Episode 9
· 16:25
People aren't fixed in place, and it's almost never too late to change. I know that because I've lived there. I left school at 14 with no qualifications, one of nine kids. I joined the RAF at 16, then spent years in sales, then run bars and nightclubs and restaurants. Not exactly your typical route into mental health.
Gary Johannes:But in my late forties, I met a hypnotherapist, and everything I thought I knew about myself turned out to be a lot more flexible than I'd assumed. I retrained and started inspired to change. And then later on, I took on an MSc in neuroscience of mental health at King's College in London. I started that at 58 and finished at 60. I'm Gary Jahan, solution focused hypnotherapist, founder of Inspire the Change, and Elektra.
Gary Johannes:And that one belief that people aren't stuck, that the brain can always learn something different runs through everything on this podcast. One condition per episode. What's going on? What's keeping it going? And what actually helps?
Gary Johannes:Let's get into it. So phobias. Here's something I want you to sit with for a moment. You already know the fear doesn't make sense. You know the spider isn't going to kill you.
Gary Johannes:You know the plane is statistically one of the safest places you can be. You know the needle is going to be fine. You know all of this, and knowing makes absolutely no difference. That's the gap between what you know and what you feel. It's one of the most frustrating things about having a phobia, and it's also the key to understanding exactly what's happening and how to change it.
Gary Johannes:We're gonna cover what phobias actually are, what's happening in the brain when one kicks in, What causes them? And what keeps them going? And what actually helps? And I'll leave you with one thing you can take away today. If you find this useful, hit subscribe wherever you're listening.
Gary Johannes:There's a lot more to come. Let's get into it. So what is a phobia? Not just a fear. Most people have things they find uncomfortable or unsettling.
Gary Johannes:A phobia is something more specific than that. It's an intense irrational fear of a particular object, situation, or creature, one that's disproportionate to any actual danger, and one that's disruptive. It affects what you do, where you go, and how you live. In The UK, phobias affect around ten million people. They cut across age, gender, and background.
Gary Johannes:The most common specific phobia is the fear of heights. More than one in five people in Britain say they experience it, but the list is long. Spiders, flying needles, dogs, vomiting, enclosed spaces, open spaces, dental visits, blood. The range is enormous. Goes on and on.
Gary Johannes:And the experience is real regardless of what's causing it. There are two broad types, specific phobias, sometimes called simple phobias. They are an intense fear of one particular thing, spiders, needles, dogs, flying. The trigger is clear. The fear is contained.
Gary Johannes:And while it can be very disruptive, it's also highly treatable. Complex phobias are different. Agrophobia, fear of situations where escape might be difficult. Social phobia, the fear of judgment and humiliation in social situations. Fear of driving, fear of vomiting, or vomit.
Gary Johannes:These aren't about one specific object. They're woven into how somebody experiences the world more broadly. The anxiety runs deep. The avoidance patterns are more entrenched, and the way through them needs a different approach. If complex phobia sounds more like your experience, stay with the podcast series.
Gary Johannes:These episodes are coming. Today, we're talking about specific phobias. So what's actually happening in the brain? Every phobia runs through the same basic mechanism. The amygdala, the brain's threat detection system, the alarm, has learned to associate a particular thing with danger.
Gary Johannes:And when it encounters that thing or even just thinks about it, it fires. The response is immediate, and it's physical. Adrenaline floods the body. Heart rate spikes, breathing changes, muscles tense. We sweat.
Gary Johannes:We might go dizzy. We might feel the full fight or flight package. The same response your ancestors would have had facing real predators. And if that response keeps firing, if the phobia means the body is regularly being flooded with stress hormones, the long term physical effects are real. Living with an unmanaged phobia has been shown to weaken the immune system.
Gary Johannes:It can contribute to cardiovascular damage, gastro problems, and over time, a chronic state of low level anxiety that the body starts to treat as its normal setting. Most people think of phobias as psychological, and they are. But the body keeps score too. And here's the critical thing. The amygdala doesn't consult the rational brain first.
Gary Johannes:It doesn't wait for a logical assessment of whether the spider is actually dangerous. It sees the trigger, it fires the alarm, and the body responds, all before the thinking part of your brain has had a chance to weigh in. This is why knowing the fear is irrational doesn't help in the moment. The rational knowledge lives in the prefrontal cortex. The phobia response lives in the amygdala.
Gary Johannes:They're different systems. And in a phobia, the amygdala is faster, louder, and completely convinced it's right. The brain isn't stupid. It's been a very efficient threat detection system. It's just learned the wrong lesson about what constitutes a threat.
Gary Johannes:So what causes a phobia to develop in the first place? Often, though not always, there's a learned event at the root of it, a bad experience with a dog as a child, a turbulent flight, a medical procedure that felt frightening or out of control. The brain, in that moment, learned this thing is dangerous, and it filed it away. Sometimes people can pinpoint exactly where it started. Sometimes they really can't, and that's fine.
Gary Johannes:The origin matters less than you might think, because the treatment doesn't depend on uncovering it. Observation plays a role too. Children who watch a parent react with fear to something are more likely to develop a fear of it themselves. The brain learns from watching others as well as from direct experience. If adults around you treated spiders as terrifying, your brain would absorb that signal.
Gary Johannes:Genetics contribute. Some nervous systems are more sensitive and reactive than others, which means some people are more predisposed to developing phobias than others. That doesn't make it fixed. It just means the starting point is different. And sometimes a phobia develops without any obvious cause at all.
Gary Johannes:One express can lower the threshold at which the amygdala fires, making the fear response more likely across the board. So what keeps it going? Because this is the really important bit. A phobia, once established, has a very effective self maintenance program. Avoidance is the engine of it.
Gary Johannes:Every time you avoid the thing that you're afraid of, you get relief. That relief is real. The body calms down, the threat response fades, and the brain notices. It fouls that away. Avoidance worked.
Gary Johannes:Avoidance is the right strategy. Do it again next time. But every avoidance also sends a deeper message. That thing really was dangerous. The fear stays intact.
Gary Johannes:The belief that you couldn't have coped is reinforced. The law never gets the chance to update its threat assessment because you never stayed in the situation long enough for the alarm to realize there was no actual danger. Over time, the phobia can expand. The avoidance gets more elaborate. The world gets a little smaller.
Gary Johannes:The anticipation of encountering the trigger can be enough to set off the response. People with flying phobias start to feel anxious days before the flight. People with needle phobias can feel physical symptoms just thinking about an upcoming blood test. The brain has learned to treat the anticipation as the threat, which means the fear is running even when the thing itself is nowhere near, and the safety behavior maintains it. The things people do to get through exposure to the trigger without fully facing it, covering their eyes, gripping someone's arm, checking repeatedly that the spider has gone.
Gary Johannes:They reduce the they reduce the distress in the moment, but like avoidance, they prevent the brain from updating. They keep the message alive. This required protection. It was dangerous. So what actually helps?
Gary Johannes:The solution focused approach doesn't start by putting you face to face with the thing you're afraid of. That's exposure therapy. And whilst it has its place, for many people, it's simply too distressing to work effectively and efficiently. Under pressure rarely resolves. It just gets bigger.
Gary Johannes:What we're actually trying to do is change the way the brain has filed the memory of the threat, because that's what a phobia is at its core. A memory that's been misfiled. The brain tagged it as dangerous, stored it in the wrong place, and now retrieves it every single time anything similar comes close. The approach I use is called the rewind technique. And the reason it works is because of what actually happens in the brain during trance.
Gary Johannes:When someone is in a relaxed, focused trance state, the prefrontal cortex, the rational reasoning part of the brain stays in control. It doesn't hand over to the amygdala the way it does in a real fear response. That's important, because it means we can revisit the memory or something like it from a place of safety rather than panic. In that state, the brain can process the experience differently. It can look at what happened.
Gary Johannes:We reframe how it stood and begin to update that threat assessment, not by forcing you through the fear, but by allowing the rational brain to do what it's always been capable of doing, taking back control. The rewind technique allows the mind to essentially refile the memory, to move it from the threat category, where it doesn't belong, to somewhere far less charged. And because this happens in trance, where your calm and your prefrontal cortex is engaged, the process doesn't retraumatize. It resolves. People often find, after a few sessions, the thing that had dominated their life for years simply doesn't carry the same charge anymore, not because they force themselves through it, because the brain got the chance to look at it clearly for the first time without the alarms going off.
Gary Johannes:The solution focused part matters because it gives the brain direction, something to move towards. The three pillars matter here too. Positive interaction, reducing the isolation that Phobia created. The world has begun getting smaller. Rebuilding it starts with connection.
Gary Johannes:Positive action, incremental steps towards the feared thing, build real evidence of capability, and come, and thinking positively, deliberately building a picture of life without the phobia of running it. Before I close, one thing you can take away today. Think about your phobia, not the object itself, but what it's actually costing you. What have you said no to? What have you avoided?
Gary Johannes:Where has the world got smaller because of this? Not to make you feel bad, but because that list is your reason. That's what you're working toward recovering, the holiday, the medical care, the freedom to just live without planning every route around the thing you're afraid of. Sit down if you can. Even one thing.
Gary Johannes:Because the solution focused question, what would life look like without this fear running the show? Is where the work actually begins, and naming it concretely is the first step. If you have a phobia and you've been told you just have to live with it, or you've tried to push through on willpower and found that doesn't work, I want to say this directly. It isn't about willpower. The fear isn't in the rational part of the brain.
Gary Johannes:You can't think your way out of it, but you can update the part of the brain where it actually lives, and that's very much possible. Phobias respond well to the right approach. People who have had them for decades get through them. The brain that learned fear can learn something different. Understanding what's going on is where it starts.
Gary Johannes:You've just done that. And quietly, that is a step forward. If this episode has been useful, hit subscribe wherever you're listening. Every episode, one condition, the same lens. What's going on?
Gary Johannes:What's keeping it going? And what actually helps? There's a lot more to come. See you on the next one.
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