Imagine this typical situation of a phobia. You’re sitting on your bed, reading an interesting novel. You have your covers around you, and you’re feeling all relaxed in your comfort zone. Suddenly, you feel something’s on your shoulder. You ignore it. You’re completely engrossed in your book, but the feeling doesn’t go away. It starts moving from your neck, slowly down your shoulders, pervading into your arms. This time, with trepidation, you reluctantly check what it is. On doing so, your heart skips a beat. Your body starts shaking uncontrollably. You can’t stop the tremor.
There, sitting on your arm, unaware of the great havoc it just created, is an eight-legged creature with a hideous structure and a body that is coloured with the dirtiest black. You feel dizzy and you suddenly realize that you cannot breathe. And in about three minutes, you start having a panic attack.
Did this make you feel uncomfortable, increasingly uneasy or sounds familiar in any way? If the answer is yes, then, you have ‘arachnophobia’- the fear of spiders.
Phobias — what are they?
Phobia is a type of anxiety disorder (anxiety neurosis) where one feels fear in a way that cannot be controlled. This fear is, often, exaggerated. It is over something that poses little or no threat - like the fear of spiders. Although, only a handful of them are, in any way, mortally dangerous. According to the American Psychiatric Association, phobias are the most common psychiatric illness among women and the second most common among men. Phobias typically emerge during childhood and adolescence and continue into adulthood.
Phobias can come about as a result of some traumatic incident in the past or an experience that is embedded into one’s subconscious. The reasons behind the development of these phobias have a lot of explanations in behavioural and evolutionary theories.
For example, one of the most common explanations for animal phobias is the fact that there was a time when our ancestors feared them and considered them a threat. As they did not have the necessary medical or technological means to treat themselves, in the face of danger posed by such animals, evolution contributed to the predisposition of fear in animals. It persists even today.
Different phobias
Some common phobias seen in most people are:
- Acrophobia — The Fear Of Heights
- Aerophobia — The Fear Of Airplanes
- Cynophobia — The Fear Of Dogs
- Trypanophobia — The Fear Of Injections
- Astraphobia — The Fear Of Thunder & Lightning
- Social Phobia — The Fear Of Socialising/Social Anxiety
Some really uncommon and strange phobias are:
- Optophobia — The Fear Of Opening One’s Eyes
- Linonophobia — The Fear Of Strings
- Spectrophobia — The Fear Of Mirrors And Reflections
Now, in case you’ve got a phobia that is constantly interfering in the normal course of life, do not fear, for you can treat it and even eliminate it. They can be minimized and erased with techniques like cognitive and behavioural therapy and medication. Exposure therapy helps a lot too. Here, one is gradually made to get used to the thing that they’ve got a phobia for.
Some people don’t need to get treatment as their phobias aren’t highly uncontrollable. But if you have phobias like ‘Didaskaleinophobia’ — the fear of going to school, we’d suggest you get treatment immediately and not take too much advantage of it!
