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Comment by doitLP | Hacker News Reader

“Make someone do something they’re afraid of at a level they can handle and they get better at it and less afraid”.

Not surprising. This is how I conquered my deep fear of flying. I took some flying lessons and even had the instructor do stalls and other scary stuff and I was 95% better afterward.

It’s so much easier to take a drug or blame biochemistry than to face your fears. I think it’s underrated in today’s world where there’s a handy diagnosis for everything.

Note: not casting aspersions on people with serious issues. But when 20% of the US population is supposed to have anxiety disorders, something doesn’t make sense.

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> Note: not casting aspersions on people with serious issues. But when 20% of the US population is supposed to have anxiety disorders, something doesn’t make sense.

That's what happens when a culture undermines the virtues of independence, competence, stolidity, and maturity while venerating childishness. It's what happens when a culture overvalues safety and the avoidance of suffering and undervalues character. Coddled children turn into adults who lack the skills and experience to deal with hardship.

Exposure therapy is hard work. It requires calmly distancing yourself from your fears and anxieties, believing that they can be overcome in the first place, strategizing about how to overcome them, and carrying out actions that are genuinely terrifying to you. It requires valuing freedom from your own emotional limitations over freedom from discomfort. It requires preferring being capable over being comfortable. And that's a hard mindset to cultivate if you were raised in a society where parents sometimes get into legal trouble for letting their kids walk to school or sit outside in the car while they're grocery shopping.

20% of the US population does have anxiety disorders, because the US is suffering from a psychiatric epidemic.

That's pretty much exactly what CBT is, which we already know is effective and is already relevant as a "mainstream" treatment for mental illness ("have you seen a therapist?").

I think coming to the point where you're ready to "face your fears" may be the real difficulty, and not just because people are lazy, stupid, or "coddled". On the contrary, we as humans are really smart. The mind has developed complex strategies exactly for avoiding dealing with your fears.

This is also a regularly used method by psychotherapists. At least in Germany (and I guess all over Europe at least).

Not so fast. Facing fears can be beneficial or lead to deep traumas depending on many other factors.

Notice it says “at a level they can handle”.

And if it all goes terribly wrong there’s still powerful drugs for that too. So what is there to lose I say.

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