The brain works by making connections between pieces of information - stored in your brain and new ones from new experiences.

It is these connections, or associations as they are sometimes called, that determine how you think and therefore how you feel about any event that is happening. This thinking and feeling ultimately drives your behaviour or actions.

For example, if you're sitting in the garden and hear a buzzing you may feel compelled to get up and run as fast as you can towards the safety of the house, yelling and gasping for air as you go. 

That is assuming of course that a buzzing brings forward an association of wasps, stinging, dying of shock and all the other terrors a wasp phobic may have.

These associations may have been created through you being stung at some point, or a familiy member panicking and you learned from that or it may just be a film you saw like "Killer Bee's".

Soon you'll come to make further associations to this set of connections like, picnics are bad as they attract wasps, summer is bad as it means picnics and so on and so forth. Or rather you're brain will make them for you. It's really useful like that, making connections between all this information. It has to you see. It  just can't leave a piece of information floating around willy nilly with nothing to tie it to. So it makes associations. You can help if you like control over these matters - but if you can't be bothered or didn't know you could interfere them your brain will work away tirelessly and invisibly in the background.

Soon you'll be afraid to venture outside whenever the sun shines and la de da ..... life just got a whole lot more fearful and a lot less fulfilling and exciting.  Roll on the Winter I hear you cry.

The good news is that you can break the connections and reassemble them by creating a new experience and tying things together in a more helpful way. But the really good news is that you can do this in your head by simply imagining how it might be if you stood your ground and saw that the wasp was just going about its daily business and actually had no regard for you whatsoever.

Or you could imagine a conversation with it,"Oi. you", "Who me?", said in a slightly buzzy little voice, "Yes you in the loud jumper, what are you doing in my garden?", "Er. I'm just a little wasp passing through on my way home. The wife and kids are expecting me. We're going out tonight. It's my birthday.".

"Are you going to swat me?", "I really hate that". "No, of course not. What do you take me for?". "Have a nice birthday party. Bye".