Phobias Are Just Bad Programming—Here’s How to Debug Your Mind

A five-minute technique that can erase lifelong fears—no therapy required.

HOW TO CONQUER YOUR PHOBIAS WITH NLP

“A new study shows that having a severe phobia can hasten aging. But what if my greatest fear IS aging?”  ― Stephen Colbert

In these monthly lessons on NLP, we’ve discussed how we store memories in different locations of the brain, usually associating them with particular emotional states.

This type of state-dependent learning was first demonstrated back in the 1950’s, when college psychology students were broken out into two classes. One class was given enough booze to get them thoroughly drunk, the other class was sober. Both were taught some new and somewhat difficult material.

When the students were sober the next day, they were tested on the material. To nobody’s surprise, the drunk students didn’t learn as well or remember as much of the material. But then came the surprise: they got the drunk-learning students drunk again, and gave them the test again.

This time, they scored significantly better than they had when sober. If you learn something when you’re drunk, it turns out, you’ll remember it more easily when you’re drunk again. The same is true of things you learn when you’re angry, bored, happy, in love, upset, or under the influence of drugs.

Our minds are organized for state-dependent learning.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, then, if there was some sort of an external indicator that you could hang around a person’s neck which would tell you when they were accessing what states? When they were remembering a picture, when they were hearing a sound, when they were experiencing feelings?

It turns out that just such an indicator exists. And it can be used to dramatic effect in vanquishing debilitating phobias.

To some extent, it’s a person’s entire body. To a highly specific degree, though, it’s their eyes.

The eyes are part of the brain. I remember when I learned that in biology, and thought, “No, this can’t be true. The eyes are an independent sensory organ.” But our professor made it quite clear that the eyes are an extension of the brain, just like the thalamus or hypothalamus or inner ear.

They’re a seamless part of the nervous system, which is run from the brain. They develop from the brain during fetal development, protruding through the skull to pop out the front of the face. They’re the only external part of the brain: a window, as it were, into the human nervous system.

And the eyes tell us what a person’s brain is doing.

When a person facing you looks up and to your right, they’re probably accessing a visual memory. If they look up and to your left, they’re probably creating a visual image, an imagination. When their eyes look sideways and to your right, they’re probably remembering a sound or voice; when they look sideways and to your left, they’re imagining a sound. When they look down and to your right they’re probably talking to themselves, and when they look down and to your left they’re accessing or filled by feelings, emotions, or tactile sensations.

(About half of left-handed people are wired exactly opposite of this, as are about 5 percent of right-handed persons, and everybody is just a bit different: rather than memorizing the list, it’s always best to “calibrate” with the person first, by asking them questions that would cause them to access a visual memory or imagination.)

Try this exercise. Sit down in front of your child or some other person and ask them a few questions which to answer they’d have to access these different states. Some examples could be: “What color is the carpet in your car?” “Can you feel your toes when you wiggle them?” “How would you describe your best friend’s voice?” “Can you imagine what it would sound like if your best friend talked backwards?” “What would your bedroom look like if it was painted purple and the ceiling was covered with feathers?” “When you ask yourself questions, what are they usually about?”

Notice how their eyes move.

This knowledge gives you a new way to make conversations interesting! Just ask questions and watch people’s eyes. No matter how boring they may be, you’ll probably find the motion of their eyes fascinating, because it tells you so much about what’s going on inside them. It can even be an informal lie detector.

For example, when a person is describing a “real situation,” but is looking up and to your left, they may be actually imagining the situation and describing to you their hallucinated visual image. We call this “lying.” To determine if this is what’s happening, calibrate. Ask the person a question you both know the answer to, such as, “Where did you park your car tonight?” Notice where their eyes go. If they’re up and to your right just before they answer, then you know that when they go up and to the left they’re most likely making something up.

Making your own movies

While most of the time eye motion tells us what’s going on inside the brain, it’s also possible to reverse the process.

Psychologist William James pioneered this long ago when he pointed out that most people think that body posture reflects emotional states. A person walking along all hunched over is most likely feeling poorly; perhaps inadequate or depressed or unhappy. A person walking with their spine straight and chin up is probably feeling pretty good about life.

But James said you can reverse the process. If you’re feeling depressed, he suggested that you try standing up straight, taking a deep breath, and looking up and ahead instead of down. The very act of adjusting your posture will alter your brain’s neurochemistry, changing your emotional state.

Similarly, if you want to make or find a mental picture but are having difficulty doing so, try looking up. If you want to remember or experience a feeling, try looking down and to your right. Want to locate a sound? Look from side to side.

Begin to catalog your postures and the corresponding emotional states. Notice how you can shift states by changing your posture, and which postures produce the most rapid and noticeable changes.

This is the beginning of taking charge of your own neurochemistry, and can be applied to many of the behaviors that are most often treated with drugs, such as a lack of motivation, constant anxiety (often exploding into full-blown phobias), or emotional reactiveness. It’s also a process that’s relatively easy to teach to children, so they can control their own emotional states with greater ease.

Richard Bandler, who with John Grinder first developed NLP, taught me a “fast phobia cure” technique that is also in several of his books. The system has been shown in thousands of demonstrations all over the world to cure — really and permanently make go away — phobias of all sorts, from fears of spiders to elevators to public speaking. You can find videos of him doing it on YouTube.

At a training I attended in London taught by Bandler, a woman who was a writer for one of England’s largest newspapers presented herself. She had such a fear of public speaking, she said, that she was incapable of standing up in front of four of five of her peers to make a presentation at the newspaper where she worked. She didn’t stand up and tell us this because she was too frightened. She sat in her seat, hunched over, and told it to the person next to her who related it to the class.

Bandler took this poor, terrified woman up on stage, holding her hand as she stared at the floor, and walked her through the process I’m about to lay out here. It took five minutes. The transformation was so dramatic that one of London’s largest TV stations came to cover her five-minute speech to over 150 people on the seventh day of the training.

Here’s how you do it: Sit down in a quiet place and close your eyes. Imagine you’re in a movie theater, sitting in a comfortable seat in one of the front rows. The screen in front of you is blank.

Now, float up out of your body, leaving it sitting in that front row, and comfortably drift up to the upper balcony. There, you’ll find a remote control device that runs the movie, which you can operate with your mind or your hand.

Now, sitting in your safe place way back in the upper balcony, look down at yourself sitting in the front row. That “you” is looking up at the screen. Now turn on a still frame, a single picture, of yourself in the situation where you’re normally phobic, just before you begin to feel the phobic feeling.

Make it a color slide. Then push a button on the control panel and have the movie roll forward through the entire phobic experience, all the way through to the other end where it’s all over and you’re feeling ok again. At the end of the movie, freeze that frame on the screen. (If at any time watching the movie becomes too uncomfortable, you can move the screen away, make it smaller, or stop or slow down the movie.)

Now turn the freeze-framed picture on the screen to black-and-white.

Now, float down into your body in the front row, then, body and all, float up into the picture on the screen. Fully associate with the picture: that is, be inside the picture. Look around and see what you see, hear what you hear, feel what you feel, although it’s all in black-and-white.

Now, run the movie backwards, with all the sounds going backwards, making Donald Duck noises, all the way to the beginning. Let it go jerkily and crazily, the way old-time movies did when they ran backwards.

When you get “back to the beginning” of the movie, freeze-frame it again and step out of the screen, then float back to your seat in the front row. Look at the black-and-white picture for a moment, then let the screen go white.

Usually, the first run of this wipes out most of the phobia. Imagine yourself in a phobic situation and see how you feel about it — odds are your feelings will have changed significantly. If there is any lingering phobic feeling, repeat the process.

Many children are “phobic” about school, a particular class, or a particular teacher. Our system seems set-up to cause this, and it often lasts a lifetime, as it did with that reporter.

Even though these are very mild phobias, often really verging on the “I dislike that” to the “I hate that” spectrum, there’s usually a significant element of fear in there, too — particularly after a few failures in a class or other situation.

The fast phobia cure can be very useful with people in such situations.