Are you afflicted by Omphalophobia? The rare phobia that causes oneself to be petrified of belly buttons. Do you have a phobia in general? If so, are you sure it’s a phobia and not a fear?
A phobia is the irrational fear of something, whether it be some object, situation, or organism. Sometimes, people can mistake a fear for a phobia, but they are not identical. Phobias are intense and often debilitating, while fear is a regular emotion that, in some cases, can be helpful in a situation. Fear can warn you of a dangerous situation, whereas a phobia makes you terrified of something that simply won’t hurt you.
While most phobias stem from a negative experience or from an event in your adolescence, there can be other causes. Sometimes, a phobia can be learned from a parent or sibling, or in other instances, it could simply be genetics or just how your brain functions.
Most phobias can be categorized into one of two groups. The first being a specific phobia. This stems from a specific trigger or fear. The second happens to be social phobia, which is the extreme fear of being in front of people in a social setting.
Common Phobias include Acrophobia, Aerophobia, and Arachnophobia. They represent the fear of heights, the fear of flying, and the fear of spiders. However, with phobias that we categorize as normal, there have to be phobias considered abnormal.
These rare phobias affect 1% of people in the U.S. in comparison to the 12.5% with typical phobias. Phobias such as hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, ephebiphobia, and phobophobia.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words, which, ironically, is spelled using 36 characters. Making it the second longest word in the English language. The American Psychiatric Association doesn’t recognize it and only considers it a type of social phobia. A shortened version of the term is sesquipedalophobia. This originates from the Roman phrase “sesquipedalia verba,” which was used in the first century BCE to mock writers who used words that were “a foot and a half long.” While some believe this phobia to be real, most of the time, it’s used in a joking manner.
Ephebiphobia is the fear of the youth, and phobophobia is the fear of being afraid, along with the oddest one, arachibutyrophobia, which is the odd fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.
