Conquering Fear

With the help of my best friend, I took a big step towards vanquishing my lifelong phobia of spiders. She’s been helping me fight several irrational fears I have for a while, including my fear of heights and last week, we took a huge step to get me comfortable with spiders.

My friend has been sending me spider videos on Instagram for months, to the point where the algorithm started thinking I love spiders and inundated me with videos and photos of them. And then, when I visited her in Hamburg last week, she took me to meet Cleo, a Mexican redknee tarantula (Brachypelma smithi) belonging to an acquaintance of hers. I actually surprised everyone with how calm I reacted.

As it turns out, you can conquer even fears that you’ve held onto for over 40 years if you set your mind to the task. I’m pretty sure that me haven gotten into martial arts and putting myself into voluntary adversity situations regularly has helped me greatly with this. Doing something incredibly hard, like Muay Thai, regularly, and forcing yourself into scary situations (like sparring when you haven’t done anything remotely like it before) has helped me build a lot of mental discipline.

I think I am pretty close to being cured of this fear. If I can pick up a tarantula, spiders have no hold on me anymore!