlimited possibilities that lies on the other side of fear. Together, we can help our children become fearless learners. Thank you again and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Fannin.
Thank you.