Fear and Avoidance Fear can become a pervasive force in our lives, often expanding beyond its original trigger to encompass everyday situations. When avoidance becomes a learned behavior, it can lead to a cycle where individuals cut themselves off from meaningful experiences. The brain reinforces this behavior, making it increasingly difficult to confront fears, even in benign environments like a bustling restaurant. Understanding the context of our fears is crucial for breaking this cycle.
In this clip Shankar Vedantam Arash Javanbakht From this podcast Related Questions In the episode 838: Classic ACP Why Avoidance and Aversion Don't Help With Anxiety and the clip Changing Anxiety Perspectives, Andrew talks about a process to erase fear and traumas, stating that first you need to extinguish the fear or trauma by retelling the narrative. The whole point of that is to diminish the physiological response, right? If the goal is to diminish the physiological response, then if a person works to change their physiological response immediately after being triggered, would that over time also diminish the physiological response and therefore break the conditioning? Am I right? For example, if a person had a traumatic experience with a spider, but every time they see the spider or get activated through a trigger, and immediately after use breathwork to calm the body, would that work like retelling a narrative to extinguish the fear? Did I miss something? I have a question about this episode 838: Classic ACP Why Avoidance and Aversion Don't Help With Anxiety and this Changing Anxiety Perspectives. Andrew talks about a process to erase fear and traumas, and he says that first you need to extinguish the fear or trauma by retelling the narrative. The whole point of that is to diminish the physiological response, right? If the goal is to diminish the physiological response, then if the person works to change their physiological response immediately after being triggered, would that over time also diminish the physiological response and therefore break the conditioning? Am I right? For example, if a person had a traumatic experience with a spider, but every time the person sees the spider or gets activated through some trigger, and immediately after uses breathwork to calm the body, would that work like retelling a narrative to extinguish the fear? Did I miss something?
