Welcome to the Very Well Mind podcast. We've interviewed over 100 authors, experts, entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians, and others to help you learn strategies to care for your mental health.

This episode is hosted by psychotherapist and bestselling author Amy Morin. Now let's get into the episode.

Okay. You're listening to the Friday fix.

Every Friday, I share a quick mental strength exercise that will help fix the thoughts,

emotions, and actions that drain you of the mental strength you need to be your best.

Now, let's dive in today's episode.

Today, I want to share a strategy that will help you face your fears in a healthy way.

As a therapist, it's a strategy that I use to help people overcome a specific fear or even a phobia.

It takes some work, but it's really effective.

It involves creating a fear hierarchy and then facing your fears one small step at a time.

Here's how it works. Think of a fear that you want to conquer, like the fear of needles or the fear of public speaking. Then create a list of things you could do to

slowly face that fear in incremental steps. The key to conquering your fear is to move at a controlled

pace. Doing something that feels too scary too soon will leave you terrified. And that will make you

want to avoid facing that fear ever again. I see a lot of people who make this mistake.

They decide to face their fear all at once, and then they end up feeling emotionally scarred,

and ultimately they're still terrified of that thing that scares them.

So here's how to face your fear in a healthy way.

Think about fear on a scale of one to ten, one being not scary and 10 being downright terrifying.

Our goal is to do things that are in about the 4 to 6 range, moderately scary but still tolerable.

When you do something that fits within that range, your fear will start to decline over time.

This is what we consider to be exposure therapy.

Once your fear starts to subside, you take another small step towards doing something that feels

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