What is a phobia, how to deal with it?

For a person is prone to fear anything. Even the bravest and the bravest feel a sense of fear in one way or another, especially when it's not their own, but their close and native people. So this feeling is perfectly normal, it can appear to anyone. Unfortunately, sometimes there is an excessive degree of apprehension on this or that occasion, and completely unreasonable. Most often, these feelings of fear are called phobias. In this case, there is a huge number of a variety of their varieties. So what is a phobia?

To date, the term "phobia" is understood as an excessive irrational fear of a phenomenon, situation or object. From this definition, we can conclude that there is an extremely wide range of possible provoking factors of such a state.

There are several classifications that can complement the understanding of what a phobia is. The greatest practical value is the division of such unreasonable fears into the following groups:

1) Social.

2) Agoraphobia.

3) Specific.

The first group included those irrational fears, which relate primarily to any social situations. For example, the fear of the scene and the like. It's not so simple with what a phobia is of a specific nature. The fact is that the provoking factor of such fear can be almost anything.

To date, scientists share specific phobias in four varieties: the natural environment (fear of a wide variety of natural phenomena, as well as water and the like), animals (especially fear of rodents and spiders), certain situations (bridges, driving cars and so on ) And medical manipulations or their results (injections, blood, doctors).

The concept of what a phobia is is incomplete if you do not touch on the topic of agoraphobia. This kind of unreasonable fears implies an irrational fear of being trapped in a certain place or situation.

Scientists from the United States estimated that phobias are found in about 10% of the population of their country. In this case, only one in ten of these fears persist for life. It is conditioned by the fact that in most cases people recognize that they have a phobia. As a result, many are ready to undergo special therapy.

In the event that a person has some phobia, treatment can be very diverse. There are many methods. The most common are 2 of them:

1) Opposition to the object of fear. The essence of the technique is that the patient is taught a rational reaction to the appearance of that object or the development of that situation, which are the objects of irrational fear.

2) Prolonged contact with the object of fear. This method implies the formation of such conditions, when the patient should be in the immediate vicinity of the object of fear for a long time or be constantly in the situation that causes him fear.

Both of these techniques are quite effective, in many cases they allow you to get rid of unreasonable fear, regardless of what is called phobia - agarophobia, bacteriophobia, dentophobia or something else.