Home » Phobias

What are some interesting facts about phobias?

25 July 2010 3 Comments
tennis/is/love.x3 asked:


I need some interesting facts about phobias existing in the brain. Help me please! Don’t leave mean comments though.

3 Comments »

  • ashley said:

    a few interseting facts about phobias is that
    1.One in five Americans— 24 percent of women and 17 percent of men—say they have some degree of fear of being in crowded or wide-open places.
    2. 5.3 million Americans (almost 4 percent) suffer from a social phobia
    3.More than one in 10 Americans have one or more specific phobias, the institute estimates, and an additional 2 percent suffer from panic disorder each year.
    4. 7 percent of Americans say they suffer from a phobia, nearly 40 percent confess an extreme fear of an object or situation, the most common being fear of snakes and fear of being buried alive.
    5.More than one in 10 Americans is thought to have a phobia about something specific, and it usually appears first in adolescence or adulthood

    there are some hopefully usefull facts about phobias for you.

  • Elbie said:

    Phobias don’t develop for no reason at all, they develop for no logical reason. A long period of severe stress, an unresolved childhood fear, an unrelieved frustration and an insoluble life problem can all lie behind the beginning of a phobia.

    What’s more, knowing the originating problem doesn’t always help because the phobia may bear little relation to it.

    Some people believe that phobias develop from the body’s natural desire to protect itself.

    Unconscious or emotional learning takes place to keep us safe. In primitive conditions when coming into contact with something dangerous, the mind/body would create the optimum state for survival – a panic attack.

    This type of learning is not of the intellectual or rational type. If you had to think, “Yes, I think this would be a good time to have a panic attack” our species would have died out long ago.

    This type of learning takes place at an emotional level so that the response can bypass the ‘thinking brain’ In the past, an immediate phobic response to a predatory or poisonous animal would have been exceedingly useful.

    We therefore evolved with the ability to become phobic. In today’s complex world however, this learning mechanism often works in an inappropriate way.

    Non-specific phobias can come about either through a ‘spreading-out’ of panic attacks, or through a person’s levels of general anxiety becoming so high that panic is easily triggered whenever stress levels are raised even slightly.

    Phobias are very real to the people who are experiencing them and should not be taken lightly by those around the phobic. My own grandmother is deathly afraid of cats. We own two cats.

    While we might think her fear is silly – our cats are really cute – we still accommodate her when she visits by putting the cats away.

    Phobias have actually been around for years.

  • Jesus Thinks I am Cool! I Am His said:

    Scared Nation ~ By: Derek Joseph Levendusky

    But now, thus says the LORD, your Creator, O Jacob,
    And He who formed you, O Israel,
    “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
    I have called you by name; you are Mine!” (Isaiah 43:1)

    The first emotion that man showed after the fall in the garden was fear. God came looking for Adam, and called out, “Where are you, Adam?”

    Adam answered, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid” (Genesis 3:9-10). Here we are in the beginning of the Old Testament, at the first dawn of life, and man is already struggling with fear. Likewise, in the early morning light of the New Testament, Peter shows us that nothing has changed. Fear still has humanity in a stranglehold. Peter has his first encounter with Jesus down by the Lake of Gennesaret, and tells him, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!”

    Jesus answers, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men” (Luke 5:8-9). Peter is in bondage to his fears, and Jesus begins to lift the chains off of his soul.

    Almost 2000 years later, mankind is still enslaved by fear. With the constant threat of terrorism, wars, rumors of wars, the threat of economic collapse, the destruction of the family, and the removal from culture of a God who can help us, we have only created a pandemic of depression and anxiety disorders.

    The mental health community is scrambling to try to keep up with the growing epidemic of fear and depression in the modern age. New medicines are constantly being developed; books are being written; courses are being taught. And yet all this poor generation is left with is little more than a little help in coping with these relentless enemies. It seems now we have a phobia for almost anything. Here’s an example of just a few phobias that I came across (some silly, some not so silly):

    Alektorophobia- Fear of chickens
    Algophobia- Fear of pain
    Allodoxaphobia- Fear of opinions
    Arachibutyrophobia- Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth
    Aulophobia- Fear of flutes
    Blennophobia- Fear of slime
    Bogyphobia- Fear of bogeys or the bogeyman
    Bufonophobia- Fear of toads
    Caligynephobia- Fear of beautiful women
    Cancerophobia or Carcinophobia- Fear of cancer
    Cibophobia- Fear of food
    Claustrophobia- Fear of confined spaces
    Dutchphobia- Fear of the Dutch
    Ecclesiophobia- Fear of church
    Enosiophobia or Enissophobia- Fear of having committed an unpardonable sin or of criticism
    Felinophobia- Fear of cats
    Geniophobia- Fear of chins
    Gephyrophobia or Gephydrophobia or Gephysrophobia- Fear of crossing bridges
    Heliophobia- Fear of the sun
    Helminthophobia- Fear of being infested with worms
    Hemophobia or Hemaphobia or Hematophobia- Fear of blood
    Iatrophobia- Fear of going to the doctor or of doctors
    Ichthyophobia- Fear of fish
    Japanophobia- Fear of Japanese
    Kakorrhaphiophobia- Fear of failure or defeat
    Levophobia- Fear of things to the left side of the body
    Lilapsophobia- Fear of tornadoes and hurricanes
    Linonophobia- Fear of string
    Lutraphobia- Fear of otters
    Metrophobia- Fear or hatred of poetry
    Microbiophobia- Fear of microbes
    Necrophobia- Fear of death or dead things
    Nelophobia- Fear of glass
    Nosocomephobia- Fear of hospitals
    Numerophobia- Fear of numbers
    Nyctohylophobia- Fear of dark wooded areas or of forests at night
    Ophidiophobia- Fear of snakes
    Ophthalmophobia- Fear of being stared at
    Papaphobia- Fear of the Pope
    Parasitophobia- Fear of parasites
    Paraskavedekatriaphobia- Fear of Friday the 13th
    Peladophobia- Fear of bald people
    Pentheraphobia- Fear of mother-in-law
    Rhytiphobia- Fear of getting wrinkles
    Rupophobia- Fear of dirt
    Russophobia- Fear of Russians
    Scolionophobia- Fear of school
    Verbophobia- Fear of words
    Virginitiphobia- Fear of Rape
    Xanthophobia- Fear of the color yellow
    Zemmiphobia- Fear of the great mole rat

    I think my favorite one is “the fear of chins.”

    Our fears can be even more subtle than that…fear of our past, our present, our future; fear of failure; fear of punishment from God; fear of God not loving us, etc. The bottom line is this…people are in bondage. How can we escape living a life of bondage to this age old enemy called Fear?

    In the Old Testament and New Testament, God says to His people, “Fear not, for I am with you.” God gave us four words to bring comfort to our souls even on our worst day. I am with you.

    I just took my wife and four children on a camping trip. We had an amazing time enjoying the beauty of God’s creation in the Stonybrook State Park in western New York. My children especially enjoyed the natural slides and waterfalls on the river. One slide in particular had a pretty strong current and my daughter Essie was scared. “Daddy, will you go with me?” I agreed, and she laughed all the way down the slide.

    Did you know that the fact that I said “I am with you” made something that would normally be terrifying to a five-year-old girl exhilirating? The fact that I was with her brought comfort, peace, excitement, and joy!

    God is bigger than any challenge or enemy we’ll ever face! I could say a lot more about fear, being an expert scared person and all (in my past), but I’ll just give you that to chew on. God says, “Fear not, for I am with you.”

Leave your response!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.