Why It's Essential To Face Your Social Fears

This is one of the more key articles on this site. It talks about the importance of getting used to the social situations that make you uncomfortable. It also applies just as well to facing other types of worries. Another article goes with this one and details how to actually face your fears, and in a gradual, manageable way.

Why facing your fears is so crucial

Psychological research has consistently shown that facing your fears is the most effective way to get over them. The reason it works so well is that real world experiences speak so much more loudly than things you tell yourself or hear from other people. If someone is afraid of (mostly harmless) spiders they can spend ten hours trying to logically convince themselves that there's nothing to worry about. It won't resonate on an emotional level though. Somehow a link has been made in their mind between spiders and danger and anxiety. A single hour of being close to a spider with nothing bad happening will probably do more to eliminate that fear than the previous ten of rational arguments.

Successfully exposing yourself to your fears basically rewrites the associations your mind has made. Previously the link was Feared Situation = Danger. That kind of link also gets reinforced every time someone unsuccessfully comes into contact with their fear. If someone saw a spider, got anxious, and fled right away, that just strengthened the message of Around Fear = Feel Bad, Away From Fear = Feel Relieved. A similar thing would happen if they were around a spider for a longer period of time, but they were still on edge the whole while, and felt better as soon as it was over.

Facing your fear successfully involves putting yourself in an anxiety-inducing situation and staying in it long enough that the nerves wear off and you start to experience that everything is okay. This may mean sticking around one situation long enough for that calmness to settle in, or if the fear is of something that can be done quickly, doing it over and over again in one setting until you feel you can handle it.

Obviously this involves staying beyond your initial, reflexive urge to get to out of there. You have to stick around long enough to really see that nothing bad will occur. When you do this enough times it rewrites the association in your brain. The evidence starts to accumulate that Feared Situation = Nothing Will Happen, and that replaces the old script.

None of this is to say that every arachnophobe will get to a point where they absolutely love having tarantulas crawl up and down their arms. They may never feel completely comfortable around spiders, or be totally crazy about them. However, they can get to a point where they can feel fairly relaxed in their presence, and not feel they have to completely go out of their way to avoid them.

Why trying to think your way out of your fears often isn't enough

People often try to logically reason their way past their fears. Because actually facing a fear is nerve racking, many people can get trapped by looking for a non-existent magic thought or insight that will melt their anxiety away instantly.

Learning to recognize and challenge or accept the unrealistic, distorted thoughts behind your fears is an important part of getting over them. These 'think more realistically' approaches help to a degree, but only facing your fears really seems to finish the job once and for all. Real world evidence carries so much more weight. Your mind just won't fully trust being told something is harmless. Like I said, it needs to experience it.

The other thing is that when someone has a core fear, it may not be possible to think it away. What will happen is the fear will keep 'generating' new anxious thoughts. The person with the fear can challenge and discredit all these thoughts, but new ones will keep appearing, or the same-old ones will go away for a while before coming back as good as new. Addressing the thoughts is not dealing with the real problem, just the symptoms. The core fear needs to be extinguished through real world feedback.

Also, people can get things backwards. They think if they can just get their head straightened out and clear away all their worries then their fear will disappear. As I've said above, it won't work out like that. However, when people face their fears in real life, what happens is that a lot of their nervous thoughts and beliefs will go away on their own. They've been exposed to reality and don't stand up any more. Facing your fears instills a new world view ("X isn't scary") that the old thoughts aren't compatible with any longer. There's no longer anything to 'generate' them.

The ideal, long-term way to use the approach of 'thinking your way into feeling less scared' is to direct it towards helping you accomplish the goal of actually facing your fear. Someone may be just a little too scared to confront something that scares them in real life. If they work on their thinking that may give them the extra push they need to start doing some real world exposure, where the true benefits accrue.

Facing your fears does take work

While this approach is the most effective, it isn't easy. Facing your fears, with all the anxiety that entails, isn't comfortable. Facing the fear gradually with the aid of coping skills will make the process as pleasant as it can be, but it still won't feel great at times. It's not an overnight process either. In general it's a matter-of-fact, unglamorous way to go. Even though it works, this approach is not the kind of thing that people read about and then get super inspired and pumped up by.

What this means is that someone usually has to be at a place in their lives where they're really motivated to change. It's not unusual for someone to have a fear for years, but do nothing more than avoid the situations that scare them. Even if they hate how much their fear constricts their life and causes them to miss out on things they care about, they still feel like they prefer that to the work and discomfort of getting over it.

Still, out of all the approaches to facing fears , doing it gradually is the best one. It involves starting where things are nice and easy and building on early successes. Someone may not be able to face their biggest fear right away, but they might be able to do it fairly easily after a couple of months of working up to it.