Increase your self-esteem by understanding fear and phobias (1 minute read)

This post “Increase your self-esteem by understanding fear and phobias” continues with how you can increase your self-esteem by understanding your feelings.

Increase your self-esteem by understanding fear and phobias:

This post is about fear and phobias.

As mentioned in the last post, fear is a powerful, primitive and lifesaving emotion.

Fear makes us aware of dangers and entails important learning mechanisms. We avoid things we fear based on what we have been through and experienced.

Phobias entails having an avoidant behaviour toward specific situations and items. Usually phobias are developed towards things/situations where there is an evolutionary reason to be apprehensive: spiders when living in a cave can be dangerous, something our ancestors did.
There is research showing that even babies are more aroused/anxious when seeing images of spiders than other animals, indicating that we are biologically prewired to fear spiders.

Other examples of feared objects that have a survival value are insects, predators, narrow and open spaces, large crowds, heights, water, germs/diseases, being ridiculed or rejected by the preferred group, illogical constructions like airplanes etc.

More about fear and how to conquer it in upcoming post.

See also the free blog or the course How to develop self-esteem and boost your confidence at https://jennyrappbefree.com