How to Overcome Fear: 10 Tips to Conquer Fear

What Is Fear?

Fear is an emotional response to danger and occurs on a spectrum, from slightly nervous to full-blown panic attacks. Fear begins in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is responsible for detecting danger. When the amygdala senses danger, it sets off the fight or flight response, which changes how our bodies feel, our minds work, and how we behave.^{1, 2}

Most scientists believe that fight or flight is a built-in survival instinct meant to help us protect ourselves from danger. According to this evolutionary theory, the rush of energy and heightening of our senses that happens during fight or flight can provide power or stamina to outrun or overpower a predator. The problem is that most of the ‘threats’ in modern times are not external predators that people can run from or fight off. Because of this, fight or flight responses are less helpful and can even develop into symptoms of anxiety.^{2, 3, 4}

Fear Vs. Anxiety

While the symptoms of anxiety and fear are identical, they are triggered by different kinds of situations and contexts. Most of the time, fear is triggered by a real and immediate danger in your environment, like a loud noise or sudden movement. Anxiety, on the other hand, is most often triggered by worried thoughts in your mind about things that might happen in the future.^{2, 4}

In this way, anxiety is a fear response triggered by things happening in the mind, while fear is triggered by things actually happening in real life. Many of the triggers for fear are things you can clearly identify in your environment with one of your 5 senses, while the triggers for anxiety tend to require the mind to visualize or imagine.²

Symptoms of Fears

The symptoms of fear can be mild, moderate, or severe.^{2, 4} When mild, fear can show up as feeling nervous, jittery, restless, or easily startled. As fear becomes more severe, it usually causes increases in heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. These changes are what cause the symptoms of a panic or anxiety attack, including dizziness, nausea, heart palpitations, or chest pain.^{1, 2, 5}

Common symptoms of fear include:^{1, 5}

• Worry, dread, and catastrophizing
• Confusion, racing thoughts, and disorientation
• Restlessness, jitters, or nervous energy
• Difficulty relaxing and falling asleep
• Stomach pain, nausea, or GI problems
• Tenseness in muscles or tight feeling in the chest
• Pounding or racing heart
• Difficulty focusing or concentrating on tasks
• Feeling stressed or overwhelmed
• Trembling, shaking, or hot and cold flashes
• Ringing in the ears and trouble hearing
• Dissociation and feeling detached from reality
• Feeling paralyzed, stuck, numb, or unable to speak or move
• Feeling unable to breathe or hyperventilating
• Hypervigilance & becoming more sensitive to sensations
• Feeling a strong urge to run away or escape a situation

Common Types of Fears

Fear is a common emotion that everyone will experience, but the types of fears people experience differ. Some fears are almost universal, but your personality, psychological make-up, and past experiences influence what kinds of situations trigger your fear response. For example, certain traumatic experiences can cause you to develop new fears and phobias or can strengthen the intensity of fear you feel in certain situations.^{2, 3, 4}

Here are some of the common fears that people have:⁴

• A fear of failure: The fear of failing is something most people struggle with at some point in their lives. It can show up as perfectionism, performance anxiety, or even a pattern of playing it safe and avoiding the spotlight.
• A fear of rejection: The fear of rejection is a social fear that is especially common in people who struggle with social anxiety. This fear can keep people from developing close relationships, being authentic, or opening up to other people who might criticize, judge, or reject them.
• A fear of abandonment: The fear of being abandoned is also common, especially in people who experienced abandonment or neglect in childhood. Abandonment issues and fears can show up as a fear of being alone, separation anxiety, or a pattern of clinginess or codependence in close relationships.
• A fear of dying or becoming ill: The fear of death or debilitating illness is one of the most universal fears, and some psychologists believe this fear is at the root of all others. The fear of dying can manifest in a variety of ways, including phobias related to flying, heights, spiders, and illness anxiety or health obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This fear can also extend to a fear of a loved one dying or becoming ill.
• A fear of being trapped or stuck: The fear of being trapped or stuck is another core fear that relates to the need for freedom, choice, and independence. This fear can manifest as a fear of commitment, a fear of confinement, or even a fear of small spaces.
• A fear of losing control: The fear of losing control is also a common core fear and corresponds to the natural urge to avoid feeling powerless or helpless. This fear can show up as a fear of going crazy, having a nervous breakdown, saying or doing something destructive, or not being able to control our emotions or impulses.
• A fear of meaninglessness: The fear of meaninglessness is a form of existential anxiety that centers around a loss of life purpose, direction, or meaning. This fear is common during a ‘midlife crisis’ or during major disruptive events that cause people to reflect on their mortality.

Positive & Negative Effects of Fear

While fear is uncomfortable, a person’s response to fear determines whether it becomes problematic or not. The feeling of fear and the changes it triggers in the body and brain are temporary and don’t do any lasting damage. In fact, fear can even be positive, especially when it helps people identify and respond quickly to an immediate danger.^{1, 2, 4}

Fear is more likely to become problematic for people who go to great lengths to avoid everything that scares them. When this happens, fear can start to restrict a person’s life and choices in ways that limit opportunities to learn, grow, connect with others, and experience new things.^{3, 5, 6, 7}

Part of the problem might be that fear puts people into a kind of survival mode where all of their time, energy, and attention is dedicated to reducing risk and staying safe. Survival mode is a restrictive state that makes it hard to focus on long-term goals, core values, and other activities that enhance our connection to meaning, purpose, and wellbeing.^{2, 4, 7}

Benefits of Overcoming Fears

The more control fear has exerted over your life, the more beneficial conquering fears will be. The benefits of overcoming fear include more confidence, fewer restrictions, and a greater ability to cope in stressful or scary situations. If you have an anxiety disorder, overcoming fear will reduce your symptoms of anxiety and improve the quality of your life.^{3, 7, 8}

10 Tips for How to Overcome Fear

The most effective way to conquer your fears is to face them, and most psychologists recommend doing so in a gradual manner with the help of a licensed therapist. In addition to seeking help from a therapist trained in exposure therapy, there are also some things you can do on your own to work on overcoming a fear.

Here are ten tips to help you get over fears:

1. Identify & Understand Your Fear

“Sometimes what we fear the most is what we most need to do” – Tim Ferriss

The first step to overcoming a fear is to identify what you’re afraid of and understand why. This step is essential because you can’t face fear unless you know what it is. Understanding why it scares you can also help you develop self-awareness about when, how, and why that fear shows up. For example, identifying that your social anxiety is really about a fear of rejection can help you know where, when, and why your social anxiety shows up in certain social interactions but not in others.

2. Face Your Fears Gradually

“We must travel in the direction of our fear” – John Berryman

While there are some different approaches to getting over fear, almost all approaches use the principles of exposure therapy. Exposure therapy for anxiety helps people face their fears, usually in a slow and gradual manner. When this happens with a therapist, most experts recommend doing some preliminary sessions that focus on building more effective coping and relaxation skills first. This usually helps people feel more comfortable and prepared to begin facing and conquering their fears.

Once you have identified your fear and worked to understand it, you’ll be more prepared to make a plan to gradually face and overcome it. Most experts recommend starting with facing smaller, easier fears and gradually working up to bigger and harder ones. It can help to make a list of your fears and rate them on a scale from 1-10 based on how anxious each one makes you. This way, you can begin by exposing yourself to fears you rated the lowest and then gradually move up to the ones you rated higher.^{5, 6, 7}

3. Use Mindfulness to Stay Grounded

“Wherever you are, be totally there” – Eckhart Tolle

When you feel afraid, one of the best and simplest methods to calm down is to use grounding techniques. Grounding is a mindfulness skill for anxiety that involves using one of your senses to keep you connected to the here and now. For example, the 54321 method uses the 5 senses to ground by tuning into things you can hear, feel, smell, taste, or see.

Grounding is a simple but powerful practice that can get you out of your head, where anxious and worried thoughts tend to feed into your fears.⁸ Research also shows that mindfulness practices can help to reduce stress and anxiety, providing additional help to you as you work on getting over your fears.⁹

4. Don’t Feed Fears With Worried Thoughts

“Feed the things you want to grow and starve the things that gotta go” – Greg Carlwood

Your fear feeds off of worries and negative thoughts about things that might go wrong in the future, which is why it’s important not to feed into them. Paying too much attention to these kinds of negative thoughts can make your fear grow bigger and stronger. Reclaim this power by refocusing your attention on something else – like your surroundings, a person, an activity, or a task. Giving your full attention to something else you choose to focus on starves out the thoughts that feed into your fear and anxiety.⁶

5. Be Active to Get Rid of Nervous Energy

“Anxiety and fear produce energy. Where we focus that energy noticeably affects the quality of our lives” – Walter Inglis Anderson

Anxiety can cause surges of nervous energy in the body. Exercise can provide a great outlet to channel some of that pent-up energy in a constructive way. Exercise can help with anxiety by reducing cortisol and stress. If you’re working on overcoming fear or anxiety, consider adding 30 minutes of exercise to your daily routine or as often as you can.^{1, 9}

Since there are also many benefits to being outdoors and in nature, exercising outside is a great way to ‘double dip’ on positive health effects. Even spending a few minutes outside each day can help you experience some of the therapeutic benefits of nature, including improving sleep, mood, energy, and stress levels.⁹
Combining outdoor time and exercise can make the benefits of your anxiety even more noticeable.

6. Spend More Time With Loved Ones

“Human beings are social creatures, and we’re happier and better when connected to others” – Paul Bloom

Research shows that social interaction has incredibly important effects on physical and mental health. Seeing friends, family, and loved ones can lower your stress levels and boost your mood, which can both have positive ripple effects on your anxiety.⁹

Also, it’s often easier (and more fun!) to face fears with a significant other, friend, or loved one than it is to do so alone, so consider including someone else in your plan to conquer your fears. Including a friend can also provide you with an accountability buddy, making you more likely to follow through and less likely to back out when the time comes to face a fear.

7. Use Radical Acceptance to Battle Fears

“What you resist, persists” – C. G. Jung

According to the wisdom of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for anxiety, resisting our fearful thoughts and feelings causes bigger problems for us than just accepting them. Instead, use radical acceptance by allowing yourself to imagine that the fear is happening right now and allowing yourself to experience all of the feelings associated with it. While this might feel counterintuitive, allowing yourself to imagine a feared situation is a type of imaginal exposure that can help you become desensitized to a specific fear or worry.^{7, 8}

8. Ride the Wave of Anxiety in Your Body

“You can’t control the waves, but you can learn to surf” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

A lot of people get stuck in anxiety and fear for long periods of time because they make the mistake of trying to think their way out of fear rather than just letting themselves feel it. Riding the Wave is a DBT distress tolerance skill that helps you to feel anxiety in your body since your mind often gets you more stuck in thoughts that feed your fears.

The steps for processing feelings of anxiety or fear in your body are:

• Tune into the part of your body where your fear is (usually in your stomach or chest area) and notice the feelings and sensations there
• Imagine that your anxiety is like a wave rising up inside of you, and visualize the color, size, and shape of the wave in your mind
• Close your eyes and track the movement of the wave as it rises, crests, and subsidies, and notice the stillness and calm you feel afterward

9. Keep Expanding Your Comfort Zone

“Nothing in nature stands still – everything strives and moves forward” – John Gottfried Herder

Fear has a way of limiting and restricting your actions and choices in ways that make your world smaller. That’s why getting out, trying new things, and leaving your comfort zone are some of the best ways to overcome your fears. To implement this, switch up your routines and make a habit of trying new things, going to new places, and talking to new people on a regular basis.⁷ This will keep your comfort zone growing while also helping you develop more confidence in yourself.

10. Act on Your Values Instead of Your Fears

“You scare where you care” – Hailey Shafir

Most of the time, a person’s deepest fears are intrinsically linked to their deepest desires, values, and needs. For example, many children have separation anxiety, which is usually related to their need for secure attachments, love, and protection.³

Even though your deepest fears and values are intrinsically related, there’s a big difference between acting on a fear versus acting on a value. Acting on a fear usually means moving away from something you don’t want (i.e., rejection or failure) while acting on a value means moving towards something you do want (i.e., acceptance or achievement).

Here are some steps to identify and act on your core values instead of acting on your core fears:⁷

• I’m only scared of ____(core fear)_______ because I value ____(core value)______

I.e., I’m only scared of being rejected because I value acceptance so much

• This is what it looks like when I let  my  __core fear__ drive my behavior: __________

I.e., When I let my fear of rejection drive my behavior, I withdraw and isolate myself,  use a persona to impress people and overshare with people I just met

• This is what it looks like when I let my __core value__ drive my behavior: __________

I.e., When I let my value of acceptance drive my behavior, I make an effort to meet new people, be friendly, and maintain positive relationships with my friends and coworkers

How To Measure Progress in Overcoming Fears

There isn’t a set amount of time that it takes to overcome a fear, and everyone’s experience may be a little different. Still, there’s lots of research to support that exposure therapy (or facing your fears) works quickly, and many people see progress in just a few sessions.

Because each session involves facing something that scares you, your anxiety levels will probably get worse before they get better. For this reason, the frequency, intensity, and duration of your anxiety isn’t a good way to track your progress, at least not early on.

Here are some ways to measure your progress in overcoming fears:^{7, 8}

• How consistent you are with reducing your avoidance of fears
• How often you challenge yourself to face a fear
• How much you’re able to venture outside of your comfort zone
• How often you try something new or go somewhere different
• How many times you tested out new coping skills (besides avoidance)
• Your consistency with attending therapy sessions to help overcome fears
• How often you apply the skills you learned in therapy outside of sessions

When to Seek Professional Help for Fears

When fear begins to interfere with your ability to function and complete your normal daily routine, it’s important to seek professional help. Without treatment, fears can escalate into anxiety disorders that cause a lot of distress.³ With treatment, it’s often possible to interrupt the cycle of anxiety and equip yourself with the skills and confidence to control your fears rather than feeling controlled by them.^{5, 6, 10}

You have the best chance of getting better in treatment if you find a therapist who has experience with your struggles. Using an online therapist directory service can help you narrow down therapists who specialize in anxiety or use a specific kind of therapy you are interested in. Many therapists offer free consultation calls, which allows you to learn more about them and their approach. If you have a fear or phobia that involves leaving the house, you can use an online therapy platform, which allows you to complete treatment from the comfort of your own home.

Professional Treatment for Conquering Fear

Because avoidance makes fears bigger and stronger, facing your fear through a process like exposure therapy is the fastest and most effective way to overcome fears. There are different kinds of exposure therapy for anxiety that people can choose from, including ones that use imaginal exposures or in vivo exposures. In vivo exposures involve facing a feared object or situation in real life, while imagine exposures involve facing a fear by imagining a situation or using virtual reality to simulate the feared situation.⁶

While exposure therapy is the gold standard in treating fears and overcoming phobias, it tends to work best for people who rely on avoidance to cope. For people who don’t avoid the situations that scare them, other types of therapy may be more effective.

Other effective treatments for anxiety include:^{1, 5, 6, 10}

• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): CBT is a structured treatment that teaches people about the relationship between their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In CBT for anxiety, people will learn how to interrupt the worried thoughts that feed their anxiety and will also learn more effective coping skills to manage symptoms of anxiety and fear.
• Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT): In ACT for anxiety, therapists teach clients how to use mindfulness and emotional acceptance to respond differently to their thoughts and feelings. Instead of struggling with and resisting them, clients learn to observe them, accept them, and experience them without letting them control their actions and choices. Instead of acting on emotions and impulses, clients are encouraged to base their actions on their core values.
• Applied relaxation training: Applied relaxation teaches people how to use mindfulness, breathing, and progressive muscle relaxation to cope more effectively with their anxious thoughts and feelings. This kind of therapy helps people learn to identify early signs of anxiety and de-escalate them with relaxation skills.
• Anti-anxiety medications: Anti-anxiety medications like SSRIs or benzodiazepines are sometimes helpful in the treatment of anxiety disorders, especially when combined with therapy. These medications can help people manage their symptoms of anxiety, as well as treat symptoms of other co-occurring disorders like depression.