RANDOM PHOBIASWhat are they? There’s misophonia, where you can’t stand the sound of people chewing. There’s trypophobia, where you’re petrified of small holes (like in a honeycomb or sponge). There’s even coulrophobia, an irrational fear of clowns. Over 8% of Americans suffer from a phobia that involves persistent fear and avoidance of a specific object or situation, according to the National Institutes of Health. About 2% of people suffer from phobias so severe they significantly impact daily life: “I treated one woman who got so upset hearing other people eat that she refused to have meals with her family or go to restaurants,” says phobia expert Martin M. Antony, PhD, professor and chair of the department of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto. While the most common types of phobia are fear of close spaces (claustrophobia), heights (acrophobia) and spiders (arachnophobia), they pretty much run the gamut. “I’ve had patients refuse to go anywhere near a certain color such as orange or green,” says Antony. “I’ve had people with such severe emetophobia (fear of vomiting) that they refuse to ride in a car or on the subway because of concerns of developing motion sickness.” What causes them? The average age of phobia onset is around 7. While it’s still a mystery as to who develops them (and to what), people with a predisposition to anxiety are particularly susceptible to phobias, explains Antony. Some, however, do have an evolutionary bent, which explains why about 10% of us are phobic of needles. “About half of people with needle phobia actually faint, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective,” says Antony. “If you were pierced by something in pre-historic times your body would automatically lower your heart rate and blood pressure to minimize blood loss, which is what happens when you pass out.” What should you do about them? All phobias have one thing in common: They’re treated with cognitive behavior therapy with a psychologist who helps you understand why you’re overreacting to your fear and then gradually exposes you to the phobia source. “I spoke to someone who had this completely irrational fear of airplanes flying overhead unless she was wearing a hat or holding an umbrella,” says Antony. “We teased it out and realized she was afraid of someone flushing the toilet on the airplane and the waste falling on her.” Once you understand the thinking behind the fear, then you and your therapist can deal with your situation. “For the woman who refused to eat in public, I made her go with me to the food court, first to sit for just 2 minutes at a time, and then gradually work up to eating a meal on her own,” recalls Antony. “I’ve had people who suffer from emetophobia watch YouTube videos of people vomiting before having them go into situations that could trigger nausea, like riding in a car.” The reassuring news: about 90% of people are able to overcome their specific phobias with 12 to 16 sessions of therapy, says Antony. MORE: 5 Weird Signs You Have Celiac Disease BRAIN ORGASMSWhat are they? Do you get all goose bumpy when someone whispers to you? Experience tingles from your head down to your spine when someone crinkles a gum wrapper? Turns out you’re part of a group of people who experience these so-called “brain orgasms,” something which believers have coined Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). The phenomenon first got a name back in 2011, when University of Connecticut undergraduate Karissa Burgess began Googling her strange sensations and found another woman, New Yorker Jenn Allen, experiencing similar things. The two decided to form the ASMR Research Institute, an all-volunteer organization, to try to figure out the neurochemical reasons ASMR exists. Since then, YouTube videos of people—mostly young, attractive women—whispering in soft, sultry voices, tapping their nails, and stroking their hairbrushes—have flooded the Internet, with some of the most popular channels, such as Gentle Whisperer, receiving millions of views. “It starts the back top of your head and it feels like a warm smooth trickle down, like a waterfall,” says Burgess, now a doctoral candidate in psychology at the Fuller School of Psychology in Pasadena, CA, who first experienced ASMR at age 7, when her teacher was reading to the class. “You’re still alert, but you feel like you’re in this very pleasant zone where you don’t want the person to stop whatever they’re doing because it’s so relaxing. Our guess is that it’s due to the brain releasing feel good hormones such as dopamine and serotonin in response to the stimuli.” What causes them? While there’s no published research to back Burgess up, she says the ASMR Research Institute is in the process of collecting data from more than 7,000 respondents to a research survey to help them determine if there are any unique demographic or personality characteristics of people experiencing ASMR. In the meantime, experts agree that it could be a very real phenomenon. “These [sounds] all seem to engage the same networks of the brain—that part of us that interacts carefully and thoughtfully with our environment or with other people. There is something calmly satisfying about such things,” Yale University neurologist, Steven Novella, MD, wrote in 2012 on his blog, NeuroLogica. What should you do about them? “This phenomenon fits with the basic principle in learning theory in that ‘something evoking a pleasant state will be sought after over and over again by the organism’,” says Ozge Gurel, PhD, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington DC. “These videos evoke a strong positive state, so people are prone to re-expose themselves to them.” While there’s nothing inherently harmful about indulging the phenomenon, Gurel advocates moderation: “The question becomes: “How much time is the person spending on listening to these videos? Is it replacing or taking over various domains of one’s life? Is it negatively impacting one’s functioning?” she says. MORE: These 9 Weird Symptoms Could Be A Sign Of… EXTREME TASTE AVERSIONSWhat are they? Amanda Clayman always loved olives (especially when paired with a dirty martini) but when she became pregnant with her first child, catching a whiff of them made her nauseous. “The mere smell of them would make we want to barf, and I had an otherwise iron stomach through both pregnancies,” she says. Yet 7 years later, she’s still battling this aversion. “Last week I accidentally ate one that I had failed to remove from my Cobb salad, and now I feel completely grossed out,” she says. What causes them? Some studies show that more than a third of us will battle food aversions at some point. While they can seem extremely random—Cherry Jello! Tomatoes! Eggs!—there’s an evolutionary reason for them: “In caveman times, it was easy to accidentally kill yourself by eating something dangerous, so our mind and bodies had to develop extremely strong adverse reactions based on how we felt after we ate something,” explains David Solot, PhD, a psychologist who specializes in taste aversion. The people who formed strong negative associations with food—meaning, they ate one poisonous berry and threw up—were the ones who survived, and passed those genes down from generation to generation until they reached us. So what does that mean? “For some people, it only takes one negative contact with a food to develop an almost completely irrational fear and hatred of it,” says Solot. So while the stomach bug you developed the day after eating Indian food may have had nothing to do with that chicken tikka masala, your body and brain go on high alert and make it so you can’t look at Indian food again without feeling like you have to vomit. “In order to protect you, your brain focuses on something you don’t eat commonly and says, ‘Whoa! You got sick after eating that, so it must be poisonous,’” explains Solot. In fact, this phenomenon is the reason why folks undergoing chemo are often instructed by their doctors to avoid favorite foods, since their brains may associate them with extreme nausea. What should you do about them? The treatment sounds simple, but for sufferers, it’s stomach churning: exposing yourself to the offending food over and over, explains Paul Rozin, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who overcame a taste aversion to beer by forcing himself to drink it for more than a decade before he found it tolerable. “You have to really make an intentional effort to do it, and maybe even dilute it with other flavors,” he explains. (So if you can’t even look at carrots, smother them in butter or a cheese sauce to make them more palatable.) It takes about 8 to 10 times before a person will start acquiring a taste for a food. It also helps to think back in time to when the food phobia might have developed. Solot, for example, overcame his disgust of cherry Jello when he recalled the dessert being served with whipped cream at room temperature in kindergarten. “Once I realized it was due to the whipped cream going bad, I was able to teach myself to enjoy Jello again,” he says. Still, it’s hard to undo millions of years of genetic hard wiring. MORE: 7 Weird Body Symptoms—Solved
