The Emotionary No. 8 - Scared. A CBT Perspective

Scared

[skaird] adjective

Scared is like a waiting room with just one chair. The walls are bare; no signs to tell you what you’re waiting for. No useful information, just unsettled expectation. Unfettered imagination.

From a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) perspective, overcoming fear isn't about trying to eliminate all feelings of being scared. Overcoming fear is about changing how we handle our thoughts and behaviours around the situation or person that is scaring us. Whilst there are some circumstances that should appropriately make us feel afraid, sometimes the level of fear that we are experiencing may be disproportionate to the situation. CBT helps us to discover and understand how our thoughts create our feelings, which lead to the physiological sensations that we associate with being scared (e.g. butterflies in the stomach, increased heart rate etc.). This chain of events then results in us behaving in certain ways, such as avoidance or reacting out of fear. Mastering a number of cognitive and behavioural techniques, will allow us, over time, to retrain our brain to realise that the situation that is scaring us is not only manageable, but also that we are much more resilient than we may have first believed.