When Fear Becomes a Habit – How the Brain Can Learn Safety Again
- Brainz Magazine
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Written by Sharon Clare, Clinical Hypnotherapist
Sharon Clare is an accredited Solution-Focused Clinical Hypnotherapist. She is the founder of Sharon Clare Hypnotherapy, which helps professional women overcome stress, burnout, and sleep struggles using neuroscience-backed approaches to rewire how they think, feel, and respond to life. She also specialises in easing fears of surgery.
Hidden fear responses like bladder urgency, swallowing anxiety, and food avoidance are far more common than people realise. And because they are learned in moments of stress, they can also be unlearned, safely, gently, through the brain’s own neuroplasticity.
Anna’s story: When the body remembers fear
Anna had built a life she was proud of, meaningful work, good friends, a home she loved. From the outside, she looked calm and capable. What no one knew was how carefully she managed every meal.
For years, she had chosen foods based on texture, softness, and how safe they felt to swallow. She avoided eating in front of others. She always carried water. She checked menus before going anywhere, and often cancelled at the last minute anyway.
Logically, she knew she could swallow. Nothing medical was wrong. But each time she tried to eat something unfamiliar or slightly firm, her throat tightened and her chest fluttered. A wave of fear rose, fast and without warning. Her mind whispered, what if I choke? What if something happens? What if I panic and can’t get help?
This pattern began years earlier, during a difficult time in her life when she felt overwhelmed and alone. One day, her body reacted to stress by tightening her throat. Swallowing felt hard for a moment, and she panicked. Her body learned a rule to keep her safe:
“If you avoid those foods and stay cautious, you’ll be okay.”
It worked once.
And the primitive brain, always trying to protect us, kept the rule.
Decades later, Anna still lived by it. Not because she chose to, but because her nervous system had not yet learned that life had changed and she was safe now.
Anna’s story may sound unusual, but the mechanism behind it is common and deeply human, a stress-conditioned response that started as protection and became habit. The body remembers safety strategies long after we have outgrown them. And the same brain that learned to protect us can learn to stand down again.
When protection becomes habit
Stress-conditioned responses do not begin with choice. They begin with survival.
The primitive brain learns fast, especially in childhood or during periods of ongoing stress. Sometimes, that moment is obvious, a shock, an accident, a period of distress. But often, it is subtle, a childhood filled with tension, unpredictability, or the sense of needing to stay on alert. The primitive brain does not distinguish between big and small traumas. It simply learns, when I do this, I feel safer. If a behaviour reduces feeling threatened, even once, the brain can store it as a safety rule.
Not consciously. Not deliberately. Quietly, beneath awareness. Over years, these responses can become automatic, like a reflex. The intellectual mind knows there is no danger, but the body reacts first. It tightens, scans, plans, avoids. The sensible brain arrives late to the conversation, I do not need to feel like this, but the survival brain has already sounded the alarm.
This is not weakness. It is conditioning. And it is reversible. Because what the brain learns, it can relearn.
How these patterns can look in everyday life
When people think of fear, they often picture racing thoughts or worry. But fear lives in the body too, sometimes in ways that make no logical sense.
I see many clients whose bodies have learned to react as if danger is still present, even when life is calm on the outside. These patterns can feel confusing, embarrassing, or impossible to explain. Yet once you understand the neuroscience, they make perfect sense.
A few common examples include:
Toilet-related fears, needing to go frequently, avoiding travel, or constantly scanning for bathrooms.
Fear of swallowing or gagging, often linked to a time when breathing or eating felt unsafe.
Avoidance of certain foods or textures, after illness, choking, or distress, the brain tags that food as a threat.
Breathing anxieties, fear of tight spaces, masks, or situations that restrict breath.
Sleep-related fears, struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep because the mind equates rest with loss of control.
Fear of vomiting, fainting, or blushing in public, the body anticipating humiliation or danger.
On the surface, these behaviours can look like habits. But underneath, they are safety strategies the nervous system has not yet retired.
Once we understand this, the question changes from what is wrong with me to what did my body learn, and how can I teach it something new?
Phase one: Safety and understanding
The first part of our work is always reassurance and education. Most people have spent years thinking they should be able to just stop it. Understanding the brain removes that pressure. We talk about stress buckets, how constant worry, high standards, overthinking, and self-criticism fill the system until a tiny trigger causes an overflow. Knowledge matters.
When someone sees their response as physiology rather than failure, cortisol drops and the nervous system immediately begins to settle. We then notice what is already working. Times when things feel slightly easier. Small moments of coping. This begins to re-engage the intellectual brain and activate the chemistry of progress, serotonin, dopamine, and hope.
Alongside this, clients begin using breathing techniques or listening to their relaxation audio. Not to switch off emotions, but to show the body what calm feels like again. Each repetition is a small step toward safety becoming familiar. Early on, people often say, for the first time, this makes sense. That is where change starts.
Phase two: Teaching the body to stand down
Next, we help the nervous system practise calm in real time.
This stage focuses on two things:
1. Calm physiology
Slow breath, longer exhale, and muscle softening activate the vagus nerve and reduce threat signals. Research from Harvard Health shows that paced breathing supports nervous-system regulation and quietens the stress response.
2. Kind inner dialogue
We gently shift internal language. From, why am I like this, to, my body tried to protect me, and it can stand down now. Self-compassion is not sentiment. It is neurobiology. Research links it with lower cortisol and improved emotional regulation.
This is where clients begin to trust their bodies again, not through force, but through repeated evidence that calm is possible.
Phase three: Rewriting the old alarm
When the foundations are steady, we gently update the old learning. In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, we often use the Rewind Technique, a safe, controlled process that helps the emotional brain review old experiences without reliving them. Distance, calm, neutrality.
The brain sees the memory differently. The threat file updates. The alarm eases. Clients often describe the change not as dramatic, but as relief, I do not get pulled back there anymore. Old pathways soften. New ones strengthen.
Phase four: Living forward with confidence
Finally, we help the brain practise life without the fear response.
We explore questions like:
What will life look like when this is behind you?
What is the first situation you will say yes to again?
We rehearse success. Anchor calm. Strengthen the identity of someone who can cope, because they already are.
This is where clients start noticing real-world changes:
a meeting they did not dread,
a trip they did not avoid,
a night out without planning exits.
The three C’s, Calm, Confidence, and Control, begin to feel natural again.
Why this works
People often ask why change can happen relatively quickly. It is because we work with the brain, not against it.
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy combines:
Neuroscience and education, reducing fear through understanding
Solution-focused work, strengthening the brain’s forward circuits
Hypnosis, practising calm in a state where the subconscious can learn
This approach is recognised for safe, evidence-based practice by:
It is not about going back into the past. It is about giving the body what it always needed, safety, consistency, and calm, and allowing the nervous system to update itself.
A way back to yourself
If you have lived with a fear-based habit, there is nothing wrong with you. Your nervous system simply learned to protect you in a moment when you needed it most. And it can learn something new. With the right support, the brain can move from survival to freedom, from protecting life to living it.
Read more from Sharon Clare
Sharon Clare, Clinical Hypnotherapist
Sharon Clare is an accredited Solution-Focused Clinical Hypnotherapist specialising in mindfulness and stress management. She combines her expertise with decades of leadership experience in the NHS and not-for-profit sector to support her professional clients. Leading a social care organisation through COVID was an immense responsibility that deepened her understanding of stress and resilience, She also has a passion for helping people overcome fears around surgery and medical procedures. She volunteers at her local cancer care centre. When she's not helping others, Sharon can be found sea swimming year-round on the beautiful Northern Irish coast, a ritual that continues to keep stress at bay. Her mission is helping women thrive.
