Phobia or Fear?

Do you have a fear of something? Everyone is scared of something, whether it be spiders, or falling off a cliff, or something as simple as tight spaces. Fears however are much different than phobias. Fears do not limit you on daily tasks. If you are scared of something so bad that you can’t even go near or even think of that thing, you probably have a phobia of that particular object. Because phobias limit you one everything you do on a daily basis, it is very hard for people with certain phobias to live a normal life.

            I don’t believe that I personally have any phobias, however, I am scared of a lot of things. But because they do not keep me from living a normal life, they would not be considered phobias. For example, I’m scared of being kidnapped, but me being scared of that does not lead me to live in constant fear of it. For people with phobias of being kidnapped, they would not even be able to function and go outside normally because they would be living in constant fear that someone is going to come up and take them.

            Some symptoms of phobias is dizziness, breathlessness, nausea, and in some cases a full on anxiety attack. Because these sympotoms can escalate to extreme cases, many go seek medical treatment. Phobias affect more than 10% of people in the United States alone. Because there is so many people with phobias living in the United States, they are able to go to the doctor and get many different options as to how to treat different types. For example, one type of treatment is called flooding. In this treatment, the patient is confronted with the fear for an extended amount of time with no way to get out of it. To me, this type of treatment seems a little too aggressive for my liking, however it seems to work because they are able to see that their fear is not actually harmful to them. Another type of treatment is counter-conditioning. In this treatment, the patient is taught to feel a different type of emotion when encountering that fear rather than feeling panicked. This type of treatment is mostly used for those who cannot handle the exposure treatments such as flooding.