The Importance of Facing your Fears

This past weekend, I was a participant of a panel geared towards Mental Health. And one of the questions that I provided insight specifically was anxiety. And honestly speaking, it wasn’t until recently that I became familiar of anxiety and how I felt when feeling extremely anxious. When it comes down to it, anxious people fear the feeling of fear. This leads to avoidance, which then leads to more avoidance, which then leads to living a life where you allow fear to take over. Avoidance is a bad strategy for your brain’s fear center. When you feel fear and run away or avoid, you miss the chance to “habituate” your fear center to the thing you’re afraid of.  

Believe it or not, facing your fears calms down the brain tremendously. I honestly don’t care for public speaking or completing presentations, but after getting through my first speaking engagement I found it to not be nearly as bad as I made it out to be. My fear center learned with experience that this wasn’t actually a threat and I learned that I could handle the fear of me speaking.

The more you face a certain fear, the more your brain will consider that situation to not be a threat and we ultimately learn how to handle that situation. It changes your brain’s physiology to face your fears, especially in doses you can handle without getting completely overwhelmed. If I had turned down being apart of the panel, I would have taught my brain that fear and avoidance is the right reaction to this “threat”, and it would have been worse the next time around. Which then would have led me to lose out on different opportunities in the near future!