Introduction
It is not uncommon for anyone to know at least one person who always looks like he is scared of something, like experiencing a constant state of nervousness no matter the place nor the circumstances.
Since today none of us, or at least the majority of us don’t live in an environment with enough dangers to justify a permanent feeling of fear, for this to happen the person needs to have a certain mental instability, that makes him more prone to adopt and maintain a flawed impression about the things that are happening around him, and if there are past experiences that can trigger the feeling of fear, it could manifest itself disproportionately, without any way of controlling it by the individual in question.
How come some people can have a permanent feeling of fear?
There is a phobia called pantophobia, and it is defined as follows:
Pantophobia refers to the condition of having an abnormal, extreme, and persistent fear of everything. | Source
is a vague and persistent threat or fear of some unknown evil. It is an irrational fear there is no logical cause that triggers it. | Source
As we all surely know, phobias are intense fears that are directed towards certain situations, animals or objects. People may have an irrational phobia or fear towards interaction with other people, or spiders which is extremely common, closed spaces, among other examples.
But when people suffer from pantophobia, irrational and intense fear is towards everything and not towards specific things or circumstances, so people can feel fear at the same time because of an animal, because of a situation, and any other thing we can imagine.
These people will obviously live under a perpetual state of alertness and may even end up worrying about their own tendency in being permanently scared, because it can become something very disabling and might complicate the possibility of having a normal life.
The panophobic person is always worried and fearful that something horrifying would happen. | Source
It is very easy for these individuals to fall into social isolation and begin to develop other issues such as depression and anxiety, which can only make the initial problem worse, and make their self esteem decrease to very low levels, causing them to feel a lot of sadness, guilt and even feelings of helplessness, because handling something as frustrating as this can be very demanding on all aspects.
They can also start having frequent thoughts questioning the fear they experience, which might not allow them to think clearly and concentrate on whatever activity they are doing. The discomfort they feel can sometimes be so intense that they may become afraid of losing control or feel they may go crazy as a result of going through all of this, which can have as a result the following physical manifestations:
- Difficulty breathing
- Racing or pounding heart
- Chest pain or tightness
- Trembling or shaking
- Feeling dizzy or light-headed
- A churning stomach.. | Source
Another important aspect is that they experience a constant adrenaline rush due to the state of alert in which they remain throughout the day. After this adrenaline increase, there are periods of fatigue as the body needs to recover, this causes people who suffer from this type of phobia to usually have a very limited life.
What can trigger the development of this problem?
In order for an individual to suffer from this problem, he possibly already suffered from an intense fear or phobia towards something in particular. For example, a person could have started having acrophobia (fear of heights), claustrophobia (fear of being trapped in a small space), hematophobia (fear of blood) and endeding up generalizing this fear to the symptoms that he experienced when facing that type of situations.
When the fear starts to expand itself beyond its initial environment, the person begins to avoid anything that might make him feel scared of nervous, which causes the fear to become persistent and in this case a pantophobia is produced.
Other thing that can trigger this issue is having traumatic experiences during childhood or teenage years, so the person experiences an intense fear of that situation and lives tormenting himself about that possibility of it happening again to him or to someone close and loved. This circumstance can also cause the person to start avoiding situations, people or places, making the fear in question to keep increasing as time goes by.
When people have parents that show a frightened behavior towards certain things, the same pattern of behavior is more likely to develop in the children. This is due to the fact that as children, the behavior of the parents tends to be mimicked, so as a result, they can end up adopting it and adding it to their own personality, without filtering out the possibly defects there might be.
Parents can be such a big conditioning, that there is a possibility of genes being also a factor that can develop a phobia later in life.
Memories can be passed down to later generations through genetic switches that allow offspring to inherit the experience of their ancestors, according to new research that may explain how phobias can develop. | Source
"From a translational perspective, our results allow us to appreciate how the experiences of a parent, before even conceiving offspring, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations. "Such a phenomenon may contribute to the etiology and potential intergenerational transmission of risk for neuropsychiatric disorders such as phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder." | Source
All of this can make the person feel like he his incapable of achieving anything important in his life, and believing this is clearly a considerable hit in the emotional well being of anyone, which makes achieving goals such as gaining independence and eventually forming a family, something much more difficult than what it actually is.
What can people do to overcome this?
How do we address baseless fears? Being in the right company can make a huge difference. The person next to you can help you overcome and of course on a more sophisticated scale you could seek professional help, and hypnotherapy is one of them... | Source
As is the case with every type of irrational believe, the most important thing the person must do is to manage to identify the fact that he is having irrational thoughts, in this particular case, an irrational fear that has no justification to exist.
Once this fact is identified and accepted, the person can start to realize there is no risk whatsoever by exposing himself little by little to the situation that is causing the fear, in a way in which he feels in control, getting used to the idea that there is no actual danger whatsoever. This is the only way to actually reduce and eventually completely eliminate all types of irrational fears.
There is also a very common technique called mindfulness, which consists in:
a state of active, open attention on the present. When you're mindful, you carefully observe your thoughts and feeling without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to your current experience, rather than dwelling on the past or anticipating the future. | Source
With the practice of mindfulness, the interpretation of everything that happens to them is eliminated and it promotes the acceptance of undesirable things as part of the life experience everyone goes through, which is a contribution towards stop worrying about everything.
This can be of great help because it can help people in focusing on the present moment, that is, on what happens moment by moment and to stop judging each of the experiences they go through.
One thing is for sure, do not continue to live in that fear that haunts and taunts you as it is a leech that sucks every moment of life out of you. | Source
Conclusion
No one likes to have irrational fears, nor having to deal with all of their consequences capable of affecting the life of anyone in a negative way. This is something that for people who unfortunately have to experience it, must be dealt with the sooner the better, so it doesn’t get stronger with time.
At the end of the day, all of this is a product of the person’s mind and nothing more, so in order to fix this, said person must be willing to collaborate fully, especially when it comes to accepting the fact that what is happening is a product of some irrational thought process, as mentioned before.
For some people accepting they have irrational thoughts that are affecting their life, might not be something very comfortable to do for obvious reasons, but it is still necessary if the goal is overcoming this issue once and for all.
Have you ever felt fear with no justification? If so, why do you think it happened?
References
healthtopia - fear of everything
scientificamerican – fearful memories passed down
Images sources
1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11
If these titles sound interesting to you, I assure you the articles will be even better!
Let's talk about people with inferiority complex |
Today’s lesson: What are identity crisis all about? |
"Today’s lesson: How drinking alcohol affects our memory? |
Its so unfortunate that this is actually Real and i wouldn't wish this on Anyone....
Nice write up.... I look forward to reading more from you @dedicatedguy
Never knew about pantophia
This is really an educative write up. Thanks for sharing @dedicatedguy
Thanks I am glad you like it!
MAN ! it must be so hard to live like that ! is it true that we are only born with two fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud sounds ? any thoughts ?
It would make sense since both are able to protect us and avoid dangerous situations.
Fear of heights reduces the chances of falling and dying because of that.
And anything that makes loud noises is surely not very friendly.
My son suffers from so many irrational fears, I wouldn’t say it was on the same level as pantophobia but it is close to it. He has Autism and sever anxiety disorder, both seem to play a huge part. He has a fear of crowds, people, lights, sounds and is in constant self doubt of his actions and words. It is extremely difficult for him to get through the day. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to be afraid of everything!
I am sorry to read this @mumofmany
I checked your last article btw and your son looked very happy in those pics :)
@dedicatedguy not aware we have some thing very common. Today i too made a post on fear..two way to live a life...you have the psycology pretty well....
I will be checking your article mate! Thanks for stopping by.
I like that you believe mindfulness is a good option to resolve mental distress :)
This is a great, informative post @dedicated guy. You always manage to put things in a very straight-forward way!
Best.
Thanks for your words @abigail-dantes! I really appreciate it!
You would finally become my therapist from reading your posts
Another one added today.... Panophobia.i belive everyone has an atom of it
hahahaha ^^
Well we all have our little fears, but in a reasonable way of course.
This is educative and easy to understand. Well done
I have never heard of the fear of everything. Thanks for the enlightenment
I am glad you found this article interesting!
Irrational fear can be hell dangerous to the health..I can't imagine how hard it is to manage just a particular phobia talkless of integrating into Phantophobia...Self-mindfulness and socialization are main helpful means of avoiding this situations...
Nice work you did here buddy
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and nice words mate!
It's a pleasure..The quality demands it
Keep writing!
I wonder if there really is something as an irrational fear. It can be irrational in the sense that you wont get killed by an spider, but I think it's a mistake to not be mindful of that fear has it's own logic. A fear of everything can for example be a trauma connected to fear itself, so all pantophobia does is defend you from that trauma-complex
Having a phobia is not the best defense since it could make it more complicate to have a normal life.
Irrational because the intensity of fear doesn't correlate with the danger of the situation.
Yeah I know, phobia sucks. But it has it's own logic, it correlates more to what that particular thing represent then the actual situation. But I guess it doesn't matter because the same treatment is derived: gradual exposure, gradual exposure, gradual exposure
This writeup is very useful for counselling, thanks for unveiling the hidden worm sucking out people's life
I have had 4 different diagnoses, panic disorder was one of them. I wrote about it in a couple of posts even and talked about my personal experience. Looking back, I am happy I went through that, I would not be me that I am today without it. This is a really good post on the subject of fear. Thank you for sharing it and trying to educate people. Very lovely of you to do that.
Going through something like that can really shape the person.
Thanks for stopping by!