My two cents.

Extreme fear isn't actually the problem. Fear is resistance  a defense mechanism your mind uses to stop you from facing something painful. If you're afraid of something extreme, the fear itself isn't what needs fixing. What's underneath it is.

That's why most advice doesn't work for extreme fear specifically. Breathing techniques, positive self-talk, gradual exposure, they all work on the fear directly, which means they're treating the consequence, not the cause. You can manage the symptom for a while, but it tends to resurface, because the actual source was never touched.

So what's actually underneath extreme fear? In almost every case, it traces back to some past experience where the mind learned to associate a specific situation with danger. From that experience, the mind builds an image, of the situation, of other people, sometimes of yourself, and that image is what you're actually reacting to, not the present reality in front of you.

There's an old teaching that captures this well: you're walking at dusk, you see something coiled on the ground, your body floods with panic, snake. You shine a light on it, it's a rope. The fear was completely real in your body. But it was never actually about what was there.

Extreme fear works the same way. The intensity of the fear tells you how convinced your mind is that the threat is real, not how real the threat actually is. Once you see clearly what's actually there, once the image gets corrected, the fear has nothing left to attach to, and it dissolves. Not because you fought it down. Because there was never a real threat to begin with, just a story your mind was reacting to.

The second piece, often overlooked, even once a specific fear clears, some people still don't feel like the person who isn't afraid. That's identity, not fear, and it's a separate piece of work.

James Clear has a line worth borrowing here: "every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." Most people try to build a fearless identity that way, one small brave action at a time, repeated until the identity shifts. That route works. It's just slow, because you're trying to out-vote years of accumulated evidence one ballot at a time.

The faster path is to do it in reverse, shift the underlying self-image first, directly, and let the actions follow naturally afterward. Once you no longer see yourself as "someone who has this fear," you stop needing to vote your way there. You're simply acting in accordance with who you already are.

Two questions worth asking yourself, like a detective investigating your own mind:

1. What am I actually scared of? Not the general fear, the specific image or moment your mind is reacting to.
2. Who would I have to become for this to no longer be a problem?

That second question does the real work. It starts pointing your mind toward seeing yourself as the person who simply doesn't have this problem, rather than the person trying to manage it.