We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

Fear expands to fill the space where information should be. What you have never looked at directly becomes whatever your imagination needs it to be, and imagination is generous with worst cases. Once you know the actual shape of a thing, it usually turns out to be smaller, more specific, and more manageable than the version you were carrying.

Name the thing you have been avoiding and get one concrete fact about it: the real number, the actual process, what happens next. Not the whole picture, just one fact. Dread rarely survives contact with detail.