Confronting Your A nx iety 89
yourself to your fears. Exposure, in many ways, is the exact
opposite of anxious avoidance. Exposure works by slowly
reducing fears associated with a threatening stimulus and
also decreases your anxiety and distress. Over time and with
enough practice, exposure can help improve your relation-
ship to a feared object or situation through mastery of the
experience, in which you deliberately develop a sense of ease
and control over your fear, which leads to increased confi-
dence in your ability to regulate your emotions.
The three main goals of exposure are:
- To teach you to accept uncertainty and lack of
control about the feared object or situation. - To teach you to activate problematic emotions
and thoughts so that you may challenge them
upon confronting the feared object or situation. - To teach you to habituate yourself to your physi-
ological responses to, emotional reactions to, and
unhelpful beliefs about the feared object or
situation.
Exposure can be beneficial for many types of anxiety:
simple phobias, obsessive- compulsive disorder, social
anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disor-
der, agoraphobia, post- traumatic stress disorder, and more.
Although exposure primarily entails behaviorally confront-
ing your anxiety, it also includes confronting related
thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations through a hierar-
chy of events designed to build your tolerance.
To illustrate, imagine that you have a fear of heights, also
known as acrophobia. You first would want to identify the
specific behavior you hope to modify (your behavioral