How to use exposure therapy to overcome phobias

Beeeeeeeeees! Oh my gosh. .

. . We all have fears.

But when does a fear become a phobia? It happens when your fear begins to get in the way of your life. For example… A few years ago I was installing an AC in my living room.

I opened the window and saw a massive swarm of bees. I panicked, ran into my bedroom, slammed the door shut, and grabbed some towels to seal the space under the door because I thought the bees were going to come after me. I’m not allergic to bees, but I believed something bad was going to happen.

I called my wife and begged her to come home and save me. She did…but I was on edge for days after that and I couldn’t bring myself to open the window. My wife ended up installing that AC on her own while I was away from work.

Kinda ironic — me escaping to work to avoid my phobia when my job is to treat other people’s phobias… This whole AC incident made me realized I needed to do something about my phobia. When you get anxious your urge is to avoid a situation. While that makes you feel better, it keeps you from learning that if you stick with a situation, your body will adapt and your anxiety will come down on its own.

The more you expose yourself to anxiety, the less anxiety you feel. This is the idea behind exposure therapy, the most effective treatment for anxiety disorders. Here’s how I applied exposure therapy to my bee phobia.

Step 1: Make an exposure plan. I started by making a fear hierarchy - listing all the situations that made me anxious and rating them from 0 to 100 — stuff like cartoon bees, videos of bees, being in a garden with a lot of flowers, all the way up to having a bee crawl on my skin. Step 2: Pick a low starting point.

I started my treatment with an exposure that was one step above what I could already do — watch a documentary about bees. This where most people mess up exposure therapy - they start REALLY high, the exposure is overwhelming, and they give up. If you start too high you might end up strengthening your phobia.

It’s like learning to ride a bike — the first thing you do is get used to training wheels, not extreme mountain biking. Step 3: Get bored of your exposures. Exposures work when you do them over and over again.

Once you get bored, THEN you move up in difficulty. I’ve spent a few months crossing things off my hierarchy and I’m ready the face real bees. My wife found a patch of flowers with lots of bees nearby.

So…let’s go face my fear.