Everyone, at one point in their life or another, has felt fear. Fear is the reflexive instinct that alerts us to danger, it’s the nervous system telling us that we aren’t safe and preparing our body to react accordingly. You don’t need to study a PMHNP program online to understand what fear is, as we’ve said before you’ve likely already felt it numerous times.
However, it’s fairly common to confuse “fear” with “phobia.” While phobia does make use of similar emotional responses to regular fear, it is important to remember that there are several key distinctions between the two. Today, we will explore fears and phobias, what causes phobias and how to live with them.
Fear vs Phobia
Even though “fear” and “phobia” are often used interchangeably, the fact is they are both distinctly different things.
“Fear” is an emotional response, and therefore a universal experience across all of humanity. It is a direct response to danger (real or perceived) and allows a person to access the flight, fight, or freeze responses in useful situations. Put simply, everyone can feel fear – but not everyone suffers from a phobia.
A “phobia” is a type of anxiety disorder, and therefore not a universal emotional response. It is characterized by overwhelming fear and anxiety that consistently disrupts a person’s quality of life. This intense response is usually triggered by a certain form of stimulus, such as a situation, or object. There are many phobias but only one – agoraphobia (fear of public spaces) – can be medically diagnosed.
Another layer to the fear v phobia dynamic is added when you consider the very common practice of defining certain fears as “rational” or “irrational.” Although we can rationalize certain fears and phobias, for example, algophobia (fear of pain) compared to something like arachibutyroiphobia (fear of peanut butter), the former can be called “rational” while the latter seems wholly “irrational.”
The trouble is that a fear’s rationality or irrationality can change depending on certain things. For example, if a person is about to have a surgical procedure that will cause a lot of debilitating pain in the recovery period, then a regulated sense of fear and preparation is rational. However, if a person is so afraid of pain that they get rid of all their possessions to avoid the risk of bumping into something and avoid the associated pain, the first case represents standard fear, while the second is behaviour indicative of a person suffering from a phobia.
Therefore, terms like “rational” and “irrational” applied to fears aren’t as helpful as they may seem, as the rationality of a fear or phobia can change depending on circumstance, setting, and magnitude of response to fear.
What Causes Phobias?
There are many possible causes for phobias, and experts have thus far failed to nail down a single, consistent cause of this particular kind of anxiety disorder. However, the following factors are currently known to directly or indirectly cause phobias.
Genetics and Environment
Research has shown that there is a genetic component to the development of phobias. Children of parents with anxiety disorder are at higher risk of developing a phobia, and traumas experienced through childhood can give rise to phobias later, such as an abuse victim suffering from a phobia of anger later in life.
Trauma
As stated earlier, phobias often stem from a bad experience or panic attack triggered by an object or occurrence. For example, someone who has experienced a car crash may develop a phobia of cars or driving.
Mental Illness
Many mental illnesses can cause symptoms consistent with presentations of phobias. For example, people with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) may experience elevated feelings of fear or agitation when presented with stimuli that are reminiscent of the traumatic event that affected them. As a result, they may take extreme measures to avoid such feelings.
Treating Phobias
Living with a phobia is difficult, as the triggers surrounding it are often unpredictable, and parts of everyday life. People living with untreated phobias run the risk of becoming unable to function in a regular capacity and can suffer from consistent anxiety and obsessive feelings regarding the object of their phobia.
Fortunately, phobias can be treated. There are several treatments available for those living with phobias, though the nature of the illness means that it can be difficult to convince people with one or more phobias to seek treatment, as they feel the condition keeps them safe from a perceived source of harm.
The emotional trigger for phobia starts in the amygdala, the part of the brain that registers and controls emotional input and output. Anxiety disorders like phobias, occur because the amygdala produces the fear response either excessively, or in response to non-threatening stimuli. Therefore most treatments for phobias revolve around re-training the amygdala to recognize the object of the person’s phobia with the appropriate level of threat assessment.
This involves several forms of therapy, such as exposure therapy, which has proven successful for 80-90% of phobia sufferers, CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), Mindfulness Therapy, and in more recent years, the use of Virtual Reality to simulate the phobia’s trigger in a safe and controlled environment.
All of these therapies are carried out with the assistance of a qualified, trained professional to monitor progress, create a feeling of safety, offer encouragement, and talk through feelings that may arise during treatment sessions.
Facing Fear and Phobia
Fear is something everyone has to live with, but phobia is a difficult condition to manage that directly affects the sufferer’s quality of life. Although it causes some of the most potent feelings of fright a person can be exposed to, it is important to remember that this condition does not keep a person safe. Rather it turns their life into a living prison, forcing the person to live in a state of obsession with being protected or safe from the source of their phobia. However, treatment is available, and if you or someone you know is living with a phobia, getting help can open up their life, and help them live free from the yoke of their condition.
