Anxiety and tension, scalp tingling, palpitations and sweating...

Are people with intensive phobia "hypocritical"?

　　Psychological words

　　Some people see a lot of the same objects that are densely packed together, and they will produce physiological reactions of discomfort such as tension, fear, and nausea. In fact, people do not feel uncomfortable with the object itself, but with a large number of objects together. The whole body, such as the hive, ant colony, etc., feels nervous and frightened. Psychology calls this manifestation intensive phobia.

　　For example, some netizens said that on a rainy day, the thin and dense rain line and the dense blisters on the ground made her scalp numb, sweating in the palm of her hand, and shortness of breath.

　　Seeing the above case, some people may think this is too hypocritical? For people without intensive phobia, this behavior seems incomprehensible. Is it really hypocritical to suffer from intensive phobia?

Physiological mechanism evolved by human

　　Tom Kupfer, an expression research expert at the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, believes that intensive phobia is related to evolutionary adaptability, which is derived from the evolution of humans to avoid lice, fleas and other parasites. You can easily kill a lice, but if thousands of lice crawl around in front of your eyes, your mentality is different. Imagine the dense lice, slowly crawling on your skin, sucking your blood a little... Is it just that when you think of this picture, you will feel fear, many parasites are social animals, and their aggregation means In some danger. Human intensive phobia is like a signal flare, reminding humans to stay away from them so that they can be safer.

　　Another Kupfer study showed that you don’t even need to directly contact the parasite, just show you a dense picture of the parasite, and it will make you react in disgust: closed eyebrows and closed eyes. Some people have a fear reaction: shortness of breath, trembling all over, sweating like rain... The intensive fear reaction that the picture brings to people is the same as the real thing.

　　This shows that intensive phobia is not hypocritical, it is a physiological mechanism evolved by humans in the long process of adaptation.

Excessive response exacerbates intensive phobia

　　So why do some people have intensive phobias and some don't?

　　Kupfer found that even people without dense phobias feel sick about dense objects at risk of disease, such as a litter of ticks on dog ears. But they don't feel anything about the harmless dense objects, such as rice grains and small holes in the bread. But patients with intensive phobia will also experience physical and mental discomfort when they see harmless dense objects. Kupfer said that this is an overreaction of patients with intensive phobia.

　　The over-reaction of intensive phobia is related to both physiology and psychology. In terms of physiology, patients with intensive phobia have a higher level of awakening of the nervous system. They are often sensitive and alert. The sympathetic nervous system excitement in the body is dominant and it is easy to feel physiological arousal. For example, some people see physiological reactions such as rapid heartbeat, nausea, and vomiting when they see dense sesame seeds on sesame cakes. In severe cases, syncope may also occur.

　　The psychological aspect involves several aspects, such as a timid personality, easy to withdraw, and excessive protection during growth, etc., which may easily cause excessive reactions to dense things. In addition, patients may also acquire intensive phobia psychology the day after tomorrow, forming a conditioned reflex. Some patients suffered from chickenpox when they were young, and all kinds of blisters all over their bodies, so that later they were extremely afraid of seeing pictures of dense egg. This type of acquired intensive phobia is related to specific objects. Some people are afraid of bubble-shaped dense objects, which does not affect their eating rice; some people are uncomfortable with strip-shaped dense objects. Eating rice will arouse their fear of dense objects.

　　In addition to the psychological reasons mentioned above, the intensive phobia's excessive response is also related to collective psychological cues. Affected by psychological cues, some diseases will be widely spread in the collective, psychology called collective psychogenic diseases. For example, in 2011, 20 girls in a high school in New York State exhibited convulsive symptoms at the same time, and they were subsequently diagnosed with collective psychogenic disease conversion. Dense phobia is similar to it. Pictures of densely spread objects widely distributed on the Internet, as well as the sharing of details of such pictures, may form a collective psychological hint, allowing some people who do not have intensive phobia to be This atmosphere is contagious.

　　So, how do we overcome intensive phobia? First of all, it should be clear that if intensive phobia is serious enough to affect life, you should seek medical treatment in time. If the symptoms are mild, we can give ourselves some positive psychological hints in life, increase guts, and tell ourselves that this is not terrible, and that there is no danger. At the same time, some desensitization training can also be carried out, according to their own degree of adaptation, repeatedly expose themselves to the environment where objects appear densely to eliminate the conditioned reflex.

　　(The author is a national second-level psychological counselor)

　　Yang Jianlan