Phobia Specialists share their top 3 tips to overcome your fear

Phobias come in many forms: Some people are afraid of spiders while others are afraid of flying in airplanes.

But the one thing they have in common is that they are irrational, according to one phobia specialist.

“A phobia is an irrational response to a mild substance,” Christopher Paul Jones, a London-based phobia specialist with a clinic on London’s Harley Street, told CNBC Make It in an interview.

“As humans, we are primitively hardwired when we encounter danger, our amygdala fires, then we do one of several things. The most common fight, flight, or freeze. So, either we get angry and punch the thing, or we. run away from the thing , or we hide from that stuff,” he said. The amygdala is the part of the brain that processes emotions like fear or motivation.

This trigger comes in handy when we’re fighting saber-toothed tigers or when we’re in danger, Jones said. However, a phobia is when you react to something that is not dangerous.

The Jones Clinic has treated a variety of phobias from fear of water, heights, germs, needles, and even the fear of failure.

He explained that phobias develop through conditioned responses like Pavlov’s dog experiments. The famous experiment was conducted by the Russian neurologist Ivan Pavlov who would ring a bell every time he fed his dog. The dogs eventually started salivating when they heard the bell ring because they associated it with food.

“Humans do the same thing,” Jones said. “Most commonly with phobias, at some point in the past, your brain has associated the danger with something that has happened…

Jones’ recently published book “Face Your Fears” guides readers through exercises to help them overcome their fears. He shared his top three tips for overcoming fear with CNBC Make It.

A very simple technique to challenge your phobia is to think about the object of your fear differently, says Jones.

He called it the “Harry Potter” effect referring to a scene in the movie “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” where students face their fears and use magic to turn them into comedy.

“So, when you think about spiders, often people make them very big and close them. If you imagine them small, black and white … or imagine them on roller skates, smoking a little cigar, dancing with small hands. .. you will feel very different,” Jones said.

He recommends using the same technique in your inner dialogue.

“If you’re going ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be scared’ or ‘This is going to make me jump’ or ‘What if I embarrass myself?’ If you imagine an inner dialogue like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, with a squeaky voice it takes away all its power,” he said.

In time, it will change the way you perceive your fear because it will seem “more silly and less realistic,” says Jones.

One of the easiest ways to comfort yourself when dealing with the source of your phobia is to hug yourself, says Jones.

“If you basically cross your arms and go up and down your shoulders, like you’re hugging yourself, it releases the same chemicals as when you hug someone or when someone hugs you,” he explained.

“It releases oxytocin and all sorts of other chemicals and what happens is, if you do something fun or exciting while trying to visualize what you’re afraid of, the brain struggles to hold two emotions at once, and the fear emotion subsides.”

Jones refers back to Pavlov’s dog experiments and says that if the brain can be conditioned for fear, it can be reconditioned to cancel that fear.

“If you go to a moment when you feel very happy, calm or can’t stop laughing and you just visualize what is in your mind, and when you visualize that moment, you do something unique at the peak of your emotions like squeezing your fist, thinking. about happy times, clench your fists, think about happy times, clench your fists, you’re conditioning an artificial Pavlovian response,” Jones explained.

He said that if you then squeeze your wrist when facing a certain fear, it will bring you back to happy memories and take out the emotional intensity of fear.

“These are some very quick things you can do to disrupt those old patterns,” he said.

“If you think about Reddit or YouTube, where people take something like a horror movie and cut it into a funny movie because they change the music and the pacing, we can do it with our internal images, internal dialogue, and our internal feelings,” he added.