Rational vs Irrational Fear | @caroline-cavanagh | The Anxiety Alchemist

15 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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Caroline Cavanagh explains the difference between rational fear, which protects us from real danger, and irrational fear like arachnophobia, where you know the spider is harmless but panic anyway. Hypnotherapy works by finding where the fear started in your subconscious and removing it at the root.

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Rational versus irrational fear, and I'm sure we can all relate to that. So let's talk about rational fear first. That's standing on the edge of a cliff looking down. That's dangerous. So your subconscious mind that's responsible for keeping you safe is going, move away from the edge, just move away from the edge. It's a rational fear because it's dangerous. However, The most common phobia in the Western world is a fear of spiders, and if a little spider is running across the kitchen floor in a UK kitchen, it's not going to hurt you. And logically, adults know that, but the irrational fear says you need to get away from that creepy crawly and probably never even go in that kitchen again, just in case. it's there. And that's where hypnotherapy can be really, really powerful because it helps rationalise what caused that irrational fear by getting down to the roots of it and effectively pulling those roots up. Irrational fears can actually be very, very quickly dissipated.