“… the best methods for tranquilizing fear and panic are to acquire much knowledge and information of fearsome things (to discover that they are not really harmful) and to force oneself to repeatedly expose one’s hearing and sight to noxious things, though disliking the practice, until one’s senses are familiarized by them. In tolerating the pain of this exercise one is in fact training oneself like the riding animal forced by the whip to move again and again near the thing it is scared of until it comes used to it and loses its fear.”
Abu Zayd al-Balkhi - Sustenance of the Soul - The Cognitive Behavior Therapy of a Ninth Century Physician - Malik Badri