| For a period of a few months a couple years back, I was extremely worried about my house being broken into while I was asleep. Eventually it got bad enough to effect be seriously effecting my sleep. I would stay up late worried about it until I basically couldn't stay up anymore. One of the things that helped me the most was sitting down and thinking, if I was going to break into someone's house, would I choose this one? There ended up being a lot of reasons not to break into my house. We always kept our front and rear porch lights on. We had houses extremely close by on both sides, so the chances of being seen are much higher than if you broke into one of the houses at the edge of our little neighborhood. We had two larger dogs that would definitely bark if anyone unfamiliar so much as walked by. There were much larger and nicer houses nearby to break into instead. This thought experiment didn't put the irrational part of my brain to rest immediately, but it did help considerably with the anxiety. Eventually my anxiety went away entirely - I think it was being caused by the fact that I was out of work at the time and facing a lot of stress trying to find a job. It just happened to manifest as an irrational fear of break ins. Anyways, I recommend anyone suffering from excessive anxiety talk to a professional about it. However, it can take a long time to get an appointment depending on where you live, so I would recommend my strategy as an interim measure while you wait. For what it's worth, I've also had a phobia of spiders my entire life and have recently been applying a similar technique to fix it. Watching videos of spiders on the internet, especially videos of people handling spiders, has decreased the anxiety I experience around them significantly. I can even kill them by myself now, instead of freezing up and asking my wife to do it. I hope to keep working on it until I feel comfortable enough to either not kill them and just let them be, or to transport them outside. |