You’re well into your adult years and you’ve got most of your life together. You’ve acquired a place to live, gotten yourself gainfully employed, and you even have some stable relationships with people you care about. All in all, you’re doing well for yourself. With that said, you can’t help but feel overwhelming anxiety at the thought of making a phone call to schedule an appointment, trekking to the dentist, or even swimming.

Being vulnerable and open can be extremely difficult, regardless of how many candles are on your birthday cake. Fortunately, there are ways to work through it. You can get through an entire workday and contribute to the good of greater society, but scheduling a haircut freaks you out. There are several reasons for the anxiety and fear that can come with social interactions, certain specific activities, or commitment-focused situations.

As a child, you soak up everything around you without adult logic and rationalization available. Thus, if you made a phone call to schedule something as a kid with your parent listening over your shoulder correcting your grammar or coaching you with exactly the words to say, you may have some fear about messing it up. Similarly, if something happened at the dentist when you were young, there’s a great chance that the fear is residual.

Working through fear and anxiety starts with pinpointing the event or circumstance that created it. If you can understand that you’re afraid to make an appointment because you’re afraid to somehow do it incorrectly, you can mitigate that by telling yourself that there’s really no wrong way to schedule the appointment, regardless of what you mother or father told you when you were a child. As an adult, you can retrain your brain to acclimate to your current reality versus your past circumstances. You don’t have to plunge in headfirst, either — there are lots of ways to get professional assistance for working through your fears. From gentle touch dentists to self-help books like Conquer Your Fear of Water , you’re not alone.

This is easier said than done, and won’t happen quickly. The process is slow and often involves affirmations, statements of truth, and practice. Getting as comfortable as possible with every aspect of you helps every single kind of anxiety and fear. The better you know yourself, the more confident you become. With confidence comes certainty in decision-making, which opposes and ultimately erases fear and anxiety.

Learning to work through anxiety is a personal process; there is no right way to go about it. By coming to understand yourself as a person in your current reality, you encourage the fear to fade.