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For anyone who has ever experienced serious anxiety, you already know that it’s very real and very scary. To put it bluntly, anxiety sucks. The fears you have can prevent you from really living your life and, on top of that, you also have to deal with people who think you’re just being dramatic. If you’ve ever found yourself missing out on things due to your anxiety, then I’m sure you’ve wondered about how to get rid of anxiety. Well, good news: psychologists and doctors have found a better way to treat anxiety and it’s something you definitely need to know about.

The treatment itself isn’t exactly new – it’s exposure therapy and it’s basically about facing your fears. However, psychologists say that kids dealing with crippling fears shouldn’t just be exposed to their fears by doctors… their parents should also take a more interactive role as “exposure coaches.” After a few studies were done on different kinds of anxiety treatments, doctors found that slowly exposing people to things that make them anxious is very effective if it’s been done early on in treatment.

Basically, it works like this: you work with a doctor to do some intensive exposure therapy. But instead of then going home and going back to avoiding your fears on your own, you have your parents assist with the therapy. Your parents should be exposing you to your fears also and checking in with your doctor on a pretty regular basis. This may not sound super groundbreaking (after all, we’ve all heard about how we have to face our fears at least one million times), but it’s still a really important method of therapy. Why? There are a lot of parents out there who help their kids hide from their fears. That’s not because they want to hurt their children – it’s because they want to protect them.

You can’t really blame parents for wanting to protect their loved ones, but doctors say that helping someone hide from their fears isn’t helping. All it does is make your fear seem less manageable and more scary. Hiding from a fear gives your fear so much more hype than it actually deserves – avoidance doesn’t help you get over things over time, it just helps you become more anxious.

Now, I know this is easier said than done, believe me. I’ve dealt with anxiety most of my life. I’ve been a shy girl all my life and while I can talk lightly about it now, it used to be something that literally took over my life. I was terrified of being the center of attention and one of my biggest fears was speaking in front of a class. Whenever I heard that we had to do a solo class presentation, I immediately freaked out. I would spend the weeks leading up to my presentation worrying about what could go wrong while I was giving mine. The night before a presentation, I would cry myself to sleep and make myself feel sick to my stomach. All day leading up to my presentation, I would sit in each class, paralyzed in fear, not speaking and barely blinking. It sounds dramatic, but doing class presentations gave me genuine anxiety.

Trust me, you don’t want this happening to you. | Source: ShutterStock

How did I get over this fear? By speaking up more in class, thanks to encouragement from my parents. When I was in college, I had to take a speech communications class for my major. The first day of class, my professor explained how the majority of our work would be class presentations. I ran home and told my mom I needed to drop the class. She convinced me to stick with it, saying that this type of thing would only help me get over my fear. And guess what? It worked. After the first two presentations, talking in front of my class got easier and easier. By the end of the course, I was barely blushing while I was standing up there.

I’ll be honest, speaking in front of others still isn’t my favorite thing – but I can now do it without losing sleep for a full week beforehand. And I think that I owe that to exposure therapy. In fact, I know I do – I have a phobia of spiders that only gets worse the more I avoid them (I wrote about it here!). I am so afraid of spiders that the other day when I saw one in my car, I crawled into the backseat and hopped out of the car, leaving it running in the middle of the street. I stay far away from them and have built up this idea of spiders that only gets worse the more I avoid them.

So if you have anxiety, I really encourage you to try exposure therapy. Facing your fears is never going to be easy – in fact, it may be one of the hardest things you ever do – and it doesn’t work overnight. But over time, it will help. And I know you may not love the idea of going to your parents for help, but use them as exposure coaches! Facing your fears will be easier to do if you have someone by your side. Don’t let anxiety take over your life. Using exposure therapy to get rid of anxiety helps you realize that your fears aren’t as bad as you made them out to be. You’ll realize that you can deal with them… and that you’re a lot stronger than you thought!

Do you deal with anxiety? What gives you anxiety? How do you deal with your anxiety? Would you be willing to try exposure therapy and use your parents as exposure coaches? Tell me in the comments. 

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