That moment you are crossing the road and you hear a car horn too close before you can even think about the situation you dash to the curb quicker than you ever thought you could move. Then you feel the surge of adrenaline wash over your entire body. That is your fear response working at its best. But a system that works that fast does not have time to contemplate what signs are valid and which ones might be less reliable signs of danger. It senses, it acts. You survive.'Thank you, brain.'

In other situations when your life is not in immediate danger, the urges are still the same. You're asked to speak in a meeting and your heart starts pounding. Your heart might be getting your body to be alert and perform. But if you interpret that as fear and make excuses to leave the room, then avoid those meetings in the future, you never get to experience talking in meetings and having it go well.

But avoidance not only maintains anxiety, it makes it worse over time. The things that give us immediate relief from our fear tend to feed that fear in the long term. Every time we say no to something because of fear, we reconfirm our belief that it wasn't safe or that we couldn't handle it. Every time we cut something out of our lives because of fear, life shrinks a little. So our efforts to get rid of fear today mean that fear gets to take over our life choices in the long term.

Our attempts to control fear and eliminate it become the real problem that dictates our every move. Fear is around every turn, in every novel situation we face, in every creative endeavour and in every learning experience. If we are unwilling to experience it, what are we left with?

Many phobias exist in our subconscious mind and are learned responses. This makes them particularly vulnerable to hypnotherapy. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy uses the rewind technique that is safe, natural and efficient in removing fear from a specific phobia. It encourages the mind to process the fearful event in a relaxed (REM) state from a third-person perspective and change it from being an emotional and frightening memory to a narrative memory.

This whole process is liberating, because not only leaves clients freed from the inconvenience of their symptoms but also because thereafter their brain literally has more spare capacity to deal with the stresses of life, once it is not using valuable energy to maintain the phobic template.