The seemingly constant flow of emergency alerts has dulled many people’s fear response to this pandemic, leading them to let down their guard, relax their restrictions or masking habits, or even refuse potentially lifesaving vaccines. Why? We’ve basically all been through one of the best available therapies for extinguishing extreme fear.
If you have a fear of spiders, the mere sight of a bug with eight legs activates your amygdala — a vital part of your brain’s threat detection system. The amygdala acts as a safety siren that immediately drowns out all the other noise in your head and propels you to take rapid protective action: fight, flight or freeze.
When that response is overactive — especially if you have a phobia — psychologists often recommend exposure therapy. The goal is to make you so familiar with the source of your fear that it no longer seems like a threat. Your amygdala takes a nap and your prefrontal cortex takes over, allowing you to think rationally about whether that daddy longlegs in the bathtub is really a danger.
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