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“A phobia is an irrational response to a benign substance,” Christopher Paul Jones, a London-based phobia specialist with a clinic on Harley Street in that city, told CNBC Make It in an interview.
“As human beings, we are primitively programmed so that when we experience danger, our amygdala activates and we do one of several things. The most common is fight, flee or freeze. So, we either get angry and hit the object, or we run away. run from it, or we hide from it,” he said. The amygdala is a part of the brain that processes emotions such as fear or motivation.
This trigger is useful when we’re fighting saber-toothed tigers or if we’re in real danger, Jones said. But a phobia is when that response is directed at something that isn’t dangerous.
Jones’ clinic has treated a variety of phobias, from fear of water, heights, germs, needles and even fear of failure.
He explained that phobias develop through a conditioned response, like that of Pavlov’s dogs experiment, carried out by Russian neurologist Ivan Pavlov, who rang a bell every time he fed his dogs. The dogs ended up salivating when they heard the bell because they associated it with food.
“Humans do the same thing,” Jones explained. “More commonly with a phobia, at some point in your past, your brain has linked the danger to something that has happened…then, every time you think about it again in the future, it triggers that old response.”
Jones’ recently released book, “Face Your Fears,” guides readers through exercises to help them overcome their fears. She shared her top three tips for overcoming any fear with CNBC Make It.
A very simple technique to challenge your phobia is to think about the object of your fear differently, Jones said.
He calls it the “Harry Potter” effect, referencing a scene in the film “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” where students face their fear and use magic to transform it into something comical.
“So when you think about that spider, people often make it really big and up close. If you imagine it small, in black and white… or you imagine it on roller skates, smoking a cigar, dancing with one little hand… you’re going to feel very different,” Jones said.
He suggested using the same technique in your internal dialogue.
“If you say ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be scared’ or ‘This is going to make me jump’ or ‘What if I get embarrassed?’ “If you imagine that internal dialogue as if it were Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, with a squeaky voice, you will take all the power away from it,” he said.
At that point, this will change the way you perceive the fear because it will seem “sillier and less realistic,” Jones said.
One of the easiest ways to comfort yourself when you encounter the source of your phobia is to hug yourself, Jones said.
“If you basically cross your arms and move them up and down your shoulders, like you’re hugging yourself, it releases the same chemicals as if you were hugging someone else or if someone else was hugging you,” she explained.
“This releases oxytocin and several other chemicals and what happens is, if you’re doing something relaxing or calming while trying to imagine what’s scaring you, the brain struggles to contain two emotions at once, and so the emotion of fear will be reduced.”
Jones referred to Pavlov’s dog experiment and said that just as the brain can be conditioned to fear something, it can also be reconditioned to undo that fear.
““If you come to moments where you felt really happy, calm or couldn’t stop laughing and you just visualize them in your mind, and as you visualize those moments, you do something unique at the height of the emotion, like clenching your fist , thinking about happy moments, clenching your fist, thinking about happy moments, clenching your fist, you create artificial Pavlovian response conditioning,” Jones explained.
He said that if you squeeze your wrist when you are faced with a particular fear, it will take you back to those happy memories and remove the emotional intensity of the fear.
“Those are some very quick things you can do to disrupt that old pattern,” he added.
“If you think about Reddit or YouTube, where people take a horror movie and turn it into a funny movie because they change the music and the beat, we can do that with our internal images, our internal dialogue, and our internal feelings,” he added.
