Confronting Your A nx iety 91
experience the sights, sounds, and even smells of
riding in an airplane. Many of these virtual
reality exposures are conducted in psychologists’
offices.- Interoceptive exposure: Deliberately bringing
on physical sensations that are harmless, yet feared.
For example, someone who is prone to pan-
icking might be instructed to run up and down
stairs to create a sense of breathlessness or an
increased heart rate; spin around in a chair to
induce dizziness; or breathe through a straw to
bring on feelings of hyperventilation. The idea is
for the person to learn that these sensations aren’t
dangerous and don’t necessarily indicate that
anything is wrong.
The idea behind exposure is that you confront your fears
through new conditioning experiences. Each step in an
exposure hierarchy may lead to anxiety, but as Yerkes and
Dodson taught us, you need some anxiety to perform opti-
mally while confronting your fear. We fully expect you to
feel anxious during each exposure, perhaps more than you
would expect or like; however, we know that through mul-
tiple exposures, your anxiety will eventually decrease so you
can master the current step of your exposure hierarchy.
Using the example above, in which you are afraid to cross a
bridge, perhaps you would experience more anxiety, espe-
cially in the form of increased physiological arousal, while
watching videos of the bridge than you would while simply
looking at pictures. In that case, we would encourage you to
spend more time with that particular step of the exposure
until your anxiety is significantly reduced. We also don’t