Thephobiashisirrational fearsand very intense towards situations or things that are very unlikely to harm us. They become a real psychological problem when they limit our life in a drastic way. The most common are blood phobia (hematofobia), to hospitals (nosocomephobia), to closed places (claustrophobia) or too open (agorafobia), to the elevators, to exams, to the dark (scotophobia), to the dogs (cynophobia), spiders (arachnophobia), cockroaches …, but there are hundreds of them. Some are as surprising as the irrational fear of water (hydrophobicity), to the rain (ombrophobia), to be seated (catisophobia) or clowns (coulrofobia).
There are those who have an atrocious fear of natural elements such as flowers (antophobia), the bees (apiphobia), the trees (dendrophobia) or storms (astrophobia). The rarest name for one of these pathological fears is that of thehexakosioihexekontahexafobiaor phobia of the number 666.
Phobias are generalized by a double mechanism. First, the affected person begins to fear something because he associates it with some negative experience; later, he tries to avoid that which generates apprehension, which leads him to have him more and moreafraid. Shunning the object of his fear makes him mythologize it and increases his anxiety at each encounter. The result is a human being aware of the irrationality of his fear, but finding it very difficult to fight it.
