Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Fear. A lot of people struggle with fear.

So in today's episode we're going to look at how to overcome fear and find happiness no matter what. So where does fear come from? What

is the root of our fears? It begins at a very young age. We have things that happen when we're younger that we don't like.

And when these things happen, these things that we don't like,

our mind, our egos come up with an idea.

They tell us, hmm, I'm going to protect you from these fears.

I'm going to really help you so you're not afraid anymore.

But in the act of trying to protect ourselves from these fears, our fears actually grow.

And fears can be so paralyzing.

Let me use an example to illustrate just how devastating fears can be.

There are a lot of people out there that struggle with something that in the psychology world

is called agoraphobia.

I don't like labels, but just for this example example let's go ahead and try to understand what a gorephobia is and what happens

It actually starts off very subtly a person perhaps you may know someone like this goes out to a

public place and is uncomfortable perhaps even afraid they don't like being

around a lot of people maybe they went to a concert one night and got very uncomfortable and had to leave.

Maybe they went to the mall. There were a lot of people there.

And fear slowly started creeping in saying what if I got trapped what if I

couldn't get out of here I need to not go to places like this anymore where

there are a lot of people because I'm afraid and I don't want to be trapped so the best way to

avoid that is just don't go to them. Then they may notice that hmm I'm now not

very comfortable driving on the freeway for the same reason what if I get

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