If you have a fear, phobia or anxiety that’s stopping you from living the life that you want, then Cure Your Phobia in 24 hours is here to help.
Through carefully honed techniques and strategies, Richard Reid will unlock your true inner potential. As well as overcoming your immediate fear or phobia in record time, you will also activate your growth mindset, accelerating learning and all aspects of personal development.
Reassuring, warm and hugely practical, with accessible guides for every phobia from Agoraphobia to Ornithophobia, advice on how to manage anxiety and panic attacks and positive affirmations to help you on your journey, Richard will be with you every step of the way.
With his help, in just 24 hours you can be phobia-free and ready to grab life with both hands.
Richard Reid is a cross-disciplinary psychologist, hypnotherapist, trauma counsellor and anxiety and phobia specialist. He owns and runs the renowned Pinnacle practice on Harley Street, and has spent the past few years working with the MoD. As well as being a guest expert for both BBC Breakfast and This Morning, Richard is the star psychologist of Sky’s Extreme Phobias. He lives in London with his wife and their four children.
To my dearest wife, Caroline and our four children, George, Charlie, Arthur & Aurelia and last, but by no means least, my parents-in-law, Johnny and Juliet, for their unstinting belief and support.
YOU’VE GOT A phobia. This is no ordinary fear, but one that’s got ‘out of proportion’, meaning it’s controlling you, rather than you controlling it. There are things you stop yourself from doing in case you come across whatever it is that makes you scared; maybe you’ve changed jobs or houses, or lost touch with friends because of it. It could be affecting your relationship with your family, even with your children.
You’re wondering if there’s any way of dealing with it. Will you have to live with your phobia for ever? Would it be possible to wake up each morning, knowing there’s nothing you have to avoid or make excuses for? What would it be like to live without this extreme fear?
That’s an understandable question, and the answer is: it most certainly can.
In this book, I’ll give you a step by step system to getting over your phobia … in less than 24 hours.
Yes – just 24 hours’ commitment from you, spaced out over the course of a matter of days or weeks, is all that you need to be free of your phobia once and for all.
In the first part I explain the reasons why you have your phobia and how your brain tricks you into thinking you need to be scared, when you don’t. In the second part I give you a simple process for gradually exposing yourself to what you’re afraid of in an ultra-manageable way, at the end of which you’ll no longer have your phobia. And in the third part I cement your new ‘phobia-free’ self so it never comes back. There’s even a chapter for your friends and family to read as well.
As a professional and qualified therapist I’ve worked with countless phobia sufferers over the years, and with each one I’ve been able to get them from feeling terrified to being able to cope with their fear, provided they were committed to the process. The case studies and success stories in this book are there for a reason: to convince you that no phobia is too deep-rooted to shift. Even yours.
Now I want to spread the word more widely, so everyone with a phobia can learn to live free from extreme fear.
You might be feeling a bit sceptical, wondering if a book on its own can give you such a fundamental transformation. The simple answer is: yes, it can. But as well as using this book as a standalone tool, you can also read it alongside other support. This could consist of close and trusted friends or family, or a professional therapist.
If you’re keen to seek professional help, there are around 4,000 different approaches to therapy, making it difficult to know where to start. After reading this book, you’ll have a good idea about what kind is best for you, so you can find someone who offers a similar style.
I’ve helped many, many people just like you to overcome their phobia so I know what works and what doesn’t. Those people were terrified of birds, deep water, heights, or certain foods, to name a few. Some of them had suffered for decades. Now they’re able to go about their lives without worrying they’ll not be able to cope with the day-to-day activities most people take for granted, and the increase in their confidence levels is wonderful.
You see, I know what makes you feel irrationally scared, and I also know how to help you take that fear away. The good news is that you already have the tools within you to understand and gradually overcome your phobia so you emerge at the end phobia-free.
My process is not a magic solution and it does involve you stepping outside your comfort zone. But this is a very practical, hands-on guide: in fact, you could call it a handbook to beating your phobia. I’ll be with you at every step of the way.
How many people know about your phobia? I’m guessing not many; I know from talking to my clients they often feel ashamed and embarrassed about what scares them. So it stands to reason that other people may also be hiding their phobias from you.
There are countless phobias in this world, and many of them have their own name. Some of them you’ll have heard of, such as agoraphobia and claustrophobia. Others you won’t, such as agliophobia (fear of pain), hylophobia (fear of forests), and rupophobia (fear of dirt). The point is, these names wouldn’t exist if many people all over the world, since time began, hadn’t been suffering just like you are.
Having a phobia doesn’t mean you can’t be successful in life. Many of my clients with phobias feel a failure, and assume it’s somehow indicative of the kind of person they are. Nothing could be further from the truth: it’s an aspect of who they are, not the whole picture.
Many celebrities also have phobias, and whether you’re a celebrity-watcher or not this list proves there are people who manage to excel in their own fields despite their fears. Here are some examples:
Gustave Eiffel, the designer of the Eiffel Tower, was terrified of heights.
Matthew McConaughey, the Hollywood actor, is scared of revolving doors.
Johnny Depp has a phobia of clowns. ‘There’s something about the painted face, the fake smile. There always seems to be a darkness lurking under the surface, a potential for real evil.’
Nicole Kidman is afraid of butterflies. As a young girl, she wouldn’t even enter her home if a butterfly was sitting on the entrance gate.
Billy Bob Thornton is scared of antique furniture.
Alfred Hitchcock was terrified of eggs.
Walt Disney was, ironically, scared of mice.
These are popular legends and may not all bear the closest scrutiny, but they do illustrate how people we admire can also be affected by phobias. You’re in good company.
I want to take you back to when you were a child. What did the seven-year-old you dream of becoming? In your teenage years, what job and lifestyle did you aspire to have?
Now I’d like you to consider the extent to which your phobia gets in the way of you being that person you hoped to be. Think about it not only in terms of feeling too scared to do some of the things you wanted to do, but also about the damage it does to your confidence. The problem with having a phobia for a long time is that it can feel normal. Let the realisation of how it’s restricting your life be the wake-up call you need. You’re letting that seven-year-old down by staying in your comfort zone and not moving on.
And what about your family and loved ones? Your partner may be at the end of their tether, wondering how they’re going to cope with the adaptations they’re constantly having to make, or you may be concerned you’re passing your fears on to your children.
One of my clients moved house twenty-seven times in five years because of his spider phobia. Another took her university degree online due to her terror of birds; she was worried she might come across one at the train station. They’re both phobia-free now, having decided they didn’t want their lives to be crippled by fear any longer.
I’ve saved this until last. Getting rid of your phobia doesn’t only mean you’re free to live your life without it – it gets much better than that. The very process of overcoming your deepest, darkest fear gives you the knowledge you can change almost anything for the better. Once you’ve had the courage to take on the challenges I’ll be setting you, you’ll be ready for anything. Most people will never have this experience; you could consider yourself fortunate you have the chance.
This is why I wrote this book: so you could beat your phobia, and in doing so, learn to create the life you truly want. Start reading it right now, so you can give yourself the gift of as many phobia-free years as possible. I’m looking forward to working with you.
I’m Richard Reid. At this point, you might want to know a bit about me, and what makes me qualified to help you with your phobia.
I’ve been working as a psychotherapist and counsellor for over ten years now, and I’m a trauma and psychological resilience expert. I help my clients with a whole range of personal issues, from serious mental illnesses through to improving a certain aspect of their lives, such as confidence or sporting performance. I’ve even helped people who were involved in some very high-profile incidents, such as the 7 July bombings in London.
The driving force behind what I do is to make psychotherapy accessible to as many people as possible. Unfortunately, a lot of people think psychotherapy isn’t for them, or that needing it makes a bad statement about the kind of person they are. Nothing could be further from the truth.
For most of my professional career, I’ve had a special interest in working with people with phobias. I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which some people who, while seemingly very capable and rational on the outside, can become paralysed by irrational fears on the inside. Some of the situations that these people find frightening, such as exposure to snakes or heights, can seem understandable to others. But it seems less obvious when it comes to being terrified of buttons, baked beans or rubber.
In my work, I’ve dealt with all these phobias and many more. One of my greatest satisfactions is being able to resolve some very ‘niche’ phobias in a matter of minutes, such as the time I cured a woman of her fear of bananas simply by showing her how to replace the negative feeling with a positive one. This process is called ‘anchoring’ (but more on that later in this book!).
Other clients of mine have had more complex phobias. One woman had an intense fear of signing her name in public; it took her several weeks to get over her phobia and I needed to employ a much more painstaking methodology for her situation. But the good news is that in every phobia case, provided that my client had a commitment to the process, I have been able to achieve a positive outcome within less than 24 hours of effort.
As part of my mission to make treatment for phobias more accessible to all, I have been a resident expert on the Sky 1 TV series Extreme Phobias, Extreme Cures. In this programme, I work with a number of phobia sufferers to help them to deal with their challenge. By taking them from being paralysed by their fears to being well on the way to living a normal life, I show our viewers that overcoming a phobia is completely possible.
Although a lot of my work is with private individuals, I also use my professional expertise in organisations such as the City of London Police, Ernst & Young and Morgan Stanley, to name but a few.
You can find out more about what I do via my website: http://www.RichardReidMedia.com
Okay, so I’m a psychotherapist, but first and foremost I’m also a human being (you’ll be relieved to know!). Most people would probably regard me as being very confident and assertive. However, it hasn’t always been the case.
Until my mid-twenties I struggled pretty badly with anxiety, especially in social environments and public-speaking situations. If you asked the people who knew me at that time, they probably wouldn’t have guessed I was so anxious as I was very good at hiding it. I covered up my anxiety using a combination of avoidance, bravado, humour and alcohol. Ultimately, none of these approaches resolved the underlying problem. They simply suppressed it and reinforced the belief that I was incapable of dealing with my issue without the aid of props or artificial stimulants. I was also deeply ashamed of my situation, which meant that I was reluctant to talk to anyone about it or to seek out professional help.
I’ll let you into another secret … For many years, I also contended with a deep-seated phobia of being in the sea. I have a couple of theories about what may have caused this. Firstly, neither of my parents have ever been particularly confident about being in the sea, so presumably I would have picked up non-verbal cues from their behaviours which shaped my own beliefs. However, the main catalyst for me seems to have been watching the film Jaws as a child and being absolutely petrified. I clearly remember jumping out my skin at the point where the skinny-dipping girl gets pulled under the water at the start of the film. For years, I would actively avoid going above waist deep in the water. I can even remember one time on a lads’ holiday in Ibiza when someone proposed a swimming race at sea. Peer pressure dictated that I felt obliged to take part, but I can assure you that you have never seen anyone swim as fast as I did that day!
Even though I didn’t necessarily realise it at the time, in both examples above, I eventually overcame my long-term fear permanently by retraining my brain. In a nutshell, this took the form of repeated and increasingly challenging exposure to my fears, coupled with some handy cognitive restructuring courtesy of Meditations by the philosopher-emperor, Marcus Aurelius (I was studying Latin and Ancient Greek at university at the time). There were bumps and setbacks along the way and it required courage and perseverance, but the hard work eventually paid off.
I now teach a fast-track version of these same skills to others in my work as a therapist and coach. I also gain regular employment as a motivational speaker, and now actively embrace public-speaking. You will also be pleased to know that I am now a seasoned scuba diver (I even came face-to-face with a shark on a night dive off the Great Barrier Reef and it was nowhere near as bad as I imagined!).
ONE OF THE questions my clients often ask me is, ‘How did I get this phobia? Why me?’
It’s natural to want to know the answer, because getting an understanding of why phobias exist and how some people come to have one, is a great way to start moving past the fear. So this chapter explains the professional thinking behind phobias and why they arise.
I’m going to tell you something you’ll not have thought of before. Having a phobia is actually the result of your brain doing what it’s meant to do.
Yes, really. How come?
320 million years ago, humans and reptiles were closely related. We humans even share 98 per cent of our genes with our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee. We’ve done a good job of evolving since those early years, of course, but genetically speaking we’ve been the same for the last 200,000 years.
So what does this have to do with phobias? Well, our brains are made up of three different parts:
As you can see, although we live in a modern world, some areas of our brain still work in a prehistoric way. And when we see a situation as threatening, the way our brain protects us is to switch immediately to the more primitive part, bypassing our frontal cortex and leaving our rational judgement out of the picture. After all, if a lion is about to attack you, don’t want to ponder on what you should do, do you? You need to get out of danger straightaway.
To use a couple of stereotypes, think of your reptilian brain as being like the school bully, and your frontal cortex as being like the wimpy geek in class. When you’re in danger, your bully brain leaps into action, overpowering your geek brain so it never gets a chance to think things through.
tell ourselves