Learn To Get Over Your Phobia!
We all have some kind of phobia or know someone who has one. Some phobias involve things that don’t affect our daily lives, so we can just ignore them completely. For example, having a phobia of snakes or rats will not cause a lot of anxiety on a daily basis if you live in a city.
However, a phobia of, for example, driving (amaxophobia) can be a very real problem these days. Or the phobia of flying if you often have to travel for work. So it’s important to work on the fear some of these harmless stimuli produce. Because these fears in turn generate avoidance behaviors that fuel this panic… Find out how!
The key to phobias is fear
Fear is an emotion that appears when you have a phobia. Therefore, you should especially learn to reduce its intensity when this fear is activated. With this goal in mind, you should educate yourself about the things that provoke your phobia. Sometimes a phobia is produced by false beliefs. Often the phobia disappears when you are able to disprove these beliefs. It will be helpful to acquire skills that will help you master the dreaded situation.
Let’s look at an example. If you are afraid of dogs, you might think that all dogs are dangerous. However, if you do some research you will see that this is not true. You can also look up how to behave around dogs to regulate their behavior in different situations. This way you have more resources that you can use during ‘scary’ situations. These tools will give you a sense of security and reduce your anxiety. This makes the threat seem a lot less worrisome.
In addition to gathering information about the realities behind your phobia and finding a way to cope with it, working on a range of tools is fundamental. This will be very helpful in learning how to relax more. There are many techniques to achieve this. It’s about finding the technique that suits you best, depending on the stimulus and your personal characteristics.
The next step: exposing yourself to your phobia
When you are confronted with the subject of your phobia, your fear is activated. You feel your heart begin to beat faster and faster. Your breathing also speeds up. You become blocked and your attention becomes completely captivated by the stimulus itself. All you want to do is run or avoid it, right? And in fact , this is exactly what you do. That’s when your fear subsides… Until the stimulus of your phobia reappears and you respond to your fear in the same way. This behavior pattern is thus reinforced.
Obviously, this avoidance strategy is effective in the short term, but not in the long term. So what can you do? You can stop running away. It sounds difficult, but that’s why we gave you as a first step to learn to relax and control your anxiety. That way, when your phobia appears, you can control that negative emotion.
To do this, it is necessary at the same time to expose yourself a little to the source of your phobia. That is, list situations related to your phobia and rank them from worst to worst in terms of the level of fear they generate. Once you have done this, expose yourself to these situations one by one. Without running away.
Start with the situations that cause the least amount of anxiety. And when this unpleasant emotion arises, you put into practice the strategies you have learned to manage negative emotions. For example, relaxation, dissociated attention to the stimulus, breaking your train of thought, rather than avoiding it. Once you ‘ve overcome the situation, you’re ready to expose yourself to the next situation. In this way you will see how over time you can easily expose yourself to situations that used to cause a lot of anxiety.
Finally… reward yourself!
If you want to make a habit of a behavior, you have to reinforce it after it has been put into practice. To do this, it is important to reward yourself every time you have exposed yourself to a stimulus and successfully overcome the fear without running away. After all, you just experienced a very unpleasant moment… You deserve it!
In this way you increase your self-control with regard to that first impulse. But not only that, after you expose yourself to it, you will also be able to see that the negative consequences you expected were not nearly as bad as you thought they would be. Or maybe there were no negative consequences at all. This in itself is a reinforcement and motivation to successfully cope with the next situation, which will be even more difficult. By the time you get over your worries about the first situation, the next doesn’t seem so bad after all.
Overcoming a phobia is relatively easy if you know how to do it and if you practice the right techniques. So, if you think you are suffering from this problem, it is important to get help from a psychologist. Someone who will guide you through this process so that you can regain control of your life… Go for it!
