Does facing your fear work (it doesn’t)

The Emperor's Lounge
#1

I read a lot in self help that fear exposure, facing your fear and exposure therapy work but in my experience it doesn’t. I have tried ir on several occasion at work, in personal life but it always left me more fearful less energized.

I saw it works for some people in some occasion or until some things in environment change.
For example cold approach l, I have done it a thousand times and got so many bad reactions it is still not something I can do easily it broke me in my approaches.
What don’t kill you make you stronger not in my experience.

What is your experience? Is it a self help myth?

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#2

A fear is a negative emotion. It is one of the most powerful emotions. It has a very strong effect on your mind and body.

It’s a human response that is vital for our survival. It helps us respond to emergencies or dangerous situation, avoiding situations can make them harder to face up to and mean that our fears grow. The key is to gently push yourself to do things that take you a little way out of your ‘comfort zone’.

Gradually, you increase your exposure until you can tolerate the uncomfortable emotions, such as fear, anxiety and distress. Anxiety is a word we use for fears about the threat of something going wrong in the future, rather than right now. The word ‘anxiety’ tends to be used to describe worry, or when fear persists over time, often without any one cause.

Steps to help you overcome your fears

  1. Think about your physical feelings and behaviors
    Keep an anxiety diary to note down how you’re feeling, what causes you to feel anxious, and what happens. When you understand how anxiety affects you, you’ll be better able to manage the feelings.

  2. Change the way you see fear
    Understanding why we feel a certain way can make it easier to manage things when we become afraid. The best way to overcome this fear is not to avoid these activities but to gradually expose yourself to them.

  3. Break down and rate fearful situations
    Think about which situations involve your fear and how difficult each one is to face. Try rating them from 0 to 100, with 0 being not difficult at all and 100 causing the most fear.

  4. Start with the easiest
    Now you have rated your situations, you can begin working through them. Carry on putting yourself in the situation until you rate your fear as having reduced by half. You should notice that the more times you face a fear, the less scary it becomes.

  5. Allow yourself to feel the fear
    When confronting your fears, it’s important to allow yourself to feel worried or scared without relying on distractions. This can help prove to yourself you are able to cope.

  6. Work your way up – but don’t rush
    Remember that every time you put yourself in a situation you find difficult, no matter how big or small, it’s a step towards reducing your anxiety, feeling more in control and overcoming your fears.

I love the idea of sky diving but when I first did my jump I had wish that I will never do it again (likely due to an accident on the plane). But I saw lots of people are doing it and it gave me the motivation to do it again and again even having the feeling of fear, until it become second nature to me. Because of that experienced whenever I took a boat ride home (especially on a small ship) I will no longer feel sea sick, I can easily enjoy the ship dancing on a bad weather.

It is true that what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.

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#3
Summary

I felt quite deep anxiety walking past crowded areas in the city. I used to cross a street or take the longer routes to avoid being seen. Eventually I decided to force myself to walk past crowded areas when I saw any or when I felt the temptation to avoid them on my daily walk to work. It was unpleasant but every time I passed this, I gave myself a mental pat on the back. It wasn’t about not fearing. It was about doing it because I didn’t want to do it. I was strengthening my will by just that one daily decision others would probably not even think about because to them this was not a challenge. The fear lessened as months went by and eventually it went away. My heartbeat doesn’t pound fast anymore when this happens, I don’t feel anxious, I don’t care anymore. Long term voluntary exposure helped in my case.

I actually still feel this fear sometimes especially when out at night but instead of avoiding people I straighten my back, widen my shoulders and walk with a spirit of a fighter entering a ring. I feel scary. That tricks my brain into feeling more secure and quite possibly, makes me actually more safe because people can feel that. The intruder is less likely to jump at someone who looks like can fuck you up back. But ah that’s just my experience. Whatever works for you.

I can see how cold approaches can feel crippling when you get declined all the time. It’s as if you’re doing a trick and get punished for it each time like you did something wrong. It still builds character but… ah. That’s why I don’t personally like cold approaches that much. It doesn’t feel natural. I am much more fan of the idea of starting short convos with people we meet on daily basis. Naturally flow with life. Make a joke and compliment people etc. That’s actually how people interact and how men most of the time meet new friends and partners. The cold approaches can feel forced (because they kind of are). If the person is however really relaxed and doesn’t care about the outcome as much and is happy with life, then yeah his cold approach is going to be far more charming than of some guy who is desperate for human touch and love of a woman. And girls feel that energy subconsciously. They can differentiate very quickly between the two even if they don’t realize it themselves. But I know nothing.

Point is, it build your character far more than you probably can imagine and you will see that with time. How much it actually gave you. How much more capable and fearless it made you. And maybe, just maybe, cold approaches just aren’t for you. Maybe it’s just not the kind of lifestyle you want to live and a way you’d like to talk to new girls. There are endless possibilities to talk to people. Cold approaches are just one of them. Head up!

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#4

The self help approach to this is crap. People just told others what to do then wrote books. Fear is way more complex than that.

Exposure therapy when done properly works within your window of tolerance. You have to strike a balance between exposure but not being too overwhelmed. Typically proper exposure therapy needs to be led by a therapist. Another important aspect is dissecting why the fear is there and working on unraveling the behavioral patterns or emotional conditioning that gave rise to it. If you just provoke your nervous system or continually encounter bad experiences you’re training yourself to respond to fear in an undesirable way. Possibly just re triggering trauma.

I say this as someone who couldn’t even hold a cashiering job long term because I became suicidal. I had that job for a year. If facing fears was all you needed to do I would have come out of that stronger but I didn’t.

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#5

For me it worked, when I was a kid I was afraid of the dark so during the night if I closed the lights instead of running away to bed I forced my self to walk very slowly, after that I just stood in the dark in the middle of the night and expended my body (stretching my arms etc) and with enough exposure it just eliminated this fear.

Fear exposure work only if the fear is irrational, because with enough exposure you prove to your brain that there is nothing to be afraid of, if the fear is rational like the fear you would feel if a lion started to charge at you it wouldn’t work.

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#6

I am really doubtful about the naturalness of that. As in in the repeatability of the technique. If the exposure therapy works, it should work for all fear right?
As in agoraphobia, people who have this phobia I don’t think that exposure is the answer otherwise it would get fix by itself by living normally, taking bus or transportation. But it doesn’t get cured like that.

And sometimes I got fears that got fixed just like one day I got a shift, and the fear disappeared. I don’t think I fixed some deeper trauma, it just disappeared.

Like in the example of sleeping in the dark. No idea what fixed it for me. It’s just that I use to sleep with lights and just one day I just didn’t need the light and sleeping with light was annoying. Just like that.

These are just me putting my thoughts out there because I feel like sometimes self help industry or "psychology” say stuff that look cool in books but are not really repeatable.

#7

Not really.

It’s like saying the treatment for all types of cancer is the same just because they are all called cancer.
Different types of cancer require different treatment approaches based on their unique characteristics and how they respond to various therapies.

There are different kinds of fear too. Just because it’s a variation of fear, doesn’t mean the best treatment for one case is the best for the other. There are many factors to take into consideration.

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#8

What sub Titles, have you used in combination, to taking action for this fear bro?

My fear was public speaking, cause I used to stutter till last year. Or being in the spot light made me shake with anxiety.

But Ascended mogul kinda kicked that out of the curb. And now with Khan I don’t give a damn Anymore about what anybody thinks.

At least for the women part on khan most women stare at you and want to talk to you. Especially after st2.

I like this quote about the topic:

Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

For you right now, it would be better to do any seduction sub and if possible get a job in the service industry.

Or the easiest have a cute puppy while you go to do cold approaches.

It should definitely make the job a whole lot easier.

And I have to praise you for trying a 1000 times brother.

Hats off to you

image

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#9

Here’s another thing

Create an additional, stronger fear. For example, when you have a fear of starting a business at 5/10, turn up to 11 your fear of wasting your whole life doing a job you hate and earning little

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#10

This. After doing this for a while and becoming comfortable with it, then you can start doing “cold approaches” where you actively tell a girl you think she’s cute or w/e and ask for her number or w/e. If she turns down the offer, then it’s fine to go back to just short convos, and “cold approaching” again when you feel up to it. So yeah, still the idea of slowly turning up the heat.

#11

I totally understand where you’re coming from. It can be really frustrating when certain self-help strategies, like fear exposure, don’t seem to work in the way they’re often promised. I’ve been there myself, trying different approaches and feeling like I wasn’t seeing the same results others talk about. Sometimes, what we’re told to do doesn’t always align with our own needs or how we process things.

In my experience, facing fear isn’t as simple as repeatedly exposing ourselves to it. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, I’ve found that practices like the law of assumption, Reiki, Yin Yoga, NLP, Hypnosis, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) have helped me focus on gradual growth and self-compassion. It’s less about forcing yourself to push through fear and more about allowing yourself to heal and build confidence at a pace that feels right for you. Being kind to yourself throughout the process can make all the difference.

For example, I used to be afraid of speaking in front of people. Initially, exposure didn’t seem to help, but over time, I found that gradually facing my fear in small steps made a difference. I started practicing grounding and anchoring exercises to calm my nerves. I also used visualization techniques, where I first imagined myself as a spectator in the audience, then visualized myself speaking from my own perspective, feeling calm and at ease. While it wasn’t an immediate transformation, with each small step, I gradually became more confident.

I also had protective parts of me that were scared of rejection or judgment. I remember doing a speech in grade 6 about cats, and I got so nervous that I ended up repeating myself, which stayed with me for years. That experience created a part of me that wanted to protect me from future embarrassment. But working with these parts through Internal Family Systems (IFS) allowed me to validate those fears and help them feel heard, which was more effective than just pushing myself to keep speaking in front of people.

Instead of just forcing myself to face the fear, I learned to connect with and heal the parts of me that held onto that fear, which made it easier to grow and step into new challenges with more self-compassion.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a self-help myth, but I do think that advice can sometimes oversimplify things. It’s important to find what genuinely works for you and what allows you to grow at your own pace. For me, it’s all about creating space for healing and understanding that growth is a journey, not just a series of exposure exercises.

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#12

Life is what you focus on.

You only experience the part of life you focus on.

FEAR - False Evidence Appearing Real.

I shift my focus.

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#13

What a cool acronym!

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#14

Gradual exposure works. Exposing yourself to something just ever so barely outside of your comfort zone.

Forcing yourself to be retraumatized again and again doesn’t work.

If you want to do this method with cold approach - Don’t “approach” girls… just give out 100 compliments a day, VERY non sexual, even start it with “hey I have to run but I just wanted to say your outfit’s amazing” and then actually leave.

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#15

Yeah! If you make it less focused on sexual stuff and make it into normal daily interactions with people you’ll have much smoother ride. Girls will be less on guard and honestly it’s just more appropriate and friendly when it comes the the first interactions. :+1:

For a girl it’s nicer to have a guy come up to her and strike a convo or give her a quick smile and compliment (she will remember you and your energy) rather than “hey can I get your number you’re hot” which basically translates to “I wanna fuck you” : / like bro I don’t know who you are why so fast. it can work sometimes but a lot of girls are scared / reserved in the beginning. Time is your best friend and best to do it while feeling at ease and happy in life. People sense that joy from you which just adds to your charisma.

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