Upstate Medical University presents a medical student minute.

Welcome, everyone.

I'm Doctor Stacy Ellenberg, a clinical psychologist in the upstate Norton College of Medicine.

Here with my medical school minute about one of the most interesting things I learned in my career.

Facing our fears.

So when I say facing our fears, I'm talking about the principles of exposure therapy or what people in social media nowadays might call rejection therapy.

So you might have heard the old saying, A worthy goal should scare us a little and excite us a lot.

In other words, sometimes a valuable actio like speaking up at a meeting, approaching someone we don't know.

Asking someone on a dat can be, like objectively safe, but for one reason or another, it might make us afraid.

So we avoid doing those things like the plague in our life gets smaller.

But exposure therapy or facing our fears works in our favor in more ways than one through the psychological process called habituation.

Habituation means the more and more we face an experienced and manageable chunks, the more we're able to tolerate it and maybe eventually have the exciting experience of reaching our goal and enjoying it.

Well, why is that?

Well, it's it's fascinating.

If I ask you right now, pleas do not think of a pink elephant.

What is the first thing that you think of a pink elephant?

Right?

Well, anxiety and avoidance actually work in exactly the same way.

The more and more we avoid thinking about something and doing something scary, the scarier it seems, the mor it affects how we feel behave.

And so when we're talkin about facing that pink elephant, choosing to progressively approach the dreaded whatever the physical distres that may come with it, you know, heart racing, fast, sweating, shaking hands.

Well, if we're willing to face all of that in manageable chunks.

Well, we can discover that, hey, really wasn't all that bad to have my heart go a little faster get a little sweaty and shaky, and maybe even discover it feels like excitement.

I survived, I was able to reach my goal.

Woo hoo!

That's habituation.

And don't forget to start small.