Tool 14 · Exposure
Bravery Ladder Builder
List the situations you avoid. Rate each on difficulty (0–10). Climb them in order, smallest first. The tool tracks what you've done and quietly points at the next rung.
Add a rung
Specific situations work better than categories. "Reply to my sister's email" beats "family stuff".
Your ladder
Ordered easiest to hardest. Click a rung to mark it complete.
No rungs yet. Add your first one above — even the smallest counts.
Manage rungs
Reorder by changing the difficulty. Delete with the trash icon.
What this actually does
Exposure ladders come from behavioural therapy for phobias and OCD (Marks, 1987; Craske et al., 2014). The idea is simple and well-supported: anxiety drops faster when you face a feared situation repeatedly in a graded way, than when you avoid it.
This tool isn't a clinical ladder. It's a memory aid and a forcing function. The difficulty ratings are yours; the ladder is the order you commit to. The next-rung suggestion is a small nudge — feel free to ignore it.
Who it's for
Anyone whose anxiety shows up as avoidance — of phone calls, of certain people, of certain rooms, of certain conversations. Especially useful in the first weeks of working on social anxiety, health anxiety, OCD, or panic disorder.
It is less useful for purely cognitive anxiety (intrusive thoughts without an action attached) — see the Thought Record for that.
Limitations
Ladders work when you actually climb them. The most common failure mode is staying at the top (rating 9) for too long and never doing the easy rungs. Do the small ones first, even if they feel embarrassingly small. Also: if a rung triggers a panic attack that doesn't resolve in 30 minutes, step back down and consult a clinician.
This tool does not provide exposure with response prevention (ERP), which is the standard of care for OCD. If your avoidance pattern is intrusive-thought-driven, please see a clinician.
FAQ
Why 0–10 and not "easy/medium/hard"?
Numbers force you to commit to an order, which is what makes the ladder useful. "Easy/medium/hard" lets you say everything is hard.
How is "done" defined?
Your call, but be honest. "I emailed my sister once" is a rung. "I thought about emailing her" is not. If you've done it more than once across different days, mark it done — repeat exposure is the point.
Where does my data go?
localStorage on this device only. Nothing is uploaded. Use Export to download a .txt you can keep.
What if my hardest rung is genuinely impossible?
Leave it on the ladder. Don't climb it until you've cleared the easier ones. Many people find that once they've done rungs 4–6, what looked like a 9 is now a 6, and it gets redrawn.
What are the common mistakes when using Bravery Ladder Builder?
Most common mistakes come down to four habits: entering 20 when the field expects 0.2 because the field is a percentage; leaving a field blank and accepting the default without checking what it stands for; changing one input and reading a result that was calculated before the change; and quoting the output as an exact figure when the page describes it as a reference estimate. Press calculate again after any edit, and treat the number as a reference point rather than a final answer.Advertisement