Phobia specialist shares 3 top tips to overcome any fear

Phobias come in many forms: Some people fear spiders while others fear flying on a plane.

But the one thing they all have in common is that they’re irrational, according to one phobia specialist.

“A phobia is an irrational response to a benign substance,” Christopher Paul Jones, a London-based phobia specialist with a clinic on London’s Harley Street, told CNBC Make It in an interview.

“As human beings, we are primitively hardwired that when we experience danger, our amygdala fires off, and then we do one of several things. Most commonly fight, flight, or freeze. So, either get angry and punch the thing, or we run from the thing, or we hide from the thing,” he said. The amygdala is a part of the brain that processes emotions like fear or motivation.

This trigger is handy when we were fighting saber-toothed tigers or if we were in actual danger, Jones said. However, a phobia is when that response is to something that isn’t dangerous.

Jones’ clinic has treated a variety of phobias from a fear of water, heights, germs, needles, and even the fear of failure.

He explained that phobias develop through a conditioned response like that of Pavlov’s dogs experiment. That famous experiment was carried out by Russian neurologist Ivan Pavlov who would ring a bell every time he fed his dogs. The dogs eventually started to salivate when they heard the bell ring because they associated it with food.

“Human beings do the same thing,” Jones explained. “Most commonly with a phobia, at some point in your past, your brain has linked danger to something that has happened … then whenever you think about that thing again in the future, it fires off that old response.”

Jones’ recently published book “Face Your Fears” guides readers through exercises to help them overcome their fears. He shared his three top tips to overcome any fear with CNBC Make It.

A very simple technique to challenge your phobia is to think about the object of your fear differently, Jones said.

He calls it the “Harry Potter” effect referring to a scene in the “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” movie where students face their fear and use magic to transform it into something comedic.

“So, when you think of that spider, often people make it very big and close up. If you imagine it small, black and white … or imagine it on roller skates, smoking a little cigar, dancing with a little hand … you’re going to feel very different,” Jones said.

He suggested using the same technique on your inner dialogue.

“If you’re going ‘Oh my god, I’m going to get scared’ or ‘This is going to make me jump’ or ‘What if I embarrass myself?’ If you imagine that inner dialogue like it was Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, with a squeaky voice it’s going to take all the power out of it,” he said.

In the moment, this will change how you perceive the fear because it will appear “sillier and less realistic,” Jones said.  

One of the simplest ways…