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PHOBIA LIBRARY

Read up on fear, panic and phobia to get a general overview of phobias and trauma and fear management. Learn mindfulness based self care principles and exercises for managing phobias from my books on trauma and self care.

​JUMP TO A CHAPTER
​Fear | Function | Thought | Treatment | Coping
For Help See: Fear in the Brain | Fear Dictionary
THE LIBRARY TOPIC HOME PAGES
​​Introduction to Trauma, Fear and Phobia
Part 1: ​Defining Fear and the Fear Response
Part 2: Emotional & Cognitive Functions of Fear
Part 3: Maladaptive Thought Processing
​Part 4: Professional Therapy & Mindful Self Care
​THE PHOBIA COLLECTION DOWNLOADS
​Browse Collection of Phobias by Topic
Download Collection of Phobias
Download Dictionary of Fear and Phobia
Download Self Care Guides for Coping

PART ONE - FEAR
​​DEFINING FEAR AND THE FEAR RESPONSE
​ Articles defining fear, brain structure, fear conditioning, the fear response (fight, flight or freeze), & characteristics of panic & anxiety attacks

DIRECTORY OF FEAR
Characteristics of the Primal Emotion of Fear
Phobia Calls on the Fear Conditioning Process
Identifying the Brain Structures of Fear
​Chemical Reactions in the Brain
Fear Triggers the Fight or Flight Response
Can’t Fight or Flight - Then Stop and Freeze
Fear Symptoms That Aggravate Anxiety
What Happens During a Panic Attack
​Fear Manipulation of People and the Collective​
ALL CONTENT PROVIDED BY MY BOOKS ON MINDFUL SELF CARE FOR TRAUMA AND FEAR
Download for Free Here
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Download the Glossary of Fear

For help with the terms in this series
Download the Panic and Fear Dictionary of the Brain

FEAR SYMPTOMS
​AGGRAVATED BY ANXIETY

SYMPTOM OF ANXIETY


​AGGRAVATING ANXIETY
Anxiety is an emotion characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil. It is accompanied by physical effects like a racing heart or excessive perspiration, nervous or hypervigilant behaviors such as pacing back and forth, and processing behaviors like rumination or overthinking. It causes negative subjective feelings such as horror, terror or dread. Feelings may be at the current situation or anticipated events. Anxiety is also a feeling of uneasiness and worry that is generalized and unfocused. For example, an overreaction of a low risk, normal situation is perceived as menacing. It is often accompanied by muscular tension, restlessness, fatigue and attentional problems like focus or concentration.

Anxiety is closely related to fear which is responses to a real or perceived immediate threat or phobias which are fears of irrational or imaginary threats. Anxiety also involves the anticipation or expectations of future threats. People facing anxiety may avoid or withdraw from situations which have provoked anxiety in the past.

ANXIETY DISORDERS
There are a number of anxiety disorders: including generalized anxiety disorder, specific phobia, social anxiety disorder, separation anxiety disorder, agoraphobia, and selective mutism. The disorder differs by what results in the symptoms. People often have more than one anxiety disorder. Disorders are characterized as excessive or persisting beyond developmentally appropriate periods. They differ from transient fear or anxiety, are often stress-induced, and are persistent and lasting, typically for 6 months or more. The diagnostic criteria for duration is intended as a general guide and there is a degree of flexibility and sometimes of shorter duration as seen in children.

Panic disorder can be characterized by unexpected and repeated episodes of intense fear. Those who suffer from panic disorder will eventually develop constant fear of attacks and with progressive growth, affect daily functioning and general quality of life.

Treatment may include lifestyle changes, therapy, medications and self-care coping methods. Therapy is is typically cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure therapy. Medications, such as antidepressants, benzodiazepines or beta blockers, may improve symptoms. Self-care coping methods include mindfulness meditation, breath management, boundaries, strategies for trigger, visualization exercises, or self-affirmations.

DISTINGUISHING ANXIETY VS FEAR
Anxiety is distinguished from fear, which is an appropriate cognitive and emotional response to a perceived threat. Anxiety is connected to specific behaviors of the fight-or-flight responses, defensive behaviors, or avoidance and escape. It typically occurs in situations perceived as uncontrollable or unavoidable but are not realistic. Anxiety can be defined as a future focused mood state in which one is not ready or prepared for coping with upcoming negative events. The distinction between future and present dangers is what divides anxiety and fear. Anxiety is agony, dread, terror, or even apprehension.

  • Fear is short-lived, present-focused, directed towards a specific threat and facilitating escape from threat.
  • ​Anxiety is long-acting, future-focused, and broadly focused. It can result in excessive caution when approaching a potential threat. It interferes with constructive coping. Fear and anxiety can be further differentiated in four areas: duration of experience, temporal focus, specificity of the threat, and motivation

SYMPTOMS OF ANXIETY
Anxiety characterized with long, drawn-out daily symptoms that reduce quality of life is known as generalized anxiety. Anxiety experienced in short spurts with sporadic, stressful panic attacks, is known as acute anxiety.

Anxiety may cause psychiatric and physiological symptoms.Symptoms of anxiety can range in number, intensity, and frequency, depending on the person. While everyone has experienced anxiety at some point in their lives, most do not develop long-term problems with anxiety.

BEHAVIORAL EFFECTS
The behavioral effects of anxiety may include avoidance or withdrawal from situations which have provoked anxiety or negative feelings in the past. Other effects may include changes in sleeping patterns, changes in habits, increase or decrease in appetite or food intake, and increased motor tension such as foot tapping.

EMOTIONAL EFFECTS
The emotional effects of anxiety may include feelings of apprehension or dread, attentional issues or trouble concentrating, restlessness or feeling tense or jumpy, overreacting by anticipation of the worst possible scenario, anger or irritability, hypervigilance like watching (and waiting) for signs of danger, and feelings of indifference or feeling your mind is “blank.” One may experience nightmares/bad dreams, obsessions about sensations, déjà vu, a trapped-in-your-mind feeling, and feeling like “everything is scary." Finally, it may include the feelings of hopelessness or helplessness.

COGNITIVE EFFECTS
The cognitive effects of anxiety may include thoughts about suspected dangers such as the fear of dying. People may fear that chest pains are a deadly heart attack or that the shooting pains of headache is a tumor or an aneurysm. It includes an intense fear of dying that may be felt more often than normal or when one “can't get it out of their head."

PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS
The physiological symptoms of anxiety may include:
  • Neurological (headache, vertigo, or presyncope)
  • Digestive (abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea, indigestion, dry mouth)
  • Respiratory (shortness of breath or shallow breathing)
  • Cardiac (palpitations, tachycardia, or chest pain)
  • Muscular (fatigue, tremors, or tetany)
  • Cutaneous (excessive perspiration or itchy skin)
  • Uro-genital (frequent urination, urinary urgency, dyspareunia, or impotence, chronic pelvic pain syndrome.
  • Bowel (stress hormones contribute to or exacerbate IBS)

TYPES OF ANXIETY

EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY - the state in which one is aware of possible nonbeing. The three categories for defining “nonbeing” are: ontic (fate and death), moral (guilt and condemnation), and spiritual (emptiness and meaninglessness).

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY - is anxiety produced in situations of judgment like performance, competition or test anxiety and results in uneasiness, apprehension, or nervousness.

SOCIAL ANXIETY- people generally require social acceptance and dread the disapproval of others. Apprehension of being judged by others may cause anxiety in social situations. Anxiety during social interactions, particularly between strangers, is common among young people. It may persist into adulthood and become social anxiety or social phobia. Social anxiety varies in degree and severity. For some, it is characterized by discomfort or awkwardness during physical social contact like shaking hands, while others fear of interacting with unfamiliar people altogether. Those suffering from this condition may restrict their activities to accommodate the anxiety, minimizing social interaction whenever possible, withdrawing from situations or complete avoidance.

INTERGROUP ANXIETY - people may experience anxiety during interactions with groups or group memberships like race, ethnicity, class, gender, etc.. Depending on the nature of the relations, cognitions, and situational factors, intergroup contact may be stressful and lead to feelings of anxiety.Intergroup anxiety has behavioral, cognitive, and affective effects. For instance, processing of simplified information can occur when anxiety is high. Recent research has found that discriminatory evaluation can be amplified during intergroup interaction. Negative experiences can result in discrimination and bias demonstrated by unrealistic expectations, avoidance or antagonistic behavior such as hostility.

CHOICE ANXIETY - unpredictability or uncertainty may trigger emotional responses that systematically alter decision-making. There are primarily two forms of this anxiety type. The first refers to a choice in which there are multiple potential outcomes with known or calculable probabilities. The second refers to the uncertainty and ambiguity to a choice in which there are multiple possible outcomes with unknown probabilities.

NEUROSCIENCE OF ANXIETY
See Also: The Fear Structures of the Brain

In the central nervous system (CNS), the major mediators of symptoms appear to be norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). The corticotropin-releasing factor may be involved. The autonomic nervous system, especially the sympathetic nervous system, mediates many of the symptoms. Anxiety, like fear, involves the amygdala (regulates emotions like anxiety and fear) and the hippocampus (affects emotional memory). People who have anxiety tend to show high activity in response to emotional stimuli in the amygdala. The HPA axis regulates production of cortisol, a hormone that takes part in the body's stress response. When HPA activity spikes, cortisol levels increase, processing and reducing anxiety in stressful situations.

Research in sensitivity of the nucleus accumbens has found that decision making is dependent on receiving a reward. This suggests a link between circuits responsible for fear and reward. The study determined that a sense of 'responsibility', or self-agency, in a context of uncertainty (probabilistic outcomes) drives motivation (seen in the nucleus accumbens) more strongly in inhibited than noninhibited adolescents.

DRUG INTERACTIONS
Several drugs can cause or worsen anxiety during intoxication or withdrawal or as a side effect. These include alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, sedatives (including benzodiazepines), opioids (including pain killers and illicit drugs like heroin), stimulants (such as caffeine, cocaine and amphetamines), hallucinogens, and inhalants. While many often report self-medicating anxiety with these substances, improvements in anxiety from drugs are usually short-lived and tend to be exaggerated.

PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS
Poor coping skills - effects include rigidity/inflexible problem solving, denial, avoidance, impulsivity, extreme self-expectation, negative thoughts, affective instability, and inability to focus on problems. Anxiety is also linked and perpetuated by the one’s pessimistic expectations on an outcome and how they cope with feedback negativity. Temperament (neuroticism) and attitudes (pessimism) have been found to be risk factors for anxiety.

Cognitive distortions such as overgeneralizing, catastrophizing, mind reading, emotional reasoning, binocular trick, and mental filter can result in anxiety. For example, an overgeneralized belief that something is “always bad” may lead someone to have excessive fears or phobias of minimal risk situations and they will avoid benign social situations from the anticipatory anxiety of embarrassment. Findings suggest that anxious thoughts can lead to anxiety from the anticipation of a stressful event as well as the event itself. Such unhealthy thoughts can be targets for successful treatment with cognitive therapy.

Unconscious fear theory suggests that anxiety is often the result of opposing unconscious wishes or fears that manifest via maladaptive defense mechanisms (such as suppression, repression, anticipation, regression, somatization, passive aggression, dissociation) that have developed to adapt to problems with caregivers and from empathic failures in childhood. For example, persistent discouragement from a parent may lead to the repression/suppression of anger and that presents as gastrointestinal distress (somatization). Upon provocation the anger remains unconscious and outside awareness. This conflict can be treated with psychodynamic therapy, (explores the underlying roots of anxiety) or cognitive behavioral therapy (alters irrational thoughts and unwanted behaviors.)

​See Also: Setting and Enforcing Boundaries and
Dealing With Triggers

SOCIAL RISK FACTORS
Social risk factors for anxiety include a history of trauma
  • Abuse (physical, sexual or emotional or assault)
  • Bullying (traditional, online, social media)
  • Parenting factors (rejection, lack of warmth, high hostility, harsh discipline, high parental negative affect, anxious childrearing, dysfunctional behavior, drug-abuse, discouragement of emotions, poor socialization, poor attachment, child abuse and neglect)
  • Cultural factors (stoic families/cultures, persecuted minorities)
  • Socioeconomics (uneducated, unemployed, impoverished)
MORE ON FEAR
Characteristics of the Primal Emotion of Fear
Phobia Calls on the Fear Conditioning Process
Identifying the Brain Structures of Fear
​Chemical Reactions in the Brain
Fear Triggers the Fight or Flight Response
Can’t Fight or Flight - Then Stop and Freeze
Fear Symptoms That Aggravate Anxiety
What Happens During a Panic Attack
​Fear Manipulation of People and the Collective​
This content is provided for informational purposes only. Author is not a medical professional. Talk to your doctor to determine what therapy is right for you.
Self care techniques are meant to supplement professional treatment not replace it.
DISCLAIMER OF THE LEARNING LIBRARY

BROWSE PHOBIA COLLECTION​
​Phobia collection is presented in eight themed parts
​VIEW LIST INDEX or ​JUMP TO A PART
PART [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ]

PHOBIA COLLECTION BY TOPIC​
common ~ abstract ~ ordinary ~ bizarre ~ catastrophic ~ psyche ~ icky - academic ~ knowledge ~ education ~ literary ~ art ~ music ~ religion ~ political ~ law ~ order military ~ war ~ discrimination ~ science ~ chemical ~ energy ~ time ~ numbers ~ technology ~ nature ~ environment ~ astronomy ~ weather ~ geography ~ people ~ family ~ community ~ anatomy ~ medical ~ disease ~ emotions ~ senses ~ sensations ~ movement ~ conditions~ love ~ relationships ~ sexuality ~ lifestyle ~ places ~ events ~ objects ~ clothing ~ tools ~ vehicles ~ home ~ cooking ~ food ~ entertainment ~ sports ~ recreation ~ toys ~ games ~ monsters ~ characters ~ spooky ~ nightmares ~ delusional ~ joke ~ fiction

​DOWNLOAD PONDERING THE PHOBIA
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All the phobias in one download. Browse by both topic/subject and by alphabetized list
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​OTHER PHOBIA AND FEAR DOWNLOADS:
​Dictionary of Trauma, Phobia and Fear
Self Care Guides for Fear & Phobias​
Phobia articles provided by my self care series Healing the PTSD Mind ​ and my series on mindfulness based self care Be Mindful Be Well​. These self directed guides are written from a trauma perspective but the content applies to the symptoms of phobia like fear and panic. ​Learn and simple self care techniques with mindfulness.
BE MINDFUL. BE WELL. TRY MINDFULNESS​.
​DOWNLOAD SELF CARE GUIDES FOR FREE
​Books copyright 2021 by By Kairos
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