A phobia is defined as the unrelenting fear of a situation, activity, or thing that causes one to want to avoid it. Millions of people around the world suffer this, and the solution they apply is, as I said before, to avoid the object of fearing. But what happen when you cannot avoid it and it affects your life? Simple: That’s the moment to look for a specialist and confront your fear.
Having a phobia about something is very different from everyday worry or stress. Depending on the person and his/her circumstances, you will find an endless list of phobias (I will list some of them, but if you’d like to see a complete list of phobias, feel free to visit the following webpage: http://phobialist.com/). The most commons are:
Social Phobia: Also known as social anxiety disorder, it is an excessive fear of embarrassment in social situations that is extremely intrusive and can have debilitating effects on personal and professional relationships. Examples include fears of public speaking, meeting new people, and other social situations.
Agoraphobia: It is a fear of being outside or otherwise being in a situation from which one either cannot escape or from which escaping would be difficult or humiliating. Although agoraphobia, like other mental disorders, is caused by a number of factors, it also tends to run in families and for some people, may have a clear genetic factor contributing to its development.
Claustrophobia: It is an abnormal and persistent fear of closed spaces, of being closed in or being shut in, as in elevators, tunnels, or any other confined space. The fear is excessive and quite common.
Zoophobia: It is a term that encompasses fears of specific types of animals such as spiders (arachnophobia), snakes (ophidiophobia), birds (ornithophobia), bees (apiphobia), etc. It is a zooful of beastly phobias.
Acrophobia: It is an abnormally excessive and persistent fear of heights. Sufferers experience severe anxiety even though they usually realize t hat, as a rule, heights pose no real threat to them.
Aerophobia: An abnormal and persistent fear of flying is called aerophobia. This phobia generally develops after a person witnesses a plane crash or loses a family member in a plane crash or accident. Sufferers experience severe anxiety even though they usually realize that flying does not pose a threat commensurate with their fear.
Blood-Injection-Injury Phobias: It consist of several specific phobias including fear of blood (hemophobia), injury phobia, and fear of receiving an injection (trypanophobia or aichmophobia) or other invasive medical procedures.
Now I’m wondering… what causes such fear? While there is no one specific known cause for phobias, it is thought that phobias run in families, are influenced by culture, and can be triggered by life events. Immediate family members of people with phobias are about three times more likely to also suffer from a phobia than those who do not have such a family history. Phobia sufferers have been found to be more likely to manage stress by avoiding the stressful situation and by having difficulty minimizing the intensity of the fearful situation.
How do you know you have a phobia? If you present some of the following symptoms: panic attack, shaking, sweating, rapid heartbeat, trouble breathing, an d an overwhelming desire to escape the situation that is causing the phobic reaction. Also, extreme measures are sometimes taken to escape the situation.
To help those who suffer from phobias, there are different ways how phobia is treated. You can expose the person to circumstances that are increasingly close to the one they are phobic about (desensitization). A second method is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which has been found to significantly decrease phobic symptoms by helping the phobia sufferer change his or her way of thinking.
After all this, I just want to add that millions of people around the world suffer from phobias, some of them can handle it, avoid them, or have to look for help, but in conclusion I think everybody is afraid of something in different degrees. Dominican people’s phobia is to find out the new gasoline prices on Friday night. For me, I cannot share the same room with a frog. So, at the end I just want to ask: What’s your biggest fear?
