What are YOU afraid of?

What is your biggest fear? Apparently around one in ten people suffer from a phobia and the most common are

1. Arachnophobia (The fear of spiders)

This phobia tends to affect women more than men.

2. Ophidiophobia (The fear of snakes)

Often attributed to evolutionary causes, personal experiences, or cultural influences.

3. Acrophobia (The fear of heights)

This fear can lead to anxiety attacks and avoidance of high places.

4. Agoraphobia (The fear of situations in which escape is difficult)

This may include crowded areas, open spaces, or situations that are likely to trigger a panic attack. People will begin avoiding these trigger events, sometimes to the point that they cease leaving their home.

Approximately one third of people with panic disorder develop agoraphobia.

5. Cynophobia (The fear of dogs)

This phobia is often associated with specific personal experiences, such as being bitten by a dog during childhood.

6. Astraphobia (The fear of thunder and lightening)

Also known as Brontophobia, Tonitrophobia, or Ceraunophobia.

7. Trypanophobia (The fear of injections)

Like many phobias, this fear often goes untreated because people avoid the triggering object and situation.

8. Social Phobias (The fear of social situations)

In many cases, these phobias can become so severe that people avoid events, places, and people that are likely to trigger an anxiety attack.

9. Pteromerhanophobia (The fear of flying)

Often treated using exposure therapy, in which the client is gradually and progressively introduced to flying.

10. Mysophobia (The fear of germs or dirt)

May be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Of those, I fully understand being terrified of spiders and flying. I have always been scared of spiders. They're hairy, they run too fast, they are there on the wall when you least expect it, they have far too many legs and they just generally creep me out!! This is a fear I guess I was born with. It's also the most common fear.

Flying however, that's an acquired fear. Prior to developing my fear, I had flown to Adelaide and back and made the following journey: Brisbane - Cairns - Hong Kong - London - Trevisio - London - Shannon - London - Hong Kong - Brisbane. The day prior to developing my fear of flying, I had flown from Brisbane to Seoul and was somewhere in the air over an ocean on my way to London when it happened. To sum up the story, I heard the captain tell the entire cabin we were having "technical difficulties" and "were going to descend". As I mentioned, this was somewhere over an ocean (I suck at geography and can't be bothered looking at a map to figure out which one) so I panicked. They don't call it "The Miracle on the Hudson" because it's easy to land on water! So I told the English girls behind me we were going to die, panicked a lot and then, after every TV on the plane simultaneously went blank, I demanded an air hostess tell me what was going on. Turns out the technical difficulties requiring we "descend" were the TVs having trouble and we were actually going to "reset". Embarrassingly, I knew this as I was the one who'd complained about the TVs to begin with... But, the damage had been done and after fully believing I was going to die on this God-forsaken hunk of metal hurtling through the sky... I've avoided flying ever since!

So tell me, what is YOUR biggest phobia?

Miss SAMawdsley xx

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