Does your pulse race at the thought of glancing out of a plane window at 30,000 feet? How about swimming through shark-infested waters? Or delivering a speech to a roaring crowd?
While a fear of heights, sharks, or public speaking is normal, most people won’t be diagnosed with a phobia of these common fears. To be classified as a phobia, a fear must meet certain criteria: an intense, irrational fear of something that poses little or no real threat.
Specific phobias are pretty rare. In fact, just 8 to 12% of people in the U.S. qualify for a true diagnosis. Rarer still are the 10 strange phobias we’ve listed here.
This fear might sound silly, but it makes sense when you consider peanut allergies. Someone who’s gone through anaphylactic shock after unknowingly taking a bite of something with peanut butter may feel genuinely anxious when they think about eating this creamy or crunchy snack.
Most animal-related phobias center on dogs, snakes, or insects. Chickens aren’t much of a physical threat to adults, but many phobias can be traced back to childhood traumas—like a nasty peck from a hen. Most specific phobias actually begin before age 10.
Social workers play a crucial role in helping people work through phobias and other mental health struggles. If you’re drawn to helping people who suffer from phobias, both rare and common, social work is a career worth considering.
Palindromes, words that read the same forward and backward, are a source of dread for people with this phobia. “Racecar,” “mom,” and “kayak” are common palindromes. Observant readers will notice that “aibohphobia” is itself a palindrome.
Despite what the internet’s told you, anatidaephobia is not a real phobia. It actually originated in Gary Larson’s “Far Side” comic. However, the fear of birds, ornithophobia, is legitimate.
We can’t confirm whether you’re being watched at this very moment by a waterfowl, but the odds are greater than zero.
This phobia—not unique to millennials, apparently—captures the fear of falling short in any attempt, big or small.
Though rare, emetophobia affects roughly 7% of women and 2% of men. This phobia is particularly awful because of its vicious cycle. Fear of vomiting leads to nausea, which leads to more fear, and so on.
When it comes to somniphobia, it’s the fear of what happens after drifting off to sleep that has sufferers reaching for the espresso. Nightmares and sleep paralysis—the kind with a “demon” visitor—feed this fear.
For people with spectrophobia, looking into a mirror, or imagining what might appear, can trigger panic. When gazing into a mirror, people with schizophrenia are more likely to see face distortions or strange hallucinations, which explains their fear.
For people with chiclephobia, it’s not just the thought of chewing gum. Seeing someone chew gum or spotting gum on the sidewalk is enough to trigger anxiety. Like the fear of peanut butter, a past bad experience can spark this food phobia.
We’ve gotten to the final boss of phobias: fearing fear itself. People with an anxiety disorder, especially a different phobia, may be at a higher risk of developing phobophobia. Makes sense: A person with a phobia likely isn’t looking forward to suffering through another one.
There’s one more rare phobia we want to mention: decidophobia, the fear of making decisions. Hopefully, this phobia doesn’t plague you when thinking about life’s tough choices, including where to apply to college.
If you’re fascinated by phobias and what drives human behavior, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology online from UT Permian Basin could be the next step for you. Psychology majors explore fascinating topics like clinical psychology, developmental psychology, sports psychology, and more. And even if you’re not set on a psychology career, you’ll graduate with insights into human behavior that are both fascinating and valuable in any field.
Want to help others manage their fears? Check out our online psychology and social work programs. Don’t let fear hold you back from applying!
Sources:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/top-10-unusual-phobias-vol-1
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-are-the-rarest-phobias-5649656#toc-spectrophobia
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