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Overcoming a Fear

To reduce stress, try facing your fears head-on.

(9 ratings)
Duration: Variable Frequency: 1x/month Difficulty: Intensive
Overcoming a Fear
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How to Do It

Note: The following guidelines are geared toward addressing mild, everyday fears. Fears related to serious mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and social anxiety disorder should be addressed with the help of a mental health professional.

Sometimes one or two scary experiences can cause us to fear things that we don’t rationally need to fear; some fears aren’t based on firsthand experience at all. Either way, overcoming these fears often requires that we develop a more positive—or at least less negative—association with the thing that we fear. Here’s how:

  1. Start with small doses. The first step is to expose yourself to small doses of the fear-inducing activity in a safe context. For example, if public speaking makes you nervous, you could start by seeking out a low-pressure speaking opportunity with a small, supportive audience, in a setting where you don’t have to worry about being perfectly articulate—perhaps giving a toast at a friend’s birthday party. Or if you’d like to learn to rock climb but are afraid of heights, you could start by spending time observing and assisting other climbers.
  2. Repeat the activity until you start to feel the fear dissipate. Over time, repeated exposure to a safe, non-harmful version of whatever made you afraid can reduce the negative association and replace it with a neutral or positive association. For example, repeatedly seeing other people climb without falling may begin to overwrite your negative association with heights. And the more you fly and land safely, the less dangerous flying is likely to feel.
  3.  Gradually increase the challenge. After you begin to feel more comfortable with small doses, try taking it up a notch. For example, you could go from watching others climb to climbing a short distance yourself. Or you could volunteer to present the results of a team project to coworkers or fellow students. From here, you can continue to incrementally ratchet up the challenge until you reach your goal, whether that’s to scale Mt. Everest, give a talk in front of hundreds of people, or fly to a new continent.

Your fear may never be fully extinguished, but hopefully it will hold less power over you and not prevent you from achieving important goals and enjoying your life. In the words of Mark Twain, “Courage is not the absence of fear. It is acting in spite of it.”
 

Why You Should Try It


Some types of fear—like the fear that stops you from running into a busy street—are useful and necessary. But other types of fear are less rational and more likely to hold you back in life. Fear of public speaking, fear of flying, fear of heights—these are some of the more common ones.

To cope, you may avoid the situations that elicit these fears, or you may try, often unsuccessfully, to counter your fear with reason—for example, by reminding yourself of the very low likelihood of a plane crash.

Avoiding fearful situations tends to make your fears worse. In fact, when you are in a scary situation, paying full attention to the fear-causing object has been found to be more beneficial than avoiding paying attention to it. Moreover, people see larger and longer-lasting reductions in fear when they work their way up to facing their fears at the highest intensity.

Research suggests that an effective way to combat fear is to do the thing you least want to do—face your fear head-on—but do it one step at a time, in a healthy and safe way. This strategy can help retrain your brain to develop a more positive association with whatever has been triggering your fear. Confronting your fears head-on can also increase your self-confidence and show you that you’re capable of doing what might once have seemed impossible. Whereas acting based on fear limits you, facing your fears can be liberating and transformative.

Why It Works

Fear may be natural, but it’s not always helpful. Sometimes our brains mistakenly learn to send fear signals even when there is no real danger, perhaps based on one or two bad experiences. Gradually and repeatedly exposing ourselves to the activities we fear most can help teach our brains that these activities are not in fact dangerous—and may actually be very rewarding.

Evidence That It Works

Schiller, D., Monfils, M., Raio, C. M., Johnson, D., LeDoux, J. E., Phelps, E. A. (2010). Preventing the return of fear in humans using reconsolidation update mechanisms. Nature, 463, 49-53.

American adults received a mild shock each time they saw a blue square on a computer screen, conditioning them to fear the blue square; evidence of their increased fear came from a subtle measure of increased sweat on their skin. The next day, they underwent “extinction training”—that is, they were repeatedly exposed to the blue square again, but this time without the shocks. After that, they showed a significant decrease in their fear response to the blue square, an effect that persisted a year later.

Who Has Tried the Practice?

Versions of this practice have helped with reducing people’s fears of spiders, tarantulas, heights, water, flying on airplanes, public speaking, and discussions about racism. Additional studies explore how Overcoming a Fear benefits people outside the U.S.:

Keep in Mind

 

Before starting this practice, make sure that you are committed to facing your particular fear. By design, you will experience discomfort—the idea is to try to become comfortable being uncomfortable. Therefore, it’s best that you choose a fear that is reasonably challenging to overcome.

As you work to face your fears, writing or journaling may help you gain additional benefits. Chinese adults who wrote a Self-Compassionate Letter before Overcoming a Fear experienced higher decreases in fear response compared to those who did not write the letter.

 

References

Akeb-urai, N., Kadir, N. B. Y. A., & Nasir, R. (2020). Mathematics anxiety and performance among college students: Effectiveness of systematic desensitization treatment. Intellectual Discourse, 28(1), 99–127. https://doi.org/10.31436/id.v28i1.1567

Blakey, S. M., Abramowitz, J. S., Buchholz, J. L., Jessup, S. C., Jacoby, R. J., Reuman, L., & Pentel, K. Z. (2019). A randomized controlled trial of the judicious use of safety behaviors during exposure therapy. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 112, 28–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2018.11.010

Capafóns, J. I., Sosa, C. D., & Avero, P. (1998). Systematic desensitization in the treatment of fear of flying. Psychology in Spain, 2(1), 11–16. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-03488-002

Du, J., Zeng, X., Zheng, X., & Zhuang, C. (2015). The impact of unconditioned stimulus devaluation on conditional fear extinction. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 47(3), 344–352. https://doi.org/10.3724/SP.J.1041.2015.00344

Egan, S. (1981). Reduction of anxiety in aquaphobics. Canadian Journal of Applied Sport Sciences, 6(2), 68–71. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6113060/

Egara, F. O., & Mosimege, M. (2024). Effect of systematic desensitization on anxiety and achievement of nigerian secondary school students in mathematics. Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation, 15(2), 175–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/21501378.2024.2342586

Frank, H. E., Becker-Haimes, E. M., Rifkin, L. S., Norris, L. A., Ollendick, T. H., Olino, T. M., Kratz, H. E., Beidas, R. S., & Kendall, P. C. (2020). Training with tarantulas: A randomized feasibility and acceptability study using experiential learning to enhance exposure therapy training. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2020.102308

Howard, W. A., Murphy, S. M., & Clarke, J. C. (1983). The nature and treatment of fear of flying: A controlled investigation. Behavior Therapy, 14(4), 557–567. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7894(83)80078-1

Jacquart, J., Wardle-Pinkston, S., Ziegler, J., Sbarra, D. A., & O’Connor, M.-F. (2024). Improving culturally responsive clinical training: Exploring the acceptability and feasibility of an exposure-based strategy. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 18(1), 87–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/tep0000462

Mei, Y., Liu, J., Liu, H., Fu, Y., Luo, X., & Lei, Y. (2023). Self-compassion writing facilitates fear extinction. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 55(8), 1317–1329. https://doi.org/10.3724/SP.J.1041.2023.01317

Nitta, Y., Takahashi, T., Haitani, T., Sugimori, E., & Kumano, H. (2020). Avoidance behavior prevents modification of fear memory during reconsolidation. Psychological Reports, 123(2), 224–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033294118811116

Norberg, M. M., Newins, A. R., Jiang, Y., Xu, J., Forcadell, E., Alberich, C., & Deacon, B. J. (2018). The scarier the better: Maximizing exposure therapy outcomes for spider fear. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 46(6), 754–760. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1352465818000437

Shin, K. E., & Newman, M. G. (2018). Using retrieval cues to attenuate return of fear in individuals with public speaking anxiety. Behavior Therapy, 49(2), 212–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2017.07.011

Steinman, S. A., & Teachman, B. A. (2014). Reaching new heights: Comparing interpretation bias modification to exposure therapy for extreme height fear. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 82(3), 404–417. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036023

Xu, M., Rowe, K., & Purdon, C. (2021). To approach or to avoid: The role of ambivalent motivation in attentional biases to threat and spider fear. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 45(4), 767–782. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-020-10193-2

Yang, K., Yang, M., & Liu, H. (1999). Comparative study of the effects of accompanied systemic desensitization in the treatment of social phobia. Chinese Mental Health Journal, 13(4), 238–239. 

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The Greater Good Toolkit

Made in collaboration with Holstee, this tookit includes 30 science-based practices for a meaningful life.
Toolkit box, practice cards and glasses sit on a marble surface

The Greater Good Toolkit

Made in collaboration with Holstee, this tookit includes 30 science-based practices for a meaningful life.

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