This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 203. Welcome back, everybody. Today’s episode is all about why it is so important that we expose ourselves to our fears. It’s one of the most common questions I get asked from my clients, right? Which is, why do I have to do this hard work? Why? Why of all the treatments is mine the one where I have to face my fears. Because my clients ask this all the time, I wondered whether you needed a quick pep talk just to get you back on track, to remind you why and to motivate you towards facing your fears, because it is probably the most valuable change of behavior that you will do. Welcome back. I am so happy to have you here with me today to talk about that specific topic. Before we get started, I would like to quickly dive in to really set the scene today. We’re going to talk about the hard thing, the “I did a hard thing” segment. Today’s hard thing is from anonymous, and they have submitted saying: “I haven’t drank coffee for over two years since my OCD breakdown because I was too scared. But today, I went to Costa and I had a caramel latte. I got heart palpitations for a few hours, but I sat with it. This is exactly what I’m talking about. So, Anonymous, this is so good. I am so proud of you. This is the work that we do. And I’m going to use Anonymous’ example here throughout the podcast to really tie this together. All right, one more thing before we get moving, I want to do a shoutout to the review of the week. This one is from Hahajack, and they said: “This is the best short therapy lesson. This podcast is amazing! I love that episodes are short and succinct. You can’t say that you don’t have time when episodes are as short as 10 to 30 minutes. If you are struggling with OCD or anxiety, this is a great podcast to listen to for extra therapeutic support in addition to therapy. I treat OCD and I learn so much every time I listen to Kimberley’s podcast.” Thank you Hahajack for that amazing review. We are still doing the drive for reviews. So if you can go over to Apple podcast, leave us a review or wherever you listen. Once we hit a thousand reviews, we’re giving a free pair of Beats headphones. I cannot tell you how much I love, love, love, love your reviews. Thank you. It helps me help more people reach more people. And that’s what I’m here to do. All right, so let’s get to the meat of this episode, right? I, in the past – I think it’s Episode 86 – did a whole episode called the Science of Exposure and Response Prevention. You can go back and listen to that episode once this is done. We talked about the science behind ERP, and I’m going to be using a lot of that reference to talk about why. Why do we stare fear in the face? Instinctually, when we have fear – I’m just going to give you a quick education here – when we experience fear and our brain sets the signal off to say, “There might be danger, there might be trouble, please be alarmed,” – when the anxiety hits our body and our cognitions, our natural instinct is to remove ourselves from the perceived danger. And that has kept us alive. It is an important process that we humans have and other animals have. It’s an important piece that keeps us alive, like I said. The problem is, that behavior, the removal of anxiety, the avoidance of the thing that created the anxiety is only effective if the danger is imminent, not just a thought about a possible danger, right? And so, if, like I said, there was a real thing that was happening in your life that is dangerous, yeah, you may want to remove yourself from it. But if you have a brain that’s anxious like mine, where your brain sets off alarms quite often telling you, “Ring, ring, ring, something bad might happen. Ring, ring, ring, the future may have some problems. Ring, ring, ring, you’re a bad person,” and so forth – when we instinctually try to remove that, we actually reinforce the fear, the faulty fear. We reinforce the thought, right? And then what we are in a cycle of is thought, rein