Anxiety/fears can be a f*cker. It’s like you want to do so much but you don’t because of the many fears and beliefs you’ve conditioned yourself to have over your lifetime. You make up excuses to justify your decisions to not face your fears. You put on a mask for everyone that everything is okay. But deep down you know there is more that you want but you feel helpless no matter how hard you actually try.
The only way to overcome this is to keep taking steps into facing your fears. It’s harder than it sounds and much harder than you would even imagine and will take even longer than simply liking this post or any other post online. But overtime I promise stepping into your fears will bring more contentment than simply pretending everything is okay.
Gradual/graded exposure is the process of slowly and systematically exposing someone to something they fear.
The process of facing fears is called EXPOSURE. Exposure involves gradually and repeatedly going into feared situations until you feel less anxious. Exposure is not dangerous and will not make the fear worse. And after a while, your anxiety will naturally lessen.
Starting with situations that are less scary, you work your way up to facing things that cause you a great deal of anxiety. Over time, you build up confidence in those situations and may even come to enjoy them. This process often happens naturally.
An example of gradual exposure would be if you were scared of spiders and wanted to overcome this fear. Instead of immediately holding a spider, you could start by looking at pictures of spiders. You can then gradually move on to looking at a spider in a container and working your way up to holding a spider.
Steps to Graded exposure:
1. Identify what movements, activities or situations causes you pain.
2. Develop a hierarchy to rank all the activities from least fear-inducing to most scary. For example if you’re scared your knee will be painful from squatting, you could start by gentling bending your knee.
3. Then take steps to start carrying out the exposures.
Through gradual exposure you will gradually teach your mind that you don’t need to fear the activities/people/objects you are avoiding.
As you do the activity and realise it doesn’t cause as much harm as you think, it forces positive reinforcement and allows you to be comfortable with your fears.
Eventually you will be able to face the things that you avoided before and have a better understanding on how to manage your thoughts/emotions when you feel fearful.
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