Facing Your Phobias

Have you ever wondered how a person could develop a phobia, especially of kittens or balloons, or the other things you hear people having phobias of? Although many phobias do sound pretty outlandish, their development is not that odd. In facts, the development of a phobia is a natural survival instinct that is a little confused.

Although the creation of phobias is not an absolute science, all types of phobias form as the result of an extreme aversion to something. The difference between a phobia and simply being afraid of something is the level of fear that is characteristic of a phobia. In addition to feeling emotionally uneasy, phobia sufferers show physical symptoms of their fear, including increased heart rate and breathing, sweating, feeling faint, and feeling as though they are choking. Phobias strike people differently depending on the severity of their phobia and what triggers the phobic response. For example, for someone who has a phobic reaction to heights is usually not equally frightened by all situations involving heights, and how high they are, the presence of a handrail, and a number of other factors affect each individual phobic response. However, the classic example of phobia formation is that a fear of poisonous snakes gets transferred to all snakes, creating a snake phobia. Although the ideas about phobia development have progressed from this theory, the phobia forms because the brain identifies a great threat, in this case a snake, and sees the situation as out of control and dangerous.

A phobia is an instinct for self-preservation that has been falsely assigned to something that is not threatening, or at least not as threatening as the phobia sufferer makes it seem. When a person develops a phobia, their brain associates something with extreme danger and treats it with the utmost seriousness and perceives the phobia trigger as something that should be completely avoided. Essentially, your brain becomes confused and will give a person a feeling of dread when they are in the presence of their phobic trigger. In certain cases, a phobia can be so entrenched that the phobia sufferer cannot stand to think about their trigger or what they may do in its presence.

While phobias can be difficult to deal with, the system that causes phobias to develop is a means of protection and was very helpful to our early ancestors. In specific places in the world at various times throughout history, it might have been the people who have snake phobias who were capable of surviving, particularly in areas such as Australia as well as Africa where they have an abundance of very venomous species of snakes. For early people, fearing and avoiding snakes may have kept them alive, but they were able to react in an extreme way to the presence of a snake. They were also allowed to kill the snake, which may help cure the phobia, if the presence of a snake was seen as a controllable situation.

Psychologists have observed in experiments that it is easier for people to develop phobias of certain things. One experiment showed that it took only 1-2 electric shocks paired with images of a snake to elicit phobic reactions, while it took many electric shocks to develop the same phobic response to images of flowers. This leads many scientists to believe that phobias are somewhat hereditary and a natural instinct that can help one survive. However, in modern society most phobias are a major inconvenience since the survival skills needed for most cultures is vastly different than in the past.

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