Why Bother Overcoming Fears?

The top ten most common specific phobias are:

1. Arachnophobia – fear of spiders
2. Ophidiophobia – fear of snakes
3. Acrophobia – fear of heights
4. Agoraphobia – fear of crowds or open spaces
5. Cynophobia – fear of dogs
6. Astraphobia – fear of thunder and lightning
7. Claustrophobia – fear of small spaces
8. Mysophobia – fear of germs
9. Aerophobia – fear of flying
10. Trypanophobia – fear of injections

By looking at the above common phobias, they do all have some basis for why we may become afraid of them. Some spiders and snakes can kill, as can dogs (especially if they have rabies). Planes can crash, and falling from high up can be fatal. People can become trapped and suffocate in a small space or in crowds, and lightning strikes have killed people. Germs and bacteria spread disease too, and medical mishaps are the third most significant cause of death in the US according to the latest figures from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The issue is that our brain is not very good at distinguishing things that are really dangerous versus things that feel dangerous but are actually pretty safe.

How Do We Overcome Fears?

We overcome any fear through the dual process of gradual exposure and cognitive reappraisal after the exposure:

1. We determine what fear it is we would like to master. Preferably, this is something that you are currently avoiding that is negatively impacting your life, such as not going to the doctor or dentist because you are afraid of needles.

2. We develop an exposure hierarchy on this fear. This should have at least five different tasks that are ranked from least scary to most scary (scale from 0-10) tasks that you would like to challenge yourself with. For Arachnophobia this may be a 2/10 for looking at pictures of spiders, to 4/10 for watching videos of spiders, to 6/10 for looking at spiders in a an enclosure, to 8/10 for a spider being out in the open in front of you, to 10/10 for letting a spider crawl over your hand or up your arm.

3. We start with the least scary task first and stay in the situation for at least 10 minutes if possible. This should be long enough for the anxiety to peak and then reduce substantially during the exposure exercise. Specific behavioural and thinking skills can be taught by a psychologist to help lower stress levels during the exposure if it is not reducing at all.

4. We reflect on the exposure experience afterwards and try to change our previously held beliefs about what we fear. This is called cognitive reappraisal, and is done by asking ourselves “how did it go?“, “was it as bad as I thought it would be?“, and “how would I approach a similar situation in the future?”

5. Once we are comfortable with that level of the exposure hierarchy, we repeat steps 3 and 4 with the next task on the exposure hierarchy. Once we become comfortable with the next step, we repeat this process again with the next task until we are successful with all tasks on the hierarchy. This would mean the fear has been overcome or mastered.

What if What I Fear Really is Dangerous?

If you have Ophidiophobia and live in Australia, you’re probably not going to want to befriend a snake that you run into out in the bush. Australia is home to 21 out of the 25 most deadly snakes in the world. If you wanted to overcome this fear, you might want to instead learn how to distinguish between poisonous and non-poisonous snakes and get more comfortable only with deadly ones from behind solid glass panels at your local zoo. Or you could visit someone who owned a harmless pet snake so that you could get used to being around it and touching it and realising that you are safe.

If you’re afraid of heights, I wouldn’t suggest being like Alex Honnold and trying to free climb El Capitan in Yosemite, but trying out the edge experience at the Eureka tower in Melbourne or even riding on the amusement park ride The Giant Drop on the Gold Coast might be a pretty safe way to challenge your fears.

Facts can really help some people to challenge their beliefs about their fears, but nothing beats putting ourselves in a feared situation first, and then trying to challenge our beliefs afterwards.

For me, knowing that only 12 out of the 35,000 different varieties of spiders are harmful to humans makes me not worry every time I see a little one unless it is a whitetail or a redback spider.

It helps to know that flying is one of the safest forms of travel, with a one-in-12 million chance of crashing. Although I don’t try to stand in an open field with a metal pole during a storm, it does help to know that being killed by lightning is nearly as rare, with a one-in-10.5 million chance.

Even though I don’t like to watch it pierce my skin, needles don’t hurt nearly as much as I used to imagine, and the pain goes away almost immediately after the injection. Bacteria is absolutely everywhere so I couldn’t avoid germs entirely even if I tried, and getting exposed to a bit of dirt when we are young might also be good for the development of our immune system.

If I ever feel a bit trapped or panicky the next time I dive, it will help to remind myself that I have done it before. I have my open water certificate and the skills from this, and what I’m doing is actually pretty safe as long as I don’t panic and follow what I have been taught in my training.

Just because we are afraid of something, it doesn’t mean we have to avoid it for the rest of our lives. But we don’t have to face our fears every time either, especially if it is not harming our quality of life. If you determine it would be good to challenge yourself and try to overcome a fear, I hope the steps outlined above help, and I’d love to hear about any success stories in the comments below.