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What Are Phobias and How Are They Treated?
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A person with phobia:
- feels too much mental and physical anxiety
- avoids situations where they may come across what they fear
- suffers personally or professionally in some way. A person with a phobia may turn down a promotion because that job would involve sometimes traveling cross country and they're afraid of flying on an airplane.
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The phobia center of the brain
There is no one place responsible for phobias in the brain. Many parts of the brain take part.
However, fear is important to the brain's emotional processing and learning center: known as the amygdala and the hippocampus, with a central role in the process of forming memories.
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Treatments for phobias
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy (sometimes called psychotherapy) has proved to be the most effective treatment for people with phobias.
- Exposure is another part of the treatment. It teaches the brain how to deal with seeing or being close to what the patient fears.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Decide if you should face your fear
- Consider the pros and cons of not facing your fear.
- Write those down.
- Identify the pros and cons of tackling your fears head-on.
- Write down what ...
Evaluate Risk Level
Just because something feels scary, doesn’t mean it’s actually risky. Educate yourself about the facts and the risks you actually face by doing the things that scare you.
Create an Action Plan
The key to facing your fears is to take one small step at a time. Going too fast or doing something too scary before you are ready can backfire.
Keep moving forward. A moderate amount of anxiety is good. Don’t wait to take a step forward until your anxiety disappears.
If you can’t actually do the thing that scares you to practice, you might use imagined exposure.
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The Fear Of Water
Aquaphobia is a common fear, which varies in severity from person to person.
The main cause of aquaphobia is a bad experience, like a near-drowning incident in the past, while also being her...
Symptoms of Aquaphobia
..include shaking, freezing, or attempting to run. It can also result in panic attacks or anticipatory anxiety before an encounter with water. Being afraid of water can be life-limiting as we experience water in many forms.
Extreme levels of phobia can also lead to ablutophobia(The fear of bathing).
Treatment For Aquaphobia
CBT(Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) is a popular psychological treatment for aquaphobia. It involves changing your behavioural patterns and stress response gradually. Other treatments include medications and even hypnosis.
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What fear is
Fear is the body's alarm system — it’s an innate emotional response to a perceived personal threat.
There are two different types of alarms, panic and anxiety, both of whic...
Our brain when we're afraid
A perceived threat sends information to the brain's emotional processing and learning center, called the amygdala. The amygdala sorts out the data within tens or hundreds of milliseconds. If it registers the threat, then it fires off a series of physical changes. Heart rate, breathing, and sweating increase in the fight-or-flight response because the body is preparing to flee or to fight if escape is impossible.
Best way to get over fears
Getting over a fear is an active process that requires learning and retraining the brain. Essentially, you are training higher-level brain areas to overcome signals from areas like the amygdala so that you can put threats into a more realistic context.