One of the most replicatable phenomenons in the discipline of #psychology is the undeniable effectiveness of prolonged exposure therapy, coming out of the behaviour sciences. If you have conditioned avoidance to a stimulus based on a bad experience with it, the only cure to that fear and subsequent avoidance is a progressive safe re-exposure to that thing again to re-train your brain with a positively different association. This cure applies to developed fear of:

• Environments

• People

• Food

• Animals

• + more

Your mind will tell you to avoid exposure, but if you know better life is on the other side of this barrier, you must cognitively distance from this thought, buckle up, and do what matters. The alternative is watching a better life go by the wayside - your mind will point it out to you, too. In this way, avoiding pain creates a pain feedback loop.

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Fascinatingly, we also have pre-conditioned aversion to some things such as spiders, some would-be foods, and snakes. It's not all tabula rasa in the human brain. Some of our responses are innate and usually very beneficial for our survival.