BY MANASEE WAGH PUBLISHED: MAR 2, 2023
Popular Mechanics; Getty Images
I’ve had a phobia of cockroaches since I was about 10 years old, when I accidentally grabbed one in the middle of the night while visiting relatives in Mumbai, India. I have no memory of even being aware of roaches prior to that point, though I must have seen them before. There were no screens on the windows, and on that hot and humid night, a few roaches had apparently decided to go exploring.
Half-asleep and curious, I picked one up. The screaming that ensued after feeling that horrible wriggling in my hand—and then the sight of the roaches when my parents turned on the lights—probably woke the entire neighborhood. Now I’m over the age of 40, and I still react strongly to real roaches, especially indoors.
About 12.5 percent of people have a genuine phobia, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Phobias exists on the extreme tail-end of fear, manifesting as absolute, fight-or-flight horror. They typically don’t have a logical reason behind them, because usually the object “is not harmful in the ways that we might catastrophize,” Tom Davis, a psychology professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, tells Popular Mechanics. Davis specializes in problems that include fear, anxiety disorders, and phobias.
People can develop phobias about practically anything. The most typical ones are about animals, other people, environments and situations (like tight spaces or swimming in the ocean), and bodily harm (like needles for shots). Psychologists haven’t pinned down the most common phobias, because they tend to vary based on location or even time of year. However, past studies have pointed to dogs, spiders, vomiting, and getting an injection as the more common varieties, Davis says.
Fortunately, there is a way to overcome your phobias.
Where Do Phobias Come From?
Many fears, including phobias, have an evolutionary adaptation. For example, it’s useful to be wary of dogs, snakes, and spiders (they could bite or poison you), and heights (you could be injured or die if you fall). On the other hand, no one knows why we don’t see as many phobias of things that are statistically more dangerous, like guns or cars. That could be because our everyday associations mold our feelings toward things in our environment in multiple ways. Guns, for instance, may signal a mixed message: while a gun can kill, soldiers and action heroes—both of whom tend to have a positive association in society—also use them. Meanwhile, most people haven’t handled a gun or had a chance to establish either a positive or negative experience with it, Davis explains.
What Happens in Your Brain When You Have a Phobia?
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Research shows that the phobia response lights up the parts of your brain that activate while feeling fear and disgust. In one study, psychologists looked at the brains of 32 girls, ages 8–13, who had a spider phobia. Fear is a response that involves multiple areas of the brain, including the amygdala, which responds first to a threat. However, a part of the prefrontal cortex, in the front of the brain, showed significant activation during EEG tests (an electroencephalogram, a tool that measures electrical activity in the brain.) This is the brain region where planning and thinking occurs—and where fear conditioning seems to happen.
After using psychotherapy techniques like cognitive-behavioral exposure therapy, the scans revealed that the girls were better able to control their reactions, and they could look at phobia-provoking images with less disgust and fear. The work was published in Biological Psychology in April 2012.
Is Your Fear Really a Phobia?
Many supposed phobias—like the newly coined term, “nomophobia,” the fear of losing your mobile phone (from “no mobile phone”)—are made-up terms. In reality, professional psychologists would not refer to this feeling as a phobia. Instead, they may diagnose a different root cause for this and many other so-called phobias; the feelings of fear could be due to other, related conditions such as anxiety. If you are afraid of losing your phone, your underlying anxiety about an inability to stay in touch with loved ones or to call for help may be the real issue. Phobia is different than anxiety, because it causes an intense fear that interferes with all other thoughts.
If you do have an awful experience with something—say a particular dog bites you—every time you see a dog after that, you may begin associating them with being attacked. Eventually, even the word dog, or its general shape or other characteristics, can induce a negative reaction. Certainly a photograph alone can provoke the same feelings of fear and disgust—just like the images of cockroaches that I subjected myself to.
“We see a lot of these fears generalize over time. So it’s gotten from this one little [incident] to a little bigger, a little bigger. … The bigger it gets, the more a lot of people tend to avoid it. The fewer positive experiences you can have, the more you build it up in your mind, the more you avoid it, and away we go,” Davis says.
In another study with girls and spider phobia, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in June 2012, some of the girls receiving therapy were able to hold a living spider in their hands. They rated the spiders as “more positive” and said they provoked less fear and disgust.
Adult studies have shown similar results with this type of therapy. “We can see that the talk therapies and the exposure therapies that we do actually lead to change in brain functioning and brain activation,” Davis says.
One of the original studies on exposure treatment for adults, done in Sweden in 1989, showed positive results for one-session exposure treatment for phobias in adults. Four years after the two-hour treatment, 90 percent of the 20 patients in the study were “much improved or completely recovered.”
Feeling Afraid? Do What Scares You, Then Do It Again
Therapy and certain actions you can take on your own definitely help change your brain’s response to a phobia. “[Phobias involve] an interaction of your feelings, emotions, behavior, what you do, and what experiences you’ve had. That is encoded in some ways in your memories and the pathways in your brain,” says Davis.
When I hesitantly sifted through Getty Images for my least favorite animal, the site dutifully returned pages and pages of cockroaches in all their abhorrent glory—2,160 images to be exact.
I was doing it for the sake of this story, but the moment the pictures popped up, I felt an immediate sensation of intense disgust that forced me to grimace, cover my mouth with my hand, and look away. My heart rate shot up. Even after I clicked on another tab in my browser to hide, it seemed like the “roach page” was emanating some sort of evil miasma, distracting me from other tasks.
This roach is from West Australia, and it sort of reminds me of a fat, armored, brownish grasshopper. Normally, the waving antennae and fast-moving spiky legs of Blattodea—the scientific name for the order of the cockroach—really freaks me out, as does its reddish-brown back, though I couldn’t say why. But, I noticed that typing out this description calmed me down a little.Getty Images
Turns out, this exercise is exactly what I needed to minimize my phobia, Davis says. I was using a safe way to be around cockroaches, knowing they can’t hurt me, and articulating these thoughts and feelings to myself. The next step was to spend time with a model of a roach and maybe even touch it; I’ve done this, successfully. Later, I could move on to looking at real cockroaches in an exhibit, maybe at a natural history museum.
During decades of clinical work with children, teens, and young adults, Davis used cognitive-behavioral exposure therapy techniques like these to help people with phobias defuse their feelings until their phobias receded into milder emotions. Part of that process is the step-by-step, safe conditioning to the very thing that terrifies you—until you realize it’s not that scary.
“Do small little doses, baby steps, right? Small little bits of doing what it is you’re afraid of,” Davis says. He once had a patient who couldn’t sleep after watching a horror movie. Instead of avoiding the film’s scary imagery, Davis advised watching the film again. And again. And again. The first time, rewatching it was very scary. But the second time was a little less scary. Finally, Davis says the patient told him, “It’s getting boring.” Fear was no longer the patient’s main reaction.
Typically, a single, three-hour cognitive-behavioral exposure therapy session at Davis’ former practice in Louisiana helped people get over the worst of their phobias. They were advised to continue using the same techniques in their daily lives, because practice is key. For example, if someone was phobic about elevators, during the session, they walked by the elevator with their therapist. Then after a while, they stood in front of it, all while talking about the elevator, how it works, and its safety features. They graduated to walking in and out, perhaps. Eventually, that elevator was no longer an object of terror.
The Takeaway
Eliminating your phobia doesn’t equate to making you love what you’re afraid of, Davis says. In rare instances, fear does a complete 180, as in the case of one patient who was afraid of dogs and ended up adopting a puppy. “We don’t talk about cure, we don’t talk about miraculous recovery. But most people can go from … a life-impairing, life-interfering phobia, to at least having the skills to where they’re interacting with what they’re afraid of,” Davis says. “That means, if you see a dog and it’s coming down the other side of the street on a leash with an owner, you can walk by it and not have a panic attack or not have to leave the area,” Davis says.
I know I haven’t seen my last cockroach. But next time, instead of fleeing the scene, getting someone to kill it, and then obsessing about other roaches that may be lurking nearby, I could stop and consider it—a living creature just going about its business. If it’s indoors, then yeah, I will be getting rid of it somehow. However, as Davis tells me, I can first ask myself if I’m in actual danger of being hurt. I’d have to admit, the answer is no, because I’m aware that roaches don’t bite people, and that they are afraid of us.
“That [would be] a positive learning experience,” says Davis. “We’re tipping the scales the other way.”
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