Word: fears
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...other things that can actually be dangerous. I'm filled with overpowering, irrational dread by the sight or sound of another human being eating or drinking. It doesn't make any more sense to me than it does to you. But that's what a phobia is: a fear that has nothing to do with logic or common sense. (Find out how to prevent anxiety...
...treatment for a phobia like mine is simple and routine, and I avoided it for as long as humanly possible. That's because it involves deliberately, systematically exposing yourself to the thing you fear. It's part of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. It's a very practical kind of therapy - it has no truck with mystical Freudian mumbo jumbo. CBT views your symptoms not as clues to the secrets locked in your tormented unconscious but as a set of learned behaviors and bad habits that you can be trained to give up. As far as CBT is concerned...
...December in Nature, when a person's phobia gets activated, there's a period immediately afterward when the traumatic memory that the phobia is based on becomes vulnerable. During that time - which lasts about six hours - you can reshape the memory, rewrite it in a way that removes the fear. (See TIME's Wellness blog: "A Way to Rewrite Memories of Fear...
...results of memory-reconsolidation experiments are impressive. The participants in the Nature study were first trained to fear a certain arbitrary stimulus - they were shown colored cards while receiving mild electric shocks - then reconditioned during the reconsolidation period. The fear went away. It was still gone when the participants were retested a year later...
...more like psychoanalysis. But for the purposes of treating my phobia, he turned himself into a cognitive-behavioral therapist. For each session, I would arrive with groceries and watch while he ate them. I would calmly try to separate the sight and sound of a person eating from the fear it induced in me. I would try to retrain my brain to be unafraid of something that there was no reason to be afraid of in the first place. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...