How to overcome fear: 4 psychological tips

Knowing how to overcome fear can be what makes the difference between leading a life limited to the comfort zone or launching towards the objectives that can really make us win in happiness. No change for the better comes without effort, and part of it must be aimed at overcoming those thresholds of uncertainty and doubt that are so imposed.

In this article we will review some simple guidelines that will help us overcome fear and that, although they will not eliminate it completely, they will cushion its effects.

• Related article: "What is fear for?"

How to overcome fear on a daily basis

Fear is one of the basic emotions of the human being, and its importance is due to the fact that, in many situations, it is useful to us. As unpleasant as it may be when experienced in the first person, this psychological phenomenon is what leads us to avoid many situations that carry a real risk, either because they carry a high possibility of producing physical damage, or because they can harm us in any other way.

Of course, fear does not have to be a mechanism that allows us to perfectly guess what are the situations that will really harm us, but this is inevitable. That's not the problem. The bad comes when we unconsciously use fear as an excuse not to get out of the comfort zone, or when, due to certain learned dynamics, we internalize the idea that we must fear certain things that do not carry such a high risk.

What to do in these situations? These tips will help you.

1. Learn the logic of emotional memory

Much of the fear we feel is explained through emotional memory. This is an information storage system that has to do exclusively with emotions, and not with concepts that can be easily explained in words. Emotions are known to be processed differently than, for example, our memories of what we had for dinner yesterday, and This means that sometimes they are associated with new experiences even though we have “memorized” them in totally contexts. different.

Therefore, be clear that you are not to blame for feeling fear. This is part of brain mechanics that is unconscious and that we cannot directly control. Our efforts should be directed to creating the possibilities that fear will stop being associated with certain situations that are not really dangerous, or are not dangerous to the extent that we perceive.

• You may be interested: "Emotional memory: what is it and what is its biological basis?"

2. Get closer little by little to what you fear

This is the logic that is followed in the psychological treatments applied to phobias, but it also works for non-pathological fears. To know how to control fear, you must be clear that you will have to suffer a little, but only just enough.

That means that you will have to make progressive approaches to those situations that you fear, to gradually move towards more difficult situations for you. At first, get a little closer to those environments or those actions, then go a little further, then even further... The difficulty curve always has to be ascending, but you will have more and more preparation.

It is good that in advance you establish a gradation, ordering those situations that cause less fear those that generate the most fear, and that you establish deadlines in which you must achieve each of these objectives.

3. Let yourself help

As we've seen, fear is not something to be ashamed of, so there is no reason why you should avoid getting help. Given the irrational nature of these fears, it is never wrong to have the security that the presence of others can give you, and their assistance or intervention in specific cases.

Think that although this emotion is powerful, you have the power to modify your environment to achieve your goals, even in the moments when you think you lose control. Establishing the necessary alliances for others to help makes us help each other indirectly, creating tools to solve problems when our ability to think clearly we fail.

This is one of those tricks to overcome the fear that many ovbian, because they believe that the psychological is treated through individual work or through introspection: nothing is further from reality.

4. Learn to recognize if you need therapy

The line that separates pathological fear from that which is not pathological is not always clear, but you must have Of course, if the fear you feel is very extreme, you may need professional help to progress. Fortunately, these types of psychological problems are relatively easy to treat if you go through psychotherapy, and the results can be seen in a matter of a few weeks.

Of course: fear will never go away completely, but it will no longer paralyze us or prevent us from approaching our objectives. Although this is, in part, even positive. Doing something that feels partly like a challenge makes us feel better going through it having overcome it.

• You may be interested: "Intervention in phobias: the exposure technique"

Bibliographic references:

• American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV. Washington, DC.
• Bracha, H. (2006). "Human brain evolution and the" Neuroevolutionary Time-depth Principle: "Implications for the Reclassification of fear-circuitry-related traits in DSM-V and for studying resilience to warzone-related posttraumatic stress disorder " (PDF). Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry.
• Olsson, A.; Nearing, K.I.; Phelps, E.A. (2006). "Learning fears by observing others: The neural systems of social fear transmission". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.