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"You CAN Overcome Your Fear of Germs..."I know I’m not the best writer in the world, so what you’re about to read probably has enough grammatical errors to make an English teacher want to scream. I’m sorry about that, but I don’t claim to be a novelist, I’m just a regular person just like you who suffered with fears and anxiety for way too long before finally discovering a way to overcome it. I thought it was time to share what I had learned, bad punctuation and all, so please forgive any mistakes you find and focus on the content of my message so you can learn how to put your mysophobia in your past too. Before we get any further, let’s take a step back and make sure we know what we’re talking about. Mysophobia…that's a big word you don’t hear every day, what is it exactly? At its most basic, mysophobia is the fear of germs, dirt, or of being contaminated by something harmful. It usually results in compulsive cleansing, often of the hands, but at other times, of the entire body. It’s strongly associated with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), but doesn’t have to be. The condition has gained notoriety due to some prominent celebrities being reported as suffering from it, such as Cameron Diaz, Joan Crawford, and maybe most notably, Howie Mandell. Alright, so you don’t like to be dirty and you wash your hands a lot…that doesn’t sound so bad... As I’m sure you know, it’s much more than that. Of course nobody wants to be contaminated with germs, and everyone should wash their hands, but it’s the pathological NEED to avoid germs, even under what are considered normal circumstances that distinguishes mysophobia from ordinary everyday good hygiene. It’s the compulsion to wash your hands, the anxiety about touching the doorknob, the great lengths that you’ll go to in order to avoid germs that makes it a problem that can severely effect your quality of life. If you’re still reading, I’m going to guess this isn’t news to you, and you already know you have a problem with mysophobia , that it isn’t normal, and that you want to overcome it. If you would, pause for a
moment, and think of how life would be different if you could put your
mysophobia behind you…
I've got some good news...
There’s no reason you have to live with a fear of germs. It CAN be overcome. Life CAN be different – much different. Overcoming your mysophobia doesn’t have to be complicated, require addictive drugs, or take years of expensive therapy either. And it certainly doesn’t require some useless new age potion or other nonsense scam. What has worked for many others, and what I believe can work for you too, is a step by step system for conquering your fears and phobias like mysophobia that’s based on well tested techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy and other treatment approaches that have been used successfully for treating fears and severe phobias for years. I’m
getting ahead of myself…let’s first understand how
your fear works…
There’s two things you should know about your fear that may surprise you. 1. The fact that you have a fear such mysophobia shows that you’re a very fast learner. You may think that you’re weak, silly, or weird for having a fear of germs, but in reality, it’s more likely that the opposite is true. Having a phobia can mean that you possess the ability to learn at a far more rapid rate than typical. From only a small amount of experiences you developed a very powerful fear response. If you know how, you can harness that same rapid learning ability that caused you trouble to be taught something new - to learn to NOT be afraid. 2. Fear is simply a message from a deeper, more primitive part of your mind to your conscious mind. Your subconscious mind thinks that there’s something it needs to protect you from so it tries to do its job and screams to you to avoid the danger, to wash your hands and protect yourself, to get away! But here's the
problem...
You’ve
brain is wrong! It’s actually doing its job TOO
well…Your brain has wrongly learned that the everyday situations you’re in, and the germs that exist are a far greater threat than they actually are. It’s doing its job TOO well, overprotecting you. It’s trying to protect from what it thinks is a danger by activating what psychologists call the "fight or flight" response, which has been part of our genetic makeup since caveman days. The fight or flight response causes your body to take massive and immediate action to protect itself from danger, and it doesn’t even ask your approval! This reaction exists in the primitive part of your brain we talked about earlier, and it gives you no opportunity to think about or evaluate the situation using logic to decide whether or not the threat it perceives is real or an illusion. And that makes sense doesn’t it? Think about it, when we were living in caves and we heard a twig snap, we didn’t want to wait to think about and decide if what stepped on it was a saber toothed tiger or a bunny, we needed to be ready for ANYTHING – RIGHT AWAY. Even today, when it’s not screwing up and causing mysophobia, the fight or flight response has a good use. Have you ever almost gotten into a car accident? Time seemed to slow down and you reacted without thought, maybe even saving your life. Without the fight or flight response, you could never have reacted that quickly. The problem is that your brain has wrongly given an oncoming car and possible germs on a doorknob the same “threat level”. When you encounter a situation that causes you anxiety and activates this response, hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol immediately surge through your body which causes symptoms such as trembling, racing thoughts, a pounding heart, sweating, the desire to escape, and more. Of course logically you know that this response isn't appropriate when you're not in real danger, so you need to learn how to retrain your brain to respond differently so it doesn't initiate the fight or flight reaction unnecessarily, so you now need to… Learn how to “shut
off” your fear…
Your
mysophobia is what's known as a "conditioned" response.Every time you encounter something you think is dirty or contaminated, or maybe even think about those situations, the primitive part of your mind thinks back to what happened the last time you were in that situation how you responded. It's easy to pull from your memory easily because it left a very strong emotional imprint in your mind (memories with strong emotions behind them are easy to recall and is why you can probably remember where you were when you heard of about 9-11 or the death of a loved one but not the first time you had a grilled cheese sandwich or some other mundane event). Your brain wrongly associates that negative reaction of fear with germs or dirt, and decides that it must be dangerous and a threat, and activates your flight or flight response you learned about earlier. This learning is done by the creation of 'neural pathways" in the brain. Every time you encounter germs in the future and experience more of the same anxiety and fear, you strengthen your brain's false belief that a threat is present and create MORE neural pathways, resulting in a faster and more severe phobic reaction. You actually "condition" yourself to be afraid! Just to be sure I’m not making this up, let’s look at another example of learning, such as how we learn to ride a bicycle. When you first begin to ride, you have to pay very close attention to what you're doing and your riding is awkward as your mind establishes the neural pathways for the balance and coordination of cycling. But soon, as those neural pathways multiply and grow stronger, you hop on your bike and take off pedaling down the street, making hundreds of subtle adjustments constantly without conscious thought. The learned behavior has become automatic, you no longer THINK about riding, your primitive brain takes over and does the work so you can focus on other things. Similarly, as you create more neural pathways in your brain about germs and contamination, you make your phobic reaction more automatic, more deeply rooted in your brain, until that reaction occurs without your even thinking about it. Since your reaction is now occurring at a deeper level, BEFORE it requires logic and reasoning, the secret to overcoming your mysophobia is to scrub away the faulty limiting neural pathways of fear and compulsion and replace them with new neural pathways of your choosing. This is why you may KNOW your reaction doesn’t make sense on a logical level, and why you seem to react so automatically. It’s also why traditional therapies fail so often, they’re trying to address a emotional, automatic response with logical reasoning, it just won’t work! Why should you
listen to me in the first place?
I used to be a lot like you. My fears ruled my life. They decided what I did, what I didn’t do, where I went, and who I went with. Even when I wasn’t afraid, my anxiety always lurked in the background, like a stalker. I was ashamed, embarrassed, felt odd, different, and lost a lot of very good years to my anxiety. My whole world was invaded by fear, and I’ll never get those years back, so believe me when I tell you I know how horrible the struggle is. But life isn’t like that anymore, not by a long shot. As I sit here typing this in my office on a snowy Friday afternoon, it doesn't even seem possible that the person I remember was me. Life is so much easier now and I feel proud of myself, confident and secure instead of ashamed and limited. Germs, doorknobs, shaking hands, and all the things that can cause you so much anxiety are things that you can not even notice anymore after the right treatment. How did I overcome my fear? I'll be honest, it wasn’t easy. What made it so hard and frustrating is that I couldn’t find any good places to turn to for help, there wasn’t anything I found that dealt with what I was experiencing.. Through years of research, reading, trial, and painful error, I learned cutting edge psychological techniques and practices such as cognitive behavioral therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, and others that don’t just help you "cope" with your fears, but can actually eliminated them completely. I assembled all I knew into a comprehensive system and it became what is now known as: How is this
different than other programs for anxiety and fear?
The Panic Puzzle specializes in treating anxiety and specific phobias such as the fear of germs. Conquering the fear of germs is different than overcoming other fears like heights or flying and requires a different approach. You wouldn’t take read a book about traveling to Spain if you were going to Italy and just say, “close enough”, so why would you treat something so impactful as your phobia with a “one size fits all” solution? Many other solutions or therapies will try to teach you to “cope’ with your fear. In my opinion, this is a good first step, but nearly enough and certainly not the goal. If I have a toothache, I don’t want the dentist to teach me to ‘cope” with the pain, I want the tooth pulled! The Panic Puzzle Program focuses on SOLVING the problem, not COPING with it. Is this some sort of
New Age therapy?
Not at all. Trust me, I’ve seen the garbage being offered online, and this isn’t a 3 minute miracle cure. You won’t need to buy any sort of pills, it’s not simply a subliminal CD, and there’s no mystical chant to cure your fear (I wish there were). The Panic Puzzle Program is based on well established therapeutic techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy that are well respected in the psychological community, in fact, I enlisted the aid of a Clinical Psychologist when creating the program to ensure it met the highest standards possible. If you’re looking to end your fear in less than 10 minutes or without any effort on your part, you’re in the wrong place. However, if you can set aside a few minutes a day to actually read and work through the Panic Puzzle Program, I think you’ll be thrilled with the results. How complicated is
it?
Listen,
I’ve been there, I know when you’re living with
fears and anxiety the last thing you need is more stress. The
program is simple, it takes you by the hand and leads you step by step
through precisely what to do. If you can understand what
you’ve been reading so far, you should have no trouble at all
with the program.I already know
everything about mysophobia and have tried everything else, can you
really teach me something new?
I
suppose it’s possible you know everything, but I’ve
read virtually every book available on anxiety, phobia, and fears
written in the past 100 years and have never seen what’s in
the Panic Puzzle Program put together in the same
way. As I write this, I’ve also never had anyone
tell me that they had seen it before either. Will you be the
first? Maybe…but it’s doubtful.Is my fear too bad?
Have I had it too long? What if it doesn’t work for
me?
It
doesn’t matter how bad your fear is, how long
you’ve had it, or how old you are. The techniques
you’ll learn in the program are exactly what helped me and
many others conquer our fear, and I don’t know of any reason
they can’t work for you too.Does that mean I can say you’ll overcome your fear FOR SURE? Of course not. If anyone tells you that, they’re lying and unethical. There are far too many variables for me to know ahead of time what the exact nature and cause of your fear is, and to say without question that you can be helped with the program. The single biggest unknown is the amount of effort YOU put into the program, and that’s something I can’t control, ultimately you hold your cure within you. However, I’m confident that if you put the small amount of effort into the program, and follow it, you can overcome your fear. There’s simply too much evidence for me to think otherwise. But I’ll go one step further… If you try the program and don’t think its right for you, for any reason at all, you can have your money back, no questions asked. I don’t want you to have any reason not to give it a try and turn your life around, so I want you to take 8 weeks to try the program, study it, pull it apart, and see the results. You be the judge, if the results aren’t BETTER than you expected, please ask for a refund and I’ll happily give you one, no hard feelings. If you’re not completely satisfied, I don’t deserve your money. That’s not just a guarantee, that’s a personal promise. The Panic Puzzle Program is the most effective, fastest, and easiest way to overcome your phobias available. Guaranteed. |
