Like diagnosed anxiety and phobias, I’m not just talking about small stuff like asking out your crush etc.
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Exposure therapy is one of the most common forms. Yes facing your fear can help a lot.
There is still nuance to this, and you can have differnet levels of exposing you to that fear(videos etc).
But the core idea is to face what you fear to learn not to fear it.
>Like diagnosed anxiety and phobias, I’m not just talking about small stuff like asking out your crush etc.
There is nothing to be gained from this train of thought. Do not take medical advice from 19th century humorists.
For that matter, do not take medical advice from 19th century *physicians*.
The strategy psychologists use to treat phobias is quite similar to that yes.
They will slowly approach the thing you fear, first just in your mind, then with pictures, and eventually in reality.
The issue with phobias is that they are self reinforcing. You avoid NotTrulyBadThing that your brain flagged as dangerous, and then nothing bad happens, so your brain rewards you for doing a good job on avoiding danger. The behavior gets reinforced because it led to the desired outcome of nothing bad happening and the thing you fear becomes even more scary.
The only way to break out of that loop is teaching your brain that no bad things happen when you don’t avoid the thing.
Of course this is only a good idea for irrational fears. If the thing you fear the most is wrestling polar bears then don’t wrestle polar bears to get more brave.
Nnnnnot quickly in my experience, though I can’t give you any studies on this, I haven’t looked.
Doing the things you’re afraid of repeatedly can get you used to them in time, make it easier to do them. I will use getting shots as my example. I have horrible medical anxiety and now that I’m 50, I experience exactly the same level of dread and fear over shots that I always have. However, it is easier to push through that fear to get the job done. Thats been my experience. People use this technique a lot though, so my guess is that it might work better for other people than for me.
This is what happens when Andrew Tate gets cancelled. You get people inflicted by some imaginary fear
Avoidance is what perpetuates anxiety disorders. You’re scared of social situations where people will judge you negatively – when you go to that party, your anxiety level escalates, your heart beats faster, your breaths are shallower, you feel like you’re going to throw up. You then escape by going to the toilet, your anxiety level reduces a little – now you have taught your brain “social situations are really dangerous. I could have died. Thank god I got out in time! Next time I’ll avoid it even earlier to prevent this feeling from happening again”
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) uses exposure therapy where you instead learn to tolerate the feeling of anxiety so your brain instead gets the message “that was really hard but I got through it. Nothing bad happened to me. I can do this”. The exposure is done in a graded manner so it’s not too overwhelming to push through the anxiety. You start with something less stressful and then build your way up
In my personal experience, fuck no.
I was in Afghanistan working as a civilian contractor. I have a snake phobia. A colleague of mine was walking out to our elevated platform (a platform that sat above shipping containers with wooden steps going up to the platform) at 2 am and ran inside because he saw a snake underneath the steps. Since that moment, I was terrified of walking around the site at night.
To make matters worse, when winter came around, the same coworker saw a baby snake and gathered the others to put it in a Tupperware. I said okay let me see it to get over my fear. Mannnnn I’m still scared of snakes 😭
When they took the baby snake to pest control, the guy freaked out and scolded my colleagues saying that they could’ve gotten bitten and that the base didn’t have anti-venom available…
It doesn’t help with everything, but it can help with certain phobias. For instance, I suffer from severe health anxiety, and I’m not sure if exposure to sufferers of the diseases I fear would help me; then again, it would be sort of unethical to try.
On the other hand, I had an insane phobia of sharks until I was thirty years old. Now, that may sound like a perfectly reasonable thing to be afraid of, after all, sharks do occasionally kill people. However, I was afraid of sharks in places where there are no sharks. And not just a little bit. I could literally not be in a swimming pool alone, which was a problem, because I love to swim. And swimming in an open body of water was nerve-wracking, though I did do it when there was someone else there.
Anyway, when I had an opportunity to dive with sharks at an aquarium, I jumped at the opportunity. Spending 20 minutes with ten-plus-feet sand tigers serenely swimming past me really put things in perspective. Do they have faces only a mother could love? Yes, very much so. But I also learned that they are clumsy and weird, and not particularly interested in snacking on people. Of course, I had known that before, but there was something about being close enough to touch them and feel the rush of water as they went past that made all the difference.
I am now capable of swimming by myself without fear in pretty much any body of water, even though I will say that trying a VR cage diving simulation freaked me out to no end. However, I’m fairly certain they had the sharks in that growl, and that’s just not something real sharks do. Oh, and VR just disorients me.
By the way, I have two other completely irrational phobias, namely nuns and stairs. So far, I have not tried exposure therapy on either of those.
The sentence itself is what is known as chiasmus, it’s a rhetorical device, that has the purpose to convince someone of something; it is the preferred device of many gurus and charlatans.
I doubt that this technique is helpful; I know that so use it, with a degree of success, but phobias and anxiety are not simple as the sentence is.
I mean maybe. It is entirely dependent on the person, the phobia, the context.
I don’t like heights. I was never pants shittingly terrified of them, but it was an issue. I faced that and the fear isn’t gone and didn’t die. I just got better at managing and dealing with the fear before during and after it hits.
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