Raise your hand if you've ever panicked through the thought of a medical procedures.

Needles, blood tests are waiting for results or even stepping into the hospital.

These are all things that can cause so much anxiety for all of us.

But today we're going to talk about how to overcome those fears

and share some specific tools for

managing common fears like needle phobias, blood phobias and more.

Hello, my friends, welcome back to your anxiety toolkit where we talk all about how to face your fears, big or small. My name is Kimberly

Quinlan. I am a licensed anxiety specialist and today we're focusing on how to overcome the

fear of medical procedures. This was actually a listener's question.

We're going to discuss general tips and tools for common fears,

including needles, blood, waiting for results, and hospital visits.

I'm going to guide you through a tool we use in treatment

called exposure and response prevention to help you manage those fears.

So let's get started.

Now before we get going, let me say that this is a topic I feel particularly qualified to talk on.

As many of you know in 2019, I went down a very scary rabbit hole of finding a lesion

on the left side of my cerebellum in the back of my brain. And I had to undergo dozens of tests,

dozens of specialist appointments and several hospital visits. It was so scary. It was horrible.

And without these specific tools to manage my anxiety, I'm really not sure I could have gotten

through it or handled it. My hope today is to give you some helpful tools to manage the fear of

medical procedures and then go into depth on a few

specific conditions and fears that many of you have and many of my clients have had, such as needle

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