When you go to the bathroom, do you take your Smartphone with you?

If you do, you may (emphasis on “may”) have nomophobia (fear of being without mobile phone coverage).  

Laugh, if you must, but a recent article in telegraph.co.uk made this remarkable statement: “According to recent surveys, more than half of people in the UK suffer from it.”  The article continued: “The phobia is brought on by the fear of losing signal, running out of battery or even losing sight of a mobile phone.” And it’s an international phenomenon.

Explains Michael Carr-Gregg, an adolescent psychologist, as quoted in a cnn.com article: “I have clients who abstain from school or their part-time jobs to look for their phones when they cannot find them in the morning.” He adds: “Many of my clients go to bed with their mobile phones . . .  just like how one will have the teddy bear in the old days . . . . the phone has become our digital security blanket.”

Added psychiatrist Eric Yu Hai Chen, in that same cnn.com article: “One could look at this as a form of addiction to the phone. . . . The fear is part of the addiction. The use of the hand phone has some features that predispose this activity to addiction, similar to video games . . . .”

Nomophobia joins a long list of phobias suffered by man (leading us to wonder: do animals have phobias?  I know that our dogs won’t eat when we leave the house for a few hours – perhaps they’re autophobic – the fear of being alone or isolated). Reportedly, roughly 10% of Americans have bonafide phobias.

Nearly 200 phobias to choose from

Reviewing a list of nearly 200 phobias, I suddenly realized that, for most of my life, I’ve been tetraphobic (fear of the number 4).  Who knew that was on the list? 

And how about papaphobia (fear of the Pope), koumpounophobia (fear of buttons), or turophobia (fear of cheese). 

Who knew? 

As I read through the list, I started to wonder: where’s the line? That is, what’s the difference between a fear, and a phobia? Here’s how the folks at www.hudpages.com described it: “When you avoid something to the point that it negatively impacts your life, you’ve developed a phobia – a persistent fear of an object or situation which you go to great lengths in avoiding. Your fear of the danger posed by that thing is typically disproportional to the actual danger.”

Reasonable enough.  But now the question begged: how do we get rid of them?  How do we dissipate their impact?  Apparently, “thinking good thoughts” won’t do the trick – it’s more complicated than that. The article at Hudpages.com explained:

“When you have a phobia, you have a pattern within your brain; a linkage between certain thoughts, certain feelings, and certain physical reactions. This is why phobias tend to be resistant to simply ‘thinking good thoughts’. Exposing you to your triggering object or situation unleashes a cascade of intense emotion and physical sensations of fear. This is very hard to ‘think’ your way out of when you're in the middle of it.”

Overcoming Phobias: 6 principles

So what do you we do?  Dr. Fredric Neuman, writing for psychologytoday.com, outlined six principles to guide us in overcoming our phobias:

1.       “In order to overcome a phobia, the affected person has to spend time publicly trying to do things that everyone else can do effortlessly.

2.       “Practicing to overcome a phobia takes time, sometimes a lot of time. And repetition.

3.       “The things phobics are afraid of are not so awful when they do happen.

4.       “You can judge progress by what you can do, not how you feel. If you are not panicky, but you are not doing something a little more difficult than what you did yesterday, you are not getting better. [Conversely], if you are nervous or panicky all the time, but you are going further and further into the phobic situation, you are getting better.

5.       “Phobics run into ‘stuck points’ from time to time. Using an aide or a helper makes all the difference.

6.       “Sometimes the very things phobics are afraid of give them the most satisfaction when they are no longer afraid.”

And psychologist John Grohol, writing for www.psychcentral.com (which he founded), outlined a host of cognitive-behavioral techniques that are available for overcoming phobics – the trick is finding the one that works for you (e.g., gradual exposure, sudden exposure or “flooding”, the partnership method, keeping a daily mood log, positive imaging and distraction, to name a few).

I do anticipate that, in the days ahead, I can easily avoid spiders (arachnophobia), snakes (ophidiophobia) and  clowns (coulrophobia), but I have been known, of late, to suffer from bormaphobia (fear of boring meetings) and narsaphobia (fear of listening to narcissists).  But I manage. 

##