3 Keys to Turning Down the Volume on Your Fears

FearUnderground tunnel with water on the road isn’t always right. It just feels like it’s right. Fear is like the loud talker at a meeting everyone just agrees with because he’s loud, intimidating, and seems like he knows what he’s talking about. He seems like he knows what he’s talking about because, well, he’s loud and intimidating.

That’s a lot like how persistent fear gets our attention.

The fear feeling seems to pop up from the slippery, reptilian part of the brain and shout “WATCH OUT!” to the rest of the body. Then, if the fear isn’t imminent, the front, more advanced part of the brain seems to try to make sense of this feeling using some sort of story line with images, sounds, and a scary narrator. That’s when the feature film starts to roll in the brain—the one where we star as the victim of some campy, horrific tale.

To move beyond fear, sometimes you have to question it. Doing so can help you more calmly and rationally decide how to respond to the frightening stories your brain tells you.

When working with anxiety, worry, and obsessive compulsion (OCD) , the narrator seems to be especially creative and the fear feeling especially formidable. Exposure response prevention (ERP) therapy helps people with obsessive thought patterns, social anxiety, and other fear-driven issues by providing the tools to question the internal narrative. It does this—after a lot of education and therapeutic relationship building—by purposefully, systematically exposing a person to feared situations or thoughts (exposure) without use of their physical or mental rituals (response prevention). There is no actual danger present during this process, and repeating the exposures over time causes anxiety to drop (habituation).

Part of what ERP does is help turn down the volume of the narrator fueling the fear. It’s all easier said than done, but here are three supplemental concepts that may help.

1. Give Up the Quest for Certainty

To move beyond fear, sometimes you have to question it. Doing so can help you more calmly and rationally decide how to respond to the frightening stories your brain tells you.

If they’re honest, most people will admit to being a little controlling here and there—trying to make sure everything is just so, so NOTHING goes wrong. One of the overarching concepts we deal with in ERP is a quest for the absolute. We help people who want to know with 100% certainty the sun will come up tomorrow; that the red spot on the floor isn’t Ebola-contaminated blood; and if they step on a crack, no one they love will be hurt. As one person put it, “I’m 99% sure nothing bad will happen, but it’s the 1% that really gets you!”

It helps to remember you have a pretty good chance of handling whatever comes your way with your own innate qualities, and that you can enlist a therapist, friends, or family for help if needed.

2. Accept That It’s All a Giant Mess

The world really is an uncertain place. We can’t know the future, but we can try our best to prepare, accept that it’s the best we can do, and move on. We can accept that the human brain is programmed to look for, and pay attention to, problematic or scary situations.

We can practice noticing our attention to worrisome thoughts (the brain is just doing its job) but not fully engage in the story line. Instead, try to take a “Yes, dear,” half-listening approach and shift your attention to what you actually want to think about.

3. Avoid Avoidance

Fear grows and metastasizes when you avoid dealing with it. A gnawing feeling of fear can compel you to live small and avoid opportunities to experience new things or expand your social circle.

Trust what you know—what you have evidence for—over what you don’t know. Challenge your fears when possible and remember that although they’re there to serve you biologically, they rarely do in practice.

© Copyright 2015 GoodTherapy.org. All rights reserved.

The preceding article was solely written by the author named above. Any views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the preceding article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment below.

  • 2 comments
  • Leave a Comment
  • Alley

    December 8th, 2015 at 3:13 PM

    But I don’t like the uncertainty and that is the one thing that causes me the most fear over all. I detest that feeling of not being in control, that is too rocky of a slope for em to feel like I can navigate.

  • Leigh

    December 9th, 2015 at 10:06 AM

    There are times when I just know that I have to talk myself through it. Like I have to tell myself over and over again that there is little that I can do to stop, it so the better thing to do is come up with a plan for dealing with it instead of just trying to squash it down and forget about it. Because we all know that that is never going to be the best answer for me.

Leave a Comment

By commenting you acknowledge acceptance of GoodTherapy.org's Terms and Conditions of Use.

* Indicates required field.

GoodTherapy uses cookies to personalize content and ads to provide better services for our users and to analyze our traffic. By continuing to use this site you consent to our cookies.