Many People Ask The Questions – Are Phobias Normal?
Have you ever wondered how a person could develop a fear of flowers, or pigeons, or the other three hundred fifty plus things that have caused doctors to name an official condition? Phobias, interestingly enough, develop because of a wide variety of factors, and are not as abnormal as some people believe.
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.
Many times, the phobic reaction causes the body to become ready for a serious life or death situation, and some people can even have a panic attack. A phobia essentially happens when your brain recognizes something harmless as being deadly and causes the phobia sufferer to be frozen by fear for no apparent reason. For instance, someone may develop a phobia because they have internalized the idea of falling from a great distance and being hurt or killed. After this fear is hyped in the brain, the body responds to the presence of any ledge or height as being very dangerous and to be avoided. The phobic reaction keeps the phobia sufferer from going near the edge, and avoiding harm. While this response is normal for certain things, a phobia is an unjustified fear.
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 specific places in the world at various times throughout history, it might have been the people who have snake phobias who were capable of surviving, particularly in areas such as Australia as well as Africa where they have an abundance of very venomous species of snakes. 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.
Although you can have a phobia of anything, it has been shown that people are genetically predisposed to develop phobias or fears of some things much more easily than others. An experiment that focused on exposing subjects to images and electric shocks showed that it took very little to develop a fear of certain animals, while others took many electric shocks. Because of this, experts think that phobias develop as a survival instinct, but that survival instinct is, for the most part, unnecessary in the modern world. However, these instincts are intact in case we ever need them.
To discover more head on over to Symptoms Of A Panic Attack and Help A Panic Attack and more information at Panic Attack Or Heart Attack
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