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How to Conquer Your Fears Once and for All
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Decide if you should face your fear
- Consider the pros and cons of not facing your fear.
- Write those down.
- Identify the pros and cons of tackling your fears head-on.
- Write down what you might achieve or how your life might be different.
The best way to conquer a fear is to face your fears head-on in a healthy manner that helps you move past the fear rather than in a way that traumatizes you.
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Evaluate Risk Level
Just because something feels scary, doesn’t mean it’s actually risky. Educate yourself about the facts and the risks you actually face by doing the things that scare you.
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Create an Action Plan
The key to facing your fears is to take one small step at a time. Going too fast or doing something too scary before you are ready can backfire.
Keep moving forward. A moderate amount of anxiety is good. Don’t wait to take a step forward until your anxiety disappears.
If you can’t actually do the thing that scares you to practice, you might use imagined exposure.
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Seek Professional Help
- If you have a specific phobia that you are not able to conquer on your own.
- If your fears are debilitating, or you aren’t having much success facing them on your own.
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"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy."
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"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
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Suffering from the fear of heights
People that have acrophobia have an irrational fear of heights. Many symptoms of acrophobia are shared with other anxiety disorders, such as shaking, sweating, a racing heart, diff...
Challenge your beliefs about heights
People with height phobias think something bad will happen when they are up high. But you are safer than you think and your feared outcome about heights won't really happen.
Ask yourself:
- What do you believe will happen when you expose yourself to your fear?
- How likely do you think it is that this would happen?
- What would be the outcome of it happening? (you might believe a tall building will collapse.)
Once you've answered the questions, start small with the thing you fear and see that the worst doesn't actually happen, or that it is not as bad as you feared.
The cause of acrophobia
- A traumatic or frightening event, such as falling off a ladder could cause a fear of heights because the distressing experience gets paired with heights in the person's memories.
- However, many people can't link their fear to a particular experience.
- Some people that fear heights did not have repeated safe exposure to heights.
- Finally, people with height phobia show subtle differences in their ability to maintain their balance, partly because they have more difficulty integrating perceptual information from their visual system.
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Why You Self-Sabotage
For many people, the fear of rejection and the fear of engulfment keep them out of relationships.
These fears are based on false beliefs, such as success or failure defines my worth as...
How You Self-Sabotage
Relationships:
- You keep yourself isolated.
- You make so many demands on your partner that he or she feels smothered and ends the relationship.
- You judge everyone you meet as not being good enough for you.
Work:
- You keep putting off looking for the kind of job you want.
- You are able to work, and say you want to, but keep living off other means.
- You stay in a job that you hate.
- You keep yourself uneducated regarding doing what you really want to do.
Healing Your Self-Sabotaging Behavior
- Notice self-judgments.
- Shift your definition of your worth, from outcomes to effort. Decide that you will define your worth by the loving actions you take for yourself and others.
- Consciously see mistakes and failure as stepping stones to success, rather than as definitions of your worth.
- Learn to be kind and compassionate toward your own feelings.
- Make a decision that you are willing to lose another person rather than lose yourself.