August 2026
Living with a phobia can make your world feel smaller. Whether you’re afraid of spiders, flying, needles, heights, dogs or social situations, a phobia can create intense fear and anxiety that feels difficult to control. In this blog, I explore what causes phobias, why they can become so powerful, how avoidance can reinforce fear and how hypnotherapy could be the answer you seek…
Most of us are afraid of something. Perhaps you dislike spiders, feel uneasy around heights or hate the thought of flying. Fear is a normal human response and, in the right circumstances, it can be extremely useful. It helps us notice danger and motivates us to protect ourselves.
But sometimes fear becomes much bigger than the actual threat. It can become so intense that we start organising our lives around avoiding the thing we fear. When that happens, there’s a good chance it could be a phobia.
Phobias are more common than you might think. The latest Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey for England found that 2.6% of adults had a phobia – that’s equivalent to around one in 40 adults. The good news is that phobias can be treated. Understanding what is happening in your brain and body can be an important first step towards changing your relationship with fear.
What is a phobia?
A phobia is an intense and persistent fear of a particular object, animal, situation or circumstance. The fear can feel overwhelming and may seem completely out of proportion to the actual level of danger.
You might know rationally that a spider is unlikely to hurt you, for example, yet seeing one can cause your heart to race, your stomach to churn and your body to go into full alarm mode.
As Mind explains, a phobia is an extreme form of fear or anxiety triggered by a particular situation or object. It can be present even when you know that what you are frightened of is unlikely to harm you.
A phobia isn’t simply a preference or something you don’t like. It can produce a very real physical response.
You might experience:
- A racing or pounding heart
- Sweating or shaking
- Feeling dizzy or light-headed
- Nausea
- Tightness in your chest
- A strong urge to escape
- Panic or a feeling that you might lose control
- Significant anxiety simply from thinking about the feared object or situation
As a former sufferer of arachnophobia, I can confirm that even seeing pictures of spiders could induce in me a physiological feeling of shock, revulsion and panic.
Simple and complex phobias
Phobias can broadly be divided into simple and complex phobias.
A simple phobia, sometimes called a specific phobia, is usually focused on one particular object or situation. Examples include spiders, dogs, needles, flying, heights, blood, injections or enclosed spaces. Most of them have their own name – did you know that coulrophobia is the fear of clowns? Or what about hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia? – apparently, that means a fear of long words! If you’re an avid quizzer, it might be worthwhile genning up on your phobia terminology.
If you struggle with a phobia, you may be perfectly comfortable in most areas of your life but experience an intense reaction when you encounter your particular trigger.
A complex phobia can have a much broader impact. Social anxiety, for example, can involve an intense fear of being judged, embarrassed or humiliated in social situations. Agoraphobia can involve fear of being in situations where escape might feel difficult or help might not be available (contrary to the popular belief that it means fear of open spaces).
The distinction is important because a simple phobia may only interfere with your life occasionally, whereas a complex phobia can influence where you go, who you see, what you do and the opportunities you feel able to pursue. It also affects the type of treatment you might need.
Why do phobias happen?
There isn’t always one clear reason why someone develops a phobia. Sometimes there has been a frightening or unpleasant experience. A child who is chased or bitten by a dog, for example, may subsequently become frightened of dogs. Or it may be that the phobia arose by association – someone witnesses a traumatic event whilst travelling on a train and their brain makes a link, resulting in an intense fear of train travel (known as siderodromophobia, by the way).
But you don’t necessarily need to have experienced something frightening yourself. Fear can be learned by watching other people.
Imagine a young child whose parent becomes extremely frightened whenever they see a spider. The child watches their parent react with alarm, hears comments about how dangerous or disgusting spiders are and perhaps sees them being avoided. Over time, the child’s brain may begin to associate spiders with danger too.
This doesn’t mean parents cause their children’s phobias or that anyone should feel guilty. Fear is a complicated mixture of biology, learning, experience and individual vulnerability. Children are constantly learning from the emotional responses of the adults around them so, if you are a parent with a phobia, maybe it really is time to do something about it.
What is happening in the brain?
To understand phobias, it helps to understand the brain’s threat detection system. One important part of this system is the amygdala, a small structure involved in detecting and responding to potential threats. It can react extremely quickly, often before the more conscious, logical parts of the brain have had time to assess what is actually happening.
If your brain has learned that something is dangerous, seeing it can trigger an automatic alarm response.
Your body releases stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. Your heart rate increases, your muscles become ready for action and your attention becomes focused on the perceived threat. These stress hormones are powerful indicators that a threat is present and the body needs to respond. It’s a truly brilliant survival system when you really are in danger.
The difficulty with a phobia is that the alarm system can become activated when the situation isn’t actually dangerous. Neuroscience research suggests that specific phobias can involve learned fear responses and changes in the way fear is regulated so that, in effect, it becomes encoded in your neural system.
Why avoiding the fear can make it stronger
Avoidance is one of the most understandable responses to fear.
If you’re frightened of flying, you don’t fly.
If you’re frightened of spiders, you leave the room.
If you’re frightened of needles, you avoid medical appointments.
The problem is that avoidance has the effect of providing immediate relief, which in turn teaches your brain that this is how you stay safe, by avoiding the thing you fear. This then reinforces the avoidant behaviour and makes the fear more persistent. Research into specific phobias suggests that although fear may initially be acquired through learning, it is then maintained by avoidance.
This is one reason why phobias can gradually become more restrictive. A person who initially avoids one particular situation might start avoiding anything associated with it. Their world can become smaller without them even realising it.
How can you overcome a phobia?
The aim isn’t necessarily to make yourself like the thing you fear. If you have a spider phobia, for example, you don’t need to develop a love of spiders – I certainly haven’t! Instead, the goal is to help your brain learn that you can be safe even when the feared thing is present. I can co-exist with a sizeable spider in the room with me, but I won’t ever be keeping one as a pet.
One of the most established approaches for phobias is exposure-based therapy. This involves carefully and gradually approaching the feared situation or object rather than continually avoiding it. To me, it seems like a fairly brutal approach and one which I would do anything to avoid, because avoidance is what keeps me safe…right?
Exposure works in part because the brain can learn through experience. When the predicted catastrophe doesn’t happen, new learning can take place. Research into fear extinction suggests that areas including the amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are involved in this process of learning that a previously feared stimulus is no longer signalling danger. I can understand the theory but, as anyone with a phobia will recognise, it’s a hard ask and the tendency is more likely to be to continue down the avoidance route.
However, the good news is that overcoming a phobia need not mean forcing yourself to confront the most frightening situation imaginable. Good therapy should be collaborative and paced appropriately. The aim is to help you build confidence and develop new learning in a safe way, rather than overwhelm you with a stress response.
How Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy combines elements of psychotherapy with hypnosis and a modern understanding of how the brain works. Rather than spending your time analysing the fear, we focus on where you want to get to, how you want things to be. What would you like to be able to do that you can’t comfortably do now? What would be different if the phobia wasn’t controlling your choices? How would you know you were becoming more confident in situations that previously triggered the phobia?
This can help shift attention away from repeatedly rehearsing the problem and towards building a sense of possibility and control. Hypnosis can also provide a deeply relaxed state in which it may be easier to imagine responding differently. We can rehearse future situations mentally, develop more helpful responses and strengthen the sense that you can cope. This isn’t about being talked into believing that something isn’t frightening – it’s about helping your brain develop a different response.
Before we get to that part though, perhaps the most important part of the process is the Rewind technique. Whilst in a relaxed state, the therapist will guide you through a scenario involving the playing and rewinding of your feared memory as if it were a film being projected onto a screen. By fast-forwarding and rewinding the film many times over, at a safe and detached distance, the connection between the trigger and the stress response becomes corrupted and the unpleasant emotions are stripped away. The brain then refiles the memory as a normal, non-threatening event that is no longer associated with feelings of terror and an urge for avoidance. No exposure necessary.
Why is it worth doing something about a phobia?
You might think, “I can just avoid it.” And perhaps you can. But consider what that avoidance is costing you…
- Are you missing out on overseas holidays because of flying?
- Do you turn down social invitations because you’re worried about being judged?
- Are you putting off medical or dental appointments because there will be needles?
- Do you avoid walking in certain places in case of dogs?
- Are you relying on someone else to deal with the spiders in your house?
Perhaps you’ve stopped doing things that you would really like to do.
A phobia can affect relationships, work, travel, social life and independence. It can also create a constant background worry about encountering the trigger. The Mental Health Foundation notes that when fear and anxiety become long-term or start to take over your life, they can affect your wellbeing. Getting help isn’t an admission that your fear is ridiculous or that you aren’t strong enough to deal with it. Quite the opposite. It is recognising that your brain has learned a particular response and that, with the right support, it may be possible to learn something new.
You don’t have to let fear make your world smaller
Fear has an important job – it is there to protect us. But sometimes the brain’s alarm system becomes overprotective. A phobia can feel incredibly real even when you know intellectually that you are not in serious danger. Understanding this can be reassuring. It isn’t simply a matter of telling yourself to “get over it”. Your brain and body have learned a response that feels automatic, but your brain is capable of learning a new response.
With hypnotherapy, it is possible to change the way you respond to fear. If a phobia is affecting your life, you don’t have to simply work around it forever. Help is out there.
If you would like to find the freedom to live your life without fear making the decisions for you, why not book a free consultation.