How Phobias Affect People And How Can Overcome Their Phobia

Known as a mental disorder a phobia is a persistent fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to compelling desire to avoid it. Phobias tend to affect the way people live their lives, for example, their working and social environments, considering that they last for a very long time and are capable to cause intense psychological physical stress. It is considered today the most common mental and anxiety disorder in the United States (Matig Mavissakalian & David H. Barlow 1981 pp 2). There are many phobias such as: the fear of aging, fear of changing, fear of clowns, fear of getting fat, fear of being in closed spaces, etc.

Everybody that you come into contact with on a daily basis will have a fear of something but a phobia can be defined as an irrational fear, this can provoke feelings of intense anxiety and initiate avoidance behaviour.

that might be dangerous. Phobia is different from fear because a phobia is being scared of

The informational text, a magazine article titled In the Spotlight from Stuff That Scares Your Pants Off! by Glenn Murphy is fascinating. The science facts of why people are afraid of speaking in public (glossophobia) and how it may be overcome is clearly defined to the point that one can easily relate to other phobias that may sometime affect people’s live, whether it is life threatening or not. Many of the short stories, magazine articles, and the poem read in class, and ones assigned for home work are equally interesting because it makes you think about your personal experiences. Knowing phobia may affect one’s life style, it is comforting to learn there are cures to remedy, or keep at bay, fears and phobias by focusing and practicing steps needed to keep one from being afraid.

According to The University of Iowa, glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, remains the number one phobia in people all around. Although one can’t usually eliminate the fear, one can learn how to manage and reduce it. Once learning how to control anxiety, public speaking can lead to success for anyone. Seventy-five percent of people experience this fear of speaking in front of others, and I am one of them.

Though the experience of phobias is relatively common and their physical characteristics are generally well understood, there is no real consensus on the neurobiological basis of phobias. Instead, there are currently several different models and theories that work to try to understand how and why phobias occur in the human brain. Most hypotheses regarding phobias take a different approach, from biological to psychoanalytic to evolutionary. Is there one model that seems "less wrong" or more satisfying in our efforts to understand the biology of phobias? Using the various models, how do phobias seem to come about? How does thinking about phobias add to our understanding of the brain and behavior?

Introduction: Almost everyone has an irrational fear or two—of mice, for example, or your annual dental checkup. For most people, these fears are minor. But when fears become so severe that they cause tremendous anxiety and interfere with your normal life, they’re called phobias. A phobia is an intense fear of something that, in reality, poses little or no actual danger. Common phobias and fears include closed-in places, heights, highway driving, flying insects, snakes, and needles. However, we can develop phobias of virtually anything. Most phobias develop in childhood, but they can also develop in adults. If you

“Though he was afraid, he now knew that fear came in many degrees and types and peculiar categories, and he knew that his fear now was not as bad as it had been in the hot afternoon, when poor Billy Boy Watkins got killed by a heart attack.” Fear comes in many levels, some of these levels are hard for people to endure without going crazy. This is one of the toughest topics to talk about, because no one wants to admit to being afraids. However, at one time or another people are scared of something and some people are frightened more often than others.

I am scared of open heights with even the slightest chance of slipping. The reason I am terrified of open heights is because you are facing death. One wrong move and you will be closer to the ground, only not in the way you expected. Although I am terrified of open heights, I still crave the adventure and adrenaline rush you get from it as you are climbing next to a steep cliff. In four months, I will be travelling to the Dominican Republic to teach English and participate in building a school for the village. During this period of time, we will also be hiking in the national park. This national park contains forests, and of course steep cliffs. Even though I am terrified, I will still be participating in the hike, to prove to myself that fear with realities is still a mental came that can be overcame with a certain mindset. You can only be afraid if you allow the fear to get to you, inside your thoughts. Fear is a thought that you made inside your own mind. Your mind is what controls your fears, and it can be conquered. With that being said, fear is productive: “Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid.” (King, 1982, p. 357). It is simply productive because we are able to accomplish something we would not ordinary do, thus defining a line between reality and

Being afraid of something is when a threatening moment occurs, and our brain is triggered with a stimuli to feel fear. It’s when the cells in the brain create a chain reaction starting with a stressful stimulus, then ending with a

Phobias, fear of heights, fear of spiders, fear of death; everyone has something that makes them feel so uncomfortable that their body reacts with fear and anxiety. The fear comes from a sense of what if; what if that spider bit me, what if I fell off the roof? Having fear is a human experience that we can’t avoid. That goes for me as well, a phobia that I would say affects my life would be a fear of confined spaces, that feeling of I can’t get out or I can’t move. This terror is common and known as claustrophobia. For some claustrophobia can be so debilitating to ones life that they must seek help from a therapist. Therapist vary and can treat a persons phobia with a number of different techniques depending on their specialty.

In general, a phobia refers to “extreme [and] irrational fear reactions” (Powell, Honey, & Symbaluk, 2013, p. 190). Phobias are developed through a process called classical conditioning. Classical conditioning involves “a process in which one stimulus that does not elicit a certain response is associated with a second stimulus that does; as a result, the first stimulus also comes to elicit a response” (Powell et al., 2013, pp. 109-110).

Those that have used this information successfully have included many in business who must routinely give presentations, show business folks who want to be able to deliver the best performance possible and those who just join an organization and must participate in large meetings once in a while. The symptoms of fear, and how to control them are identical to all of us. The only thing that separates us in terms of public speaking is the severity of those symptoms and how we're able to control them. Speaking in public is the No. 1 fear of Americans. It surpasses our fear of losing our jobs, losing our relationships and, believe it or not, people write in surveys they fear public speaking even more than death (although I suspect that given a true life and death situation, they could muster the courage to give a little

Also known as an “irrational fear”, phobias are fears that are much more crippling than normal and can severely affect one’s life (Lilienfeld et al., 2009, p. 612). Vast amounts of different phobias exist, ranging from the extreme fear of a spider, social gatherings, or even the fear of entrapment in an elevator. However, such extreme fears are not unheard of as “Phobias are the most common of all anxiety disorders” (Lilienfeld et al., 2009, p. 612). Fortunately, treatments are available for those suffering. Phobias, although intense and various, can be disabling to those affected, but with treatments they can become manageable.

When one has a fear of something, one normally does not spend much time thinking about it, and it only affects one when one is forced to confront it.