Facing Your Phobias

Phobias do tend to sound rather bizarre, especially when people claim to have phobias of completely harmless things like birds and amputees, but phobias do develop for a reason. Phobias are able to develop because of certain little used instincts that are intended to help us survive, but phobias occur when fear is misplaced.

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.

In many cases, this causes the body to undergo a fight or flight response, or even have a full-blown panic attack. Another way to describe a phobia is that the brain forms false associations between a situation or thing, which caused the phobia sufferer to ascend into fear unnecessarily. An example of the phobia mindset would be that after burning your hand on a stove, instead of fearing or avoiding putting your hand on a hot burner, you have an intense fear of all stoves and fear their presence instead of being careful not to touch the hot burner. Some phobias are so severe that even the thought of the phobia trigger can cause a phobia episode.

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 certain parts of the world at different times in history, it may have been the people who have snake phobias who were able to survive, especially in places like Africa and Australia where there are an abundance of highly venomous snake species. 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.

Even though there is a name for a phobia of everything you can think of, you are much more likely to become phobic of certain things. It is thought that we develop phobias of certain stimuli because they are things our ancient ancestors were concerned with and threatened by. One study showed that phobias of certain animals can be nurtured much more easily than others. This phenomenon is likely a result of thousands of years of people dying from snake bites, falling from heights, and many other things that threatened our ancient ancestors.

To discover more head on over to Best Panic Attack Medicine also head on over to Help A Panic Attack with more helpful material at Hypertension A Factor In Panic Attacks