When Fears Backfire
Which do you find scarier: zombies, clowns, or ghosts? I ask because I was surprised reading an Atlantic article about fear. Vote on the scariest one before clicking over to see the article.
(Click “see previous responses” if you want to see how other people are answering)
That wasn’t actually the most interesting part of the article. Nor was learning the term “trypophobia” which is “the fear of closely clustered circles.” It was this idea of our fears backfiring:
In the wake of 9/11, airplane ridership plummeted in the United States as many people opted to travel by car. A German psychologist estimated that in the 12 months following the attacks, 1,595 more people were killed in car accidents than would be expected in an ordinary year.
So people stopped flying, deeming it unsafe. But they still had to get from Point A to Point B, so they circumvented their fear by taking a different mode of transportation. And in the end, their cause of death was due to the thing they did to get around their fear. That’s simplifying it because their cause of death was a car accident, and maybe that car accident occurred while they were driving somewhere they wouldn’t have flown. But at least some of those accidents occurred because the person opted to drive instead of fly because they were scared to fly after 9/11.
I think about this a lot because I do many things to circumvent my irrational fears. It is scary to think that one of them could be my undoing.
Great… now I have a new thing to fear.
Do you do things to circumvent your fears? Or do you plow through them?
7 comments
I had some bad experiences with needles/shots as a child, so I feared needles and shots for a long time. Until I was 22 and in the Peace Corps, that is. We had to receive a lot of shots and the blood they took and shipped back to the US for testing (I don’t remember what for) was destroyed because it was delayed by a hurricane (this was the year of Katrina), so we had to offer up a vein once again. I don’t have great veins, so combine that with my fear and it was most unpleasant. But, I didn’t want to act like a baby and since there was no one to hold my hand, I had to develop a way to deal. For me, I have to watch what they are doing. Sneaking up on me only makes it worse. And, I just take some deep breaths to relax as they are coming at me. I’m glad I got better with the whole needle thing because it would have been just another issue when I was going through infertility testing and treatments.
Thanks to the article and a quick Google search, I discovered I have trypophobia and my skin is now crawling from the photos that Google showed without warning. For the record, coffee or any other bubbles do not bother me. It’s the small, closely clustered holes in things, like seed pods or animals and it makes me feel ill and squeamish. I have no idea why and I’m really ok with just avoiding it because it does not effect my everyday life. If it does start becoming more of a problem then I will find ways to deal. So, I guess I’m more of a ‘meet the fear head-on’ kinda gal….
I remember reading about this statistic. Same goes with restaurants that have been publicly exposed for food safety violations: people avoid them, but it’s actually when they reopen that they tend to be safest as they are under watchful eyes. Same thing goes with drivers post traffic tickets.
Anyway, yes to fear driving decision making, be it rational or irrational. I think it has to do with having some control over something that frightens us. Like having a birth plan prior to giving birth or mapping out a protocol prior to doing something scary. Having some sense of control over a situation that we actually may have none allows most of us to proceed.
I have not read that statistic before but it makes sense. I don’t have many irrational fears at this moment. I still don’t like spiders. But I do allow my husband to leave them up on our ceiling in the back of the basement because he claims they keep away the other grosser bugs. I don’t go back there much. I used to be afraid of flying and needles/blood draws but I got over those after some exposure and just deciding to get over myself.
I couldn’t vote in your poll because I’m not afraid of zombies, clowns or ghosts. I don’t think clowns are scary (Pennywise aside), and I don’t believe that either zombies or ghosts exist.
I don’t like certain insects, but my only *real* fear is dying before my children are grown. There’s not much I can do to either circumvent that fear or get through it. Time will tell whether it comes to pass.
Somewhere I read that the fear of flying is a result of losing control. It made sense to me, as someone who had this fear YEARS before 9/11. When you fly you have to give up control of the situation. Rationally, I know that the pilots want to get to their destination alive as much as I do. However, simply driving to the airport causes my stomach to twist in knots.
For many years needles and the SMELL of alcohol caused me to faint. I was what used to be called a “sickly” child. My mother was young and over protective. Because of her fears, Daddy was frequently chosen to take me to Dependent Sick Call at the Army base where he was stationed. This “sick call” was held in WWII era Quonset Huts which served as the base hospital. I clearly remember sitting with my Dad on the hard wooden benches which lined the long drafty halls that connected the Quonset Hut complex. The entire place smelled like alcohol which I associated with needles and injections. One whiff and I was a goner. Poor Daddy was always having to revive me.
I remember in the 90s (?) an economist wrote about this as a political phenomenon. A baby had died on a flight, in a parents’ arms rather than an infant seat. Perhaps an infant seat would have prevented his death. Under the “if it saves just one life” line of thinking, there was a push to pass a law that all babies had to have their own airline seat and carrier.
The economist pointed out the same thing as this article. Because of the increase in cost to fly for families with babies, fewer of them would fly and more of them would ride in a car. And statistically, more of them them would be in accidents.
I really don’t like hospitals. The smells put the primitive part of my brain in a state of fear/anxiety.
I remember reading an article somewhere that pointed out we’re afraid of all the wrong things…. things like airplane travel (when, as you discovered, so many more people die in car accidents every year), terrorist attacks (very rare, in the grand scheme of things), kids being abducted by strangers (abductions of all kinds are very rare, and kids are far more likely to be abducted by someone they or you know vs a total stranger), etc. etc.
I had some bad hospital experiences as a child… nothing really bad, just having to stay without my mother (parents not allowed to stay with their child back then) & being subjected to lots of tests — poking & prodding — that weren’t well explained to me. It was YEARS before I could enter a hospital, even to visit someone, and I had nightmares about trying to “escape’ from hospitals for years afterwards. These days, though, they don’t bother me as much, although they’ll never be my favourite places. Not quite sure how or why I got over that particular fear, but I’m glad I did.