Fear or Phobia? Why the Difference Matters
Fear gets rather a bad press, which is a shame, because fear is one of the most useful things your brain does. It's what stops you stepping off the kerb in front of a bus, and what makes you check the smoke alarm battery. Healthy fear is proportionate — it tracks the actual risk.
Here's how I usually explain it. Where I live, the land is very flat, and every serious storm brings a real threat of flooding. So I take flooding seriously. I watch the forecast, I know which roads go under first, and I plan accordingly. That's fear doing exactly the job it's for. Sharks, on the other hand, don't trouble me in the slightest. They're in the sea, and once in a while so am I — but attacks are vanishingly rare, and there are guards on the beach. The risk simply doesn't warrant the worry, so I don't carry any.
Notice what's doing the work there: the likelihood of the thing actually happening. That's the mark of ordinary, healthy fear. It rises and falls with the real risk in front of you.
A phobia doesn't work like that at all. Someone with a genuine shark phobia may not go in the sea even with the guards on duty. May not go in a swimming pool. May feel their heart go at a photograph. The likelihood has stopped mattering — and that, in a sentence, is the whole difference.
You'll sometimes hear this called an "irrational fear," and I've never much liked the phrase, because it suggests the person is being silly. They aren't. Think of it instead as an alarm set too sensitively. The brain decided at some point that a particular thing meant danger, and it has gone on faithfully sounding the alarm ever since, whether or not there's anything to sound it about. Knowing the alarm is wrong doesn't switch it off — which is exactly what makes a phobia so exhausting.
Now, the word itself gets thrown about very freely. People say they're phobic about Mondays, or their inbox, or the sound of someone chewing. Usually they mean they dislike something intensely, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to mean — but it isn't this. And the loose usage does harm: it makes a real phobia sound like a strong preference, leaving the person who has one wondering why they can't simply get over a thing everybody else apparently manages.
So if you're unsure which you're dealing with, three marks to look for:
The body joins in, uninvited. Racing heart, tight chest, an overwhelming urge to get away — the full emergency response, for something that poses no emergency at all.
Reason doesn't touch it. You can know the odds perfectly well and feel not a jot better.
It costs you something. Journeys not taken, appointments not made, invitations declined. A phobia doesn't sit quietly; it rearranges your life around itself.
Dislike the dentist and go anyway? That's an aversion, and you have my sympathy. Haven't been in eleven years because the thought of the waiting room sets your heart hammering? That's a phobia, and it deserves to be taken seriously — by you as much as by anyone.
Here's the encouraging part. Because a phobia is something the brain learned, it's also something the brain can unlearn. Not through willpower, and certainly not through being told to pull yourself together — but by working with the part of the mind where the alarm actually lives. That's precisely where hypnosis does its best work, and it's what this month's newsletters are all about.
Next week, in "How a Phobia Is Born" (10 August), I'll look at how phobias form in the first place — and why some arrive after a single bad moment while others seem to appear out of nowhere.
If you would like to talk through any of this, my contact details are below.
Warmly, Denise
