The Scientific Fear Method

1. Examine the situation
     - In my life, it seems that fear is a controlling aspect but I have never really considered what I'm actually afraid of besides the things that don't constantly affect my life, like arachnophobia.

2. Experiment idea
    - It made more sense to me to do something to discover, expose, and (on some level) confront my own fears as opposed to trying to draw out the fears of my peers. I decided to make a video (included at the bottom of the post) and talk about it while it plays.

3. Hypothesises-es-es-es-es-es
    - For me, the most basic outcome is to have a better understanding of what I'm actually afraid of. Hopefully, displaying them and talking about them would lead to me overcoming them, but I'm not convinced that a couple-minute speech would accomplish that task.

    - For others, I fully expect them to not care, and get the impression that I feel my life is much harder/worse/etc. than it really is.

5. Reaction
    - While my mind went "dumb" while I was presenting to the point of not being able to focus on anything other than getting the words out, I was all but dumbfounded to get some applause at the end of the presentation. I don't know if it was pity applause or patronizing applause or legitimate applause, but it was applause. Then I got a nice sense of perspective and a great insight into codependency from Beth.

   - I didn't feel a weight lifting or anything while presenting, nor after. In fact, for the next day or so, I was depressed. I'm not sure if it was from disappointment for not feeling significantly better or because of any number of "reasonable" explanations (weird sleep schedule affecting length of sleep, etc.), but since Wednesday, I have felt better.

6. Analysis
    - The applause was really shocking. In the "best case scenario" I was expecting perhaps a brief discussion from a couple people. Now granted, the only person who talked about what I presented (at least in class; I haven't looked at anyone's reaction blogs to see if I was listed yet) was Beth, but getting applause when we weren't really "doing that" was weird and cool. Perhaps they related to my fears, or perhaps they just felt bad for me.

    - The day-ish depression was not a reaction I was prepared for. I felt like shit for a couple days, but as I type this, I feel better and I do feel a little "free-er" to talk about myself, which is definitely a side-effect of bearing your soul to a group of people without total anonymity. =)

7. Future changes
    - The best change I can think of is to force (or at least request) responses and discussion after presenting, which would help get an idea of how, if at all, it affected people. Also, I need to make sure that the video is paced for speaking-speed as opposed to "inside-your-head-reading" speed.