EEK! Phobias !

It is expected for anyone to be anxious or uncomfortable about a certain situation at one time or another during their lifetime, or even just during the day. This could range from the fear of being tardy for school to failing the next math quiz. Even so, in most cases people usually are able to cope with their fears and accept the reality set in front of them by confronting the conflict. Yet, when an individual attempts to cope with their phobias, it is as if the world is crumbling apart. Phobias are the most extreme type of fear fueled by anxiety, and possible childhood traumas, leading to be one of the most common psychiatric disorders. A phobia could range from triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13, to phobophobia, the fear of irrational fear, or even to pinaciphobia, the fear of lists. Yet most importantly, where do these irrational fears even come from?  Well, for the most part, the amygdala part of the human brain is activated, leading to an overly sensitive response that identifies threats in everyday situations, setting of a chain of adrenaline that reflect the qualities of anxiety. The prefrontal cortex, or the logical part of our brain, is unable to rein in the amygdala, leading to anxiety to build into a full-blown crisis while facing our phobias. The seeds of these anxieties can be planted by traumatic experiences, and our brains being an associative machine, tends to connect these experiences with fear. This leads back to our animal instincts as humans, for example, if a predator jumps out from behind a tree, then a person may  mentally tie the tree and predator together, now associating the tree with the fear one felt when the predator jumped out. Let’s take the Little Albert experiment, conducted by the behaviorist John B. Watson and graduate student Rosaline Rayner, into consideration. This is a famous, and pretty problematic psychology experiment that had been conducted on a baby, or Little Albert. Scientists let Little Albert play with a small white rat. Now, this rat was a completely harmless, furry animal that the child had no feelings of fear towards it. But then, scientists began to intertwine threatening sounds of hammers against a steel bar every time the animal was present, and not surprisingly, Little Albert began to grow  fearful of this furry animal. The researchers were able to create a phobia, the fear of small white animals, which noticeably began to affect Little Albert. The child’s correlation to the traumatic sound and the furry rat began to expand towards other animals such as rabbits and dogs as well, even crying near the furry tuft of Santa Claus’s hat. This experiment explains how harmless objects can take on irrational and scary associations that lead to the most extreme phobias. Phobias reveal themselves in the oddest ways, and although it may be frightening enough to make your bones shiver, remember that these are only a series of complex, heightened anxiety flaring in your brain.