What is phobias and as to fight with them?

One of the useful properties presented to the person by the nature is ability to feel fear. This ability is designed to signal about approach of a dangerous situation and to help to avoid in advance it to keep life. However if the fear is persuasive and is not reasonable, it can seriously limit possibilities of the person in respect of socialization and self-realization. Such pathological fear is called a phobia.

Types and degree of prevalence of phobias

According to specialists, from a phobia about one person from ten suffers. At the same time the fear of hit in any situation, or contact with a subject or the living being is not a lifelong state. At one people of a phobia arise in the childhood, others get them at mature age. One manage to get rid of the fears independently, others should ask for the qualified help.

Subject of a phobia can become anything. The following fears are most widespread:

• Fear of height (arophobia);
• Fear of darkness (nyctophobia);
• Fear of society, publicity (sociophobia);
• Fear of open spaces (agoraphobia);
• Fear of the closed rooms (claustrophobia);
• Fear of dogs (cynophobia).

Many people are afraid of animals (all or only some), are afraid of blood, doctors or diseases. There are also absolutely exotic phobias (for example, fear of dolls, bald people, certain numbers, buttons etc.). Fortunately, in most cases these fears not really strongly prevent people to live. The phobia admits the pathology demanding correction, only when it does not allow the person to control own behavior and becomes an obstacle for normal activity.

Characteristic signs of a phobia are:

• Persistence. The person cannot get off a mind that he frightens him;
• Sharpness of negative emotions;
• The constant aspiration to avoid contact with the menacing factor, commission for this purpose of strange, inexplicable acts;
• Understanding person of irrationality of the fear and inadequacy of behavior;
• Emergence at contact with a subject of a phobia of vegetative reactions (the strengthened sweating, dizziness, a sonitus, a shiver, vision disorders, a cardiopalmus etc.).

It is considered that from phobias people nervous, impressionable, excessively emotional often suffer. However it not always so. There is also a hypothesis claiming that tendency to phobias has the hereditary nature.

Persuasive fears pursue residents of megalopolises, than inhabitants of rural areas more often. From each four people subject to phobias, three are women.

Whether it is possible to cope with a phobia?

It is obvious that when the meeting with a subject of persuasive fear is improbable (for example, at fear of penguins or the polar lights) and to fight there is nothing. If the phobia really prevents the person to live, it is worth addressing the specialist. There are several techniques helping if not completely to get rid of persuasive irrational fear, then to learn to control considerably it.

For a start it is necessary that the psychologist analyzed a condition of the patient and tried to find a source of emergence of fear. If it works well, sometimes it is enough to explain to the person the reason of emergence of a phobia that it disappeared. In other cases the way of system desensitization is applied. It consists that the patient gradually accustom to contact to an object of his fears. For example, if the person in panic is afraid of dogs, at first show him a dog in a muzzle and on a lead from a distance, then bring a dog closer, remove from her a muzzle, suggest the patient to stroke her etc. Gradually the patient gets used that there is nothing menacing in such communication. Sometimes show to the people suffering from phobias that their fears are unreasonable, on the example of others contacts with the menacing objects.

Medicines at treatment of phobias are applied seldom when patients do not control the behavior at all. Drugs can be accepted only to destination and under control of the doctor. However, specialists claim that only by means of medicines it is impossible to get rid of persuasive fear. Besides, many drugs cause accustoming, and at the termination of their reception of a phobia are returned.

One person can have several persuasive fears. Difficulties and high rate of modern life not in the best way affect composure, and all of us sometimes look strange, alarmed, excessively excited. You should not be afraid of phobias (though there is also a specific phobia – fear of emergence of phobias), but it is necessary to try to minimize the inconveniences caused by them. Only this way we will be able to keep health and to become successful in our promptly changing world.