I remember a friend of mine years ago that had an extreme fear of spiders. He had what he called a “built-in radar” that detected them. I recall one time when he spotted a black widow spider from 20 yards away. He bolted out that area nearly running me over. He was big guy too! About 6-5, 260 pounds. It was a good thing I had fast reflexes to side step him.
What is a fear?
In his case he had an irrational fear, otherwise known as a phobia. Phobias are an anxiety disorder where the person who has the fear will play it over and over again. It is the “making a mountain out of a molehill” analogy at play. Those that suffer from a phobia or even a genuine fear, tend to replay the fear like a Hollywood movie that can’t be turned off.
When our senses spot that thing that we fear, it begins a chain reaction that eventually leads to the fight or flight response. In periods of real danger, fear proved useful for survival. That ancient part of us is activated, even when the danger is not there. It’s only our perception that it’s dangerous. Public speaking is one of the top fears and yet, the speaker is not going to lose their life over it. They only think they are.
How to quickly stop any fear or phobia
In psychology, the use of cognitive behavioral therapy or rational emotive behavioral therapy have proven to work quickly.
In hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming (NLP), fears and phobias can be removed quickly by removing the mental stimulus that triggers the response. Since the fear or phobia exists in the subconscious mind, accessing it and changing the response by changing the perception of the fear will enable it to no longer exist as such.
In neuroscience, the limbic system as well as the sensory cortex amounts to the subconscious mind in a physical term. The stimulus starts with the sensory input in the thalamus and ends with the fight or flight in the hypothalamus. The full range of the limbic system involved are the thalamus, the sensory cortex, the hippocampus, the amygdala and the hypothalamus.
Remember when I mentioned the movie analogy earlier? Well, using that you can quickly get rid of your fear or phobia. Here’s the NLP Fast Phobia/Fear Removal as described by the National Federation of Neurolinguistic Programming (NFNLP):
Eliminating Fears and Phobias
The Fast Phobia/Trauma Relief TechniqueThis technique neutralizes the powerful, negative feelings of phobias and traumatic events.
Remember: most people learned to be phobic in a single situation that was actually dangerous, or seemed dangerous. The fact that individuals can do what psychologists call “one-trial learning” is proof that a person’s brain can learn quite rapidly. That ability to learn rapidly makes it easy for you to learn a new way to respond to any phobia or trauma.
The part of you that has been protecting you all these years by making you phobic is an important and valuable part. We want to preserve its ability to protect you in dangerous situations. The purpose of this technique is to refine and improve your brain’s ability to protect you by updating its information.
1. With your eyes open or closed, imagine you’re sitting in the middle of a movie theater and you see a black and white snapshot of yourself on the screen.
2. Now, float out of your body and up into the projection booth. See yourself sitting in the movie theater seat, and also the black and white photo on the screen. You may even wish to imagine Plexiglas over the booth’s opening, protecting you.
3. Now, watch and listen, protected in the projection booth, as you see a black and white movie of a younger you going through one of those situations in which he/she experienced that phobia/trauma. Watch the whole event, starting before the beginning of that incident. Observe until you are beyond the end of it, when everything was OK again.
If you are not fully detached, make the theater screen smaller and farther away, make the picture grainier and stop and start the film so that when you’re done viewing it, you’re completely detached. End the movie after the phobia-causing event, with a freeze frame of yourself.
4. Next, leave the projection booth and slip back into the present you in the theater seat. Next step into the freeze photo of the younger you, who is feeling OK again, at the movie’s end. This is double dissociation. Now, run the entire movie of that experience backwards in color, taking two seconds or less to do so. Be sure to go all the way back to before the beginning. See, hear, and feel everything going backwards in those two seconds or less.
5. To test the process, attempt to return to the phobic state in any way you can. What if you were in that situation now? When will you next encounter one of these situations? If you still get a phobic response, repeat the steps 1 to 4 exactly, but faster each time, until none of the phobic response remains.
6. Since you were phobic/traumatized, you have stayed far away from those particular situations in which you used to feel phobic, so you haven’t had the opportunity to learn about them. As you begin to encounter and explore these situations in the future, we urge you to exercise a certain degree of caution until you learn to be more comfortable with them.
You may want to get a qualified practitioner to help you. It works much better that way. I would certainly look for a highly qualified hypnotist or therapist to do that. Many have there own version of getting rid of fears instantly. My friend, Tom Silver, is an expert in fear removal through his unique scientific hypnosis method.
If you need any help, contact me and I will certainly see what I can do or refer you out.
Cheers,
Bob
America’s #1 Mind-Body Transformation Expert, author of Mind Your Own Fitness, a certified NLP Trainer and Hypnotherapist
