Your Questions Answered: What Is A Phobia?

Many people confuse the idea of a phobia with that of a fear. Although the words have similar meanings, it is not the case that every fear is a phobia. Indeed, not every phobia is strictly a fear – in some cases it may be an irrational and/or intense dislike of something – as is frequently the case with homophobia or xenophobia. To be strictly accurate, a phobia is the intense and irrational dislike or fear of something, which prevents the sufferer from behaving or thinking clearly in the presence of the thing that they fear.

In severe cases, even the idea of the thing that they fear can be a major problem for the sufferer of a phobia. Not everyone who is scared of flying, for example, can justifiably be termed a pteromerhanophobe (Pteromerhanophobia is the technical and medical term, but for understandable reasons people tend to stick with the phrase “fear of flying”). Some people don’t like flying, and get nervous every time they fly, but someone who suffers from pteromerhanophobia is not only scared when they get on a plane, but terrified the moment they know that they will have to – and in extreme cases, even by the mere idea of doing so.

A phobia is a debilitating fear which causes real anxiety about a situation and can do so even when that situation is not present. It is very different from a simple fear which can be logically defeated or worked around. For example, if someone expressed a fear that their house was going to be flooded by high rain fall, they could be reassured by the information that the local rainfall for their area would be nowhere near high enough to affect their home. However, if someone has a phobia related to dogs, needles, or the number thirteen – all common phobias – logical exercises will present no help in getting them to set their fears aside.

There are countless situations where perfectly well-meaning friends try to help phobia sufferers by telling them facts which they think will make the sufferer look at things differently. That is not how a phobia works. You can tell someone that they are far more likely to be killed in a car crash than in a plane crash, and if they are a pteromerhanophobe then they are vastly unlikely to take any consolation from that fact, even if they do accept it as the truth.

Fears can be worked around and, if they are perfectly reasonable fears, can be avoided. A phobia is a psychological condition which bypasses the logical centers of the brain and can only be defeated with effort and persistence. Often the best approach is through exposure therapy, where the sufferer is invited, or even forced, to face their fear and come through it. Eventually, someone with a fear of dogs can be persuaded that they have no need to be scared – but cajoling them and telling them that their fear is silly is not the way around it. Fear is a natural and useful emotion – it is when it becomes a block to rational thinking and everyday life that it becomes a phobia, and needs to be addressed.

Phobias and Their Medical Names

There are more phobias in this world than most people would think. It is important to note that for every person, their own fears are particular to them and while people in general may feel that the fear is somewhat bizarre – or even phoney – that the person suffering from the phobia has no choice but to take it seriously. After all, it is this fear that is causing them so much strife that they have had to take big steps to avoid it.

Often, a person who keeps themselves to themselves may be marked out by those who know of them as being a little bit weird, or having something to hide. They may in actual fact suffer from Anthropophobia, a condition which causes them to fear being in the company of other people. It is a form of social anxiety, and a very real phobia, as are Androphobia and Gynophobia, fears of men and of women respectively. All of these conditions are often mistaken or misunderstood for rudeness or aloofness, and in some cases sexism. In fact, the sufferer simply has a very real fear of people, or at least a certain group of people.

An increasingly common fear, and one which is actually frequently exploited by makers of horror films and TV series, is Catoptrophobia. Meaning the fear of mirrors, or of one’s own reflection, this condition can occur for a number of reasons, including in many cases the very real fear that when you look in the mirror, you will see more than your own reflection staring back at you. This is a fear that can seriously infringe on a person’s activity, as they are reluctant to go out due to the perceived necessity of looking in the mirror while getting ready.

The same problem may befall a sufferer of Decidophobia, the fear of making decisions. Sufferers of this phobia may well not even know that it is a genuine condition, and may be mistaken for simply indecisive people or, worse, for someone who leaves other people to take the flak when a decision goes wrong. In actual fact, what a decidophobe often fears most of all is the consequences of the wrong decisions – not the criticism arising from the consequences, but that a serious and even fatal occurrence could arise from even the most banal choice.

There are numerous other phobias, and among them are Pyrophobia (fire), Emetophobia (vomiting), Panphobia (a fear of everything, or an all-encompassing fear) and perhaps most confusingly, Phobophobia (a fear of having a phobia). What every condition mentioned in this article has in common is that they have been identified and diagnosed by medical professionals, and present to their sufferers a serious degree of fear and concern which, left unchecked, can ruin a person’s life. They can also be affected by an individual looking to exploit the ambiguity that has been allowed to arise with regard to phobias. However, it is important to give people the benefit of the doubt in this respect – a real phobia can be a very damaging thing to live with.

Complete Guide: How To Beat A Phobia

Phobias are complex things, and it is virtually impossible to trace the absolute cause of one at first glance. Many people will categorise a phobia under the umbrella of mental illness, and although it may not be strictly accurate in all cases, it does have some resonance with sufferers of a serious phobia who have also dealt with mental illness. Just as depression can never totally be traced to a specific experience, but rather a collection of factors, phobias tend to be derived from all over the place – meaning that treating them with absolute rigor needs to be approached from more than one angle.

It is accepted in most cases that phobias are caused by some mix, in greater or lesser quantities, of genetics, brain activity, environment and influence from outside. These four factors are quite varied, although they will overlap in places. Getting to the bottom of a phobia and treating it successfully involves working out just how much of the individual’s condition derives from each of these factors. It may be a fairly equal split between them all, and it many be that one of the factors is more dominant. This is often something that can only be decided by a psychologist.

Some phobias which are heavily prompted by the genetic and chemical side of things will be best treated by medication. This is something that must be decided by a doctor, as there can be powerful side effects from the use of medication. The prescription of medication is intended to alter the levels of certain brain chemicals and make the sufferer less prone to attacks from their phobia. Side effects may include lethargy, anhedonia (where the sufferer feels unable to be happy), and affected appetite. For these reasons, medication should not be doled out freely.

Very often, the only way to truly get on top of a phobia is exposure therapy. This is something that, not unlike medication, needs to be approached with care. The idea of exposure therapy, as the name suggests, is that the sufferer is exposed to that which they fear. For example, someone who is afraid of spiders will be exposed – in a gradual way – to spiders. This will usually be something which is approached from a very basic, secure level before building up into more challenging stages.

Taking the example of arachnophobia, it will be necessary to see at what level the sufferer’s phobia stands. For someone with a crippling fear that can be triggered by the mere mention of spiders, they may be required to speak with a therapist about spiders first. Then they may be required to look at photographs of spiders, read books about them, observe one in a glass case and observe one in a more open setting. This may go all the way to asking the sufferer to handle a spider.

In many ways, the treatment of a phobia is about learning to deal with the fear rather than banish it. It is perfectly logical to have a fear of something that might harm you, but illogical to change your lifestyle to avoid something that is still essentially unlikely to hurt you. Exposure therapy is very instructive in giving people the ability to see the difference.

The Golden Question: Why Do Phobias Occur?

One of the most frequently used words when describing a phobia is “irrational”. Over time, that word has taken on a specific connotation which implies some kind of failing on the part of the person to whom it is applied. It is unfortunate in a way that the idea of a phobia is linked in so closely with the idea of a sufferer being almost childish in the way they behave. It seems to imply that they have chosen to act in an immature manner, when really they would like nothing more than for the feeling of fear to go away.

It is often hard to trace a phobia to its root cause. We can make guesses and be reasonably confident that they are correct, but to assume in so doing that we have diagnosed the cause and made a major step to curing the phobia would be a gross error. In actual fact, phobias are often the result of a complex series of events which may be seemingly unconnected. You can believe that a person is scared of bees because they were once stung by one, but you may miss the fact that they read an article about a time when a single bee sting killed an unfortunate individual (who happened to have an allergy).

Some phobias are more prominent than others. This makes for an interesting question – as most phobias are to do with external factors, and given the huge number of external factors we all see in a given day, in a week, and over the course of a year or even a lifetime, why are certain things more prone to be the subject of a phobia? If we rule out potentially dangerous things with their own instinct such as dogs, snakes and spiders, we still have things such as the dark, flying and enclosed spaces. While all of these things can, logically, be extrapolated to be contributory factors to dangers, they are also entities which have no risk in and of themselves.

We are scared of the dark because we fear that something may lurk within the dark. We are scared of flying because we have seen that sometimes a plane crashes. We are afraid of enclosed spaces because we fear that they may not open up again. None of these fears are strictly rational. If we cannot see something lurking in the dark, then anything that may be lurking will be similarly impaired. Planes crash less often than just about any mode of transport, and there are few confined spaces in which you can become trapped against your will indefinitely.

Phobias are able to thrive, in many ways, because of the imagination of the person who suffers from them. although being imaginative has many important advantages and can be hugely useful in many jobs, its free expanses within the mind mean we are unfortunately prone to fear things which do not merit our fear.

Five Strange & Bizarre Phobias

For those who do not have a phobia, there is often some comedy to be had in looking at the things that people are irrationally afraid of. However, it is important to bear in mind that a phobia is not an affected lifestyle choice, rather something that genuinely causes problems for the sufferer, and to them it is no laughing matter. Some of the following phobias, however, may surprise you, and one of them is, in fact, fake. Bear in mind that to the people who suffer from the genuine ones, mocking their fear is neither big nor clever. Finding it curious, though, is not.

Do you know any Pteronophobia sufferers? This is the very real fear of being tickled by a feather. For many, it is fair to assume, the real strangeness of this fear is the specificity of it. a fear of being tickled is quite understandable, and a fear of feathers is reasonable enough. But combining the two makes for an interesting question. Is it only feathers that you are scared of being tickled by? What about something that looks like a feather?

Linonophobia is another one that might surprise a few people. It is the medical name for a fear of string. Bearing in mind how often in life you will come into contact with something that has string in it, this must be a hard one to deal with. It is an absolutely genuine phobia, too, and one which is understandable, after a fashion. String, after all, can get tangled and can be a hazard in some situations. It seems strange that it has its own phobia, but tell that to a linonophobe.

The really unlucky linonophobe might find that they also have a touch of Koumpounophobia to make matters still worse. This is the medical title for the absolutely genuine fear of buttons. Scientists are, as of this moment, still not entirely certain why the sufferer has such a fear of something so specific, but sufferers have said that it is mostly to do with the feel of buttons, and that plastic ones are apparently much worse than the larger, metallic ones that you would find on a pair of jeans.

Lutraphobia? That is the term for an irrational fear of otters. For all the ailurophobes and cynophobes out there, a person who is scared of otters may seem quite bizarre. but if you live in a heavily wooded area next to a river, then the chances are you have occasion to see an otter up close more often than the majority of people – and therefore it is reasonable that some people would develop such a fear.

The final one is Anatidaephobia. This is the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you. One can only imagine the terrors that a sufferer goes through, checking the windows at night and getting their friends to complete a sweep of the nearby area to make sure that the duck does not have a clear line of view. It is perhaps reassuring to know, then, that in this case there is nothing to worry about. Anatidaephobia does not exist, and was in fact the fictitious subject of a drawing by the surreal cartoonist Gary Larson.

Five Medical Phobias

Of all the things to have a phobia about, a health issue has to be one of the most upsetting. The human body and mind, as well as being strongly interconnected, are also the focus of many things that can potentially go wrong. Although most of us will rarely if ever have to go through any serious medical difficulty, that doesn’t stop us being afraid. As well as being afraid, we may be excessively cautious in seeking to avoid such conditions – and this can seriously infringe upon how we live our lives.

One of the most prominent health-related phobias in Tomophobia. This condition is the irrational or morbid fear of surgery and operations. Of course, there is plenty of reason why one would be frightened of surgical procedures, or at least not welcome the idea of having to have one. There is a difference between a phobia of something and a distaste for the idea of it. People who suffer from tomophobia, however, will go to great lengths not to have surgery – which may include refusing point-blank to have surgery which may save their lives.

Fear of a medical procedure is not limited to the specific process of surgery, either. There are many, many people who are frightened of vaccines. Fairly self-explanatory, the title for this phobia is Vaccinophobia. Again, there is a very rational explanation as to why people may be afraid of vaccination. There have been times in the past when people have become very ill as a result of having a vaccination that was intended to give them immunity against a certain condition, but in fact brought on an illness. However, there are medical reasons why this happens, and these can often be identified by doctors. This will be enough to assuage many people’s fears, but for a vaccinophobe will be utterly inadequate.

Injuries and illness are always something that one will want to avoid, and we have our own safety and anti-contamination procedures to make sure these fates do not befall us. However, even these procedures are often not enough to convince someone that they are safe from illness and injury. Traumatophobia, the fear of injury, and Nosophobia, the fear of contracting an illness, are often enough to render a sufferer terrified – stopping them from leaving the house for fear of contamination, and from moving around in case they suffer an injury.

Many people are also concerned about X-rays. Although there is still no more certain way of knowing whether you have broken a bone or sustained a similar injury, there are many who will simply refuse to have an X-ray. The fear of X-rays, and also the fear of radiation – which is a major part of some people’s fear – is known as Radiophobia.

All of these conditions, if allowed to flourish, can lead to a sufferer having restrictions placed upon their life which are hard to deal with and hard to work around. This is where something stops being a fear and becomes a phobia. A phobia infringes upon a sufferer’s life in a way that simple fear cannot.

Exposure Therapy – A Useful Weapon Against Your Phobias

When you are very young, and a wasp flies into the room where you are sitting, you may very well jump off your seat and run away in terror. You have heard, after all, that these things sting you, and when that happens it really hurts. Knowing that you don’t want to get hurt, you duck and cover, naturally. It is usually at that point that a kindly family member tries to console you with the words “Don’t worry! It’s more scared of you than you are of it!”. Which, obviously, is completely untrue.

When you have a phobia, the slightest exposure to the object of your fears can have you reeling with terror. It is fairly common to have a fear of stinging insects because, well… they sting. Not only that, but they can fly and you often do not see them until it’s too late. As a consequence, it is very easy to get stung by an insect – although many people go through life and never have it happen to them. so when a wasp or a bee appears in the scene, the accepted wisdom for a child is to get out of the way.

What exposure therapy teaches us is that this is entirely the wrong way to go about things. Of course, when you are a child, you are not really disposed to listen to someone who tells you that you should face what you are scared of. Why would you be? the thing is trying to attack you! But as time goes on it becomes clear that in order to deal with your fears, you need to get real. You cannot live in a world without wasps, so you need to be able to live comfortably with the possibility of one coming near you.

Exposure therapy teaches us – in as much as the concept can be squeezed down into a simple phrase – that what we really fear is fear itself. We know, deep down, that a wasp is not going to do really serious harm to us, because in order to do so it would need to stay still for some time – long enough, usually, to be squashed. What we really fear is the torment, the anticipation that we are going to be stung, and we are not going to like it.

Exposure therapy teaches us that we can look at a wasp and think “it is only a wasp”. We start by simply looking at pictures, and realising that the picture cannot harm us. Then we observe their movement. Obviously, as they are flying insects, we cannot hold a wasp, but we can observe them, and read about them, to find out that as much as a wasp sting might initially hurt, they are largely harmless when compared to other things. The crux of exposure therapy is that, by being forced to observe that which scares us, we realize that on balance, it is something we do not need to be scared of.

Acrophobia: The Fear of Heights

One of the most common fears known to man, and one of the most consistently misnamed, is the fear of heights. Incredibly often, when fear of heights is mentioned, people will say “Ah, yes. Vertigo.”. They will be wrong to do so, because vertigo is not in fact the fear of heights. Although it is often caused by a fear of heights, vertigo is actually a physical sensation that makes someone feel as though they are spinning when they are not. The correct term for the phobia which is caused by heights is in fact Acrophobia.

It was felt for a long time that the reason for acrophobia was that sufferers associated high places with an unpleasant experience involving heights as a child, or to an incident they had heard of. Recent studies however suggest that this is not strictly true, and in actual fact that acrophobia is one of the phobias which is actually innate. We – or some of us, anyway – suffer from acrophobia because our evolution has taught us that heights have negative connotations.

In the present day, there is little or no reason why anyone who has not taken the decision to do so themselves should ever be in a position where there is a specific danger from the height they are at. Of course, height in and of itself poses no primary danger. That is to say that 1860 feet of height will not kill us, but if we fall from it, the fall is likely to – and if that doesn’t do it, then the landing is likely to finish the job. However, as cities and towns have come to be built in the most accessible places, there are few of us who cannot avoid being at such a height.

That, of course, is far from the full story. A phobia does not cease to be a problem because you remove yourself from the situation in which is might directly affect you. A phobia is an irrational fear after all. People who suffer from severe acrophobia may be affected if they hear a work colleague talk about their holiday, where they went on to the observation deck at the CN Tower and looked down. Even the thought of gargantuan (and comparatively small) heights can be problematic to someone with acrophobia. Then there is the part of a phobia which can be even more destructive – it makes us change our behavior.

Say you are fresh out of college and applying for jobs to put your newly-gained diploma to work for you. You strike out with the first couple of applications, and then you get a letter inviting you for an interview. It’s your dream job, it’s the culmination of your study, it’s on the 11th floor. Because you have become conditioned to avoiding heights, you may feel that you cannot attend the interview or take the job. This is how acrophobia and many other phobias really infringe upon a person’s life – by forcing changes in behavior which, if unchecked, can become all-encompassing. This is why exposure therapy may well be necessary to break down your phobia.

Five Common Phobias

It might not be strictly accurate to say that everyone has at least one phobia, but most of us can certainly admit to having a fear which is based in little or nothing more than the fear itself. Although you may look at the friend who is terrified of buttons and wonder “What on earth is scary about that?”, looking at your own fears might show you that, while there may be rational and irrational fears, a fear is a fear nonetheless, and its rationale makes scarce difference to the feeling of the sufferer.

Anyway, most of us have at least one largely irrational fear. For example, you yourself may not be a sufferer of Acrophobia, but you probably know someone who is. It is the fear of heights. Think about it logically, and heights cannot really do much to you (it’s falling from them you need to look out for). Even when inside a building with extremely strong walls and windows, there are many of us who will tremble in fear when we look out to see a drop of ten stories (and less, in many cases). Although there is scant likelihood of acutally falling, it still scares us. Understandable? Yes. Rational? Not strictly.

Claustrophobia is a very, very common fear. Indeed people who are not specifically diagnosed with it will often refer to feeling claustrophobic or a “claustrophobic situation”. Sometimes all they mean is that they felt a little uncomfortable – but for many sufferers, claustrophobia ia so real and so severe that it makes life very difficult indeed. Literally the fear of enclosed spaces, claustrophobia is for many sufferers the fear of what might happen due to their confinement – often suffocation is a major fear – and sufferers frequently have panic attacks at the mere idea of getting in a lift or sitting in a locked room.

Nyctophobia is a word that is seldom used, but a concept that is starkly familiar to most of us. The fear of the dark is something most people have as children and, while we are expected to “grow out of it”, not everyone has the good fortune to overcome it as easily as that. As with many fears, it is not so much the fear of things being dark as the idea of what may be hidden in it. As children we are likely to fear a bogeyman (literal or figurative), and may want to sleep with a light on. As we grow older this fear may go away, but it will not always do so. Victims of burglary may find that they develop nyctophobia.

A familiar and understandable fear of needlesand injections affects many of us. Trypanophobia is very real and often arises from the anticipation of pain or contamination from a hyperdomic needle. Even when we have seen the needle sterilised, and we have suffered considerably worse pain than a needle gives, many of us will faint at the sight of a needle which is set to be jabbed into our arm (or wherever else).

And, of course, there is Agoraphobia - the fear of open spaces, as it is known to many people. More accurately, agoraphobics fear being trapped in a situation from which there is no easy or visible means of escape – which does often apply to busy city centers, airports and so forth. This can be enough to trigger a panic attack in someone for whom ferocious dogs, spiders and sharp instruments hold no fear.

Do any of the above affect you? If so, then you can probably understand why a friend’s “bizarre” phobia is no less real for being rare.

Five Animal Phobias

Among the most common phobias, a fear of a specific animal can seriously infringe upon the life of an individual. As children, we are often scared of animals because we suspect they are liable to attack us. Even the most docile of the breed can be a worry to us, but as we grow older we usually come to the realization that next door’s spaniel, for example, is no more likely to attack us than a rabbit would be. Phobias by their nature are, however, irrational, and if you are scared of something, it’s not just something you can get over simply by logic.

Ailurophobia is the fear of cats. To many people this may seem a bizarre one. As cats are most commonly compared with dogs in keeping with their standing as domestic pets, people will often wonder why someone who likes dogs is actually scared of cats. They are generally smaller than dogs, they do not bark loudly and aggressively, and they are naturally reluctant to place themselves in the personal space of someone they don’t know.

However, this reticence can be seen by some people as something to back up their fear – a sign that the cat is less social and therefore potentially more dangerous. Someone who has had an early negative experience with a cat may be more likely to suffer.

Cynophobia, the fear of dogs, may seem more logical. After all, as mentioned, dogs are somewhat more likely to draw attention. They are often large, they are louder than cats and they are also less likely to distance themselves from humans. Because of the way they carry themselves and the shape of their bodies, they are considered to be more threatening than cats.

However, this does not make them more aggressive, and dogs vary every bit as much as humans – so next door’s golden labrador is no more likely to bite you than your aunt’s shih tzu. Someone with prominent cynophobia may well not make this distinction, of course.

Equinophobia, or Hippophobia is the fear of horses. This, again, is understandable. Horses are larger than humans and there are many ways in which they could harm someone if they were so inclined. Some people develop the fear after falling from a horse or being bitten at an early age. Some people develop the fear without such experiences, and even having never seen a horse in real life. Whether logical or illogical, the fear of horses is understandable – and also treatable.

Entemophobia and Arachnophobia are often grouped together, and although in a strictly scientific sense insects and arachnids are not animals, they fit in the bracket of creatures that are not human. There are, again, perfectly good reasons why a human may be scared of insects (they may well sting) and spiders (some may bite and some have toxic venom). As many people again have a fear of one or both because of their appearance and their size, which makes them easier to miss until they are right up close. At this time the old advice that “they are more scared of you than you are of them” is unhelpful and may well be inaccurate in many cases.

Exposure therapy has been proven effective in many cases of animal-related phobias, but can be difficult to implement in severe cases. Nonetheless, there is treatment out there for those looking to conquer their fears