For example, let’s say, arachnophobia.
I’m pretty sure a lot of people are more or less a bit afraid of arachnids. Then at what point does this phenomenon count as “arachnophobia”? How does the effect of seeing images and videos differ from seeing them IRL? Do arachnophobic people react uncontrollably in some way in these situations?
Same logic applies to other types of phobias such as megalophobia or trypophobia etc.
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It is an irrational fear that you cannot control. You are/were presumably afraid of dark as a kid. But then you told yourself that you should be brave and not be afraid anymore. With phobias, that doesn’t work. Normal mechanisms for overcoming anxiety and fear stop being helpful and you behave irrationally – objectively any random spider can’t hurt you, and you might know that but that in no way helps if you have arachnophobia; you react the same whether it’s a spider on TV or a brown recluse chomping down on your ankle.
As with most things these days, I’d say it’s more of a spectrum. You have the people who like spiders on one end, and you have people who faint at the sight of one on the other.
Most people are just somewhere inbetween. The identity of being arachnaphobic is moreso defining the severity.
Phobia, by definition, is an **irrational** fear of something, with a strong emphasis on the irrationality.
Everyone is afraid of something, but truly phobic people are distressed to the point that it affects their mental health and daily living.
Lots of people are creeped out by spiders. If they see one (or if one lands on them), they freak out, scream, and then move on with their lives. For people who have phobias, it can lead to a panic attack, intrusive thoughts, inability to think critically or make decisions (“paralysis”) and so on.
I think that in pop culture there’s a tendency to use heuristics that imply a serious condition, when in fact people just misuse the term. For example, lots of people say they’re depressed or have OCD, when they are nowhere near a clinical diagnosis (thankfully). Similarly, people might say they’re “phobic” because they’re scared, but it’s not a phobia in a clinical sense where someone’s anxiety intensifies to the point that it interferes with their daily life.
Phobias are different for everyone, but what constitutes a phobia vs a normal fear is how much it detracts from your daily life. Phobias tend to ruin your whole day/week, and cause panic/anxiety attacks and things like that.
For example, if I’m afraid of spiders, I might not want to go to bed if I know one’s in the room but I can walk up to it and kill/remove it. However if I have a phobia of spiders, I couldn’t even do that—I’d be crying and having someone else do it from far away, and probably lose sleep over the idea of if there was one spider, there is probably another. My roommate has a phobia of moths (but no other insects) and they can’t even be in the house if there’s one. We get the perimeter of the house sprayed bi-weekly with insecticide. They can’t go to any outdoor events at night just in case there are moths there, and we can’t keep the outdoor light on because it attracts moths at night.
To give an even more real example, I have a phobia of balloons. A lot of people say “oh I don’t like when they pop either!” But that’s not it. I cry when I see one. I fear the shape, the colors, the squeaky noises they can make, their material, and—of course—how they pop. I don’t go to any events that might have balloons, not even birthday parties. I had to plan alternate routes on campus (HS and college) to avoid going near balloons (and god they are everywhere, for every occasion). Balloon photos unnerve me but they aren’t real balloons, so the fear isn’t nearly as much. Balloons being everywhere all the time makes me make big changes to my everyday life, while people who “don’t like them popping” wouldn’t have to make those changes.
First, like many words in English, “phobia” has more than one definition. There’s a clinically defined phobia, a popularly defined phobia, and there are phobia adjacent definitions that are also important to know.
Clinically, a phobia is something diagnosed by a professional in a mental health situation, and is an uncharacteristic fear or hatred of a specific thing. Usually it is diagnosed because a person’s life is consistently and negatively affected by the phobia. With spiders, not liking them crawling on you is fairly normal. Refusing stay in a house with cobwebs and spending an unsustainable amount of money in the process or taking extreme actions (arson is a joke until it happens) is not. Once it is clinically identified, a professional can help somebody through different therapies, coping mechanisms, and perhaps medications.
So in short, fear becomes a “phobia” when a doctor agrees it is messing with somebody’s life because they are taking extreme and uncontrollable actions. The specific reactions to different exposures depends on the person and the method, which is why some kinds of therapy uses these different reactions to help people control their reactions. There is no single answer to this, which is why it requires a professional to clinically diagnose a phobia.
Popularly, a phobia is being afraid of something. This can be self described, but has about as much weight as a self diagnosis of depression: real enough that maybe you should take steps, but not a justification to anybody else. This is probably what you are thinking of happening when you hear “arachnophobia” and people just not liking spiders. It’s dilution is just a consequence of people using the word more freely, for better or worse.
Adjacent terms include the suffix -phobic. While in isolation it basically means “adjective of a phobia”, in materials it means the material repels a different material (hydrophobic feathers gives us the “water off a duck’s back” idiom). But in society, it is a form of bigotry. Being fatphobic does not mean being afraid of fat people; it means having an unreasonable hate or dislike or distrust of fat people and allowing that emotion to affect your actions with people in that demographic, such as a doctor dismissing chronic symptoms of cancer as being caused by obesity.
Some answers have placed a lot of emphasis on the irrationality of phobias. That’s sort of true but not *technically* it.
All mental disorders—and yes, phobias count—share one specific characteristic without which they are not mental disorders. The behavior must cause *significant distress and/or impairment in the person’s life.*
A fear of spiders might be quite rational. They’re venomous and can kill you. But a fear, even one that’s rationally grounded, graduates to a phobia when it causes marked distress or impairment. When it bothers the person a lot or makes it so they can’t live a relatively normal life.
That’s the technical threshold, not irrationality, even if it will often correlate with irrationality.
ETA: I did a bad job explaining, so I’m replacing my answer with something more precise.
tl;dr – It’s way more severe than just being afraid.
* Phobias are **anxiety disorders**. As others have pointed out, to meet the definition of *disorder* it has to be bad enough to cause significant distress and interfere with your life. A true phobia might cause you to lose relationships or jobs, affect your health, etc.
* Phobias involve *excessive fear of an object or situation.* ELI5 keyword: **excessive*****.*** This is what helps distinguish it from garden-variety fear. The average person might be apprehensive about spiders, but can typically control that reaction long enough to smash or relocate said spider outdoors. Many people can ignore it entirely if it’s confirmed to be a harmless variety. A phobic person will go to great lengths to avoid the object of their fear, to an unjustified extent.
* If it cannot be avoided they experience **significant distress**. We’re talking physiological manifestations: fight-or-flight symptoms like sweating, racing heartrate/hyperventilation, nausea, fainting, panic attacks, etc.
Specific phobias are anxiety disorders.
Most people are a little bit nervous in some social contexts, but it becomes an anxiety disorder when you’re paralysed with fear over even small social interactions. To get diagnosed it has to be something that negatively affects your life.
Same with specific phobias. Being a bit creeped out by spiders is normal. Being unable to enter a room because there’s a tiny harmless spider in the corner isn’t normal. If it affects your normal functioning you could get diagnosed with it.
Btw, worth pointing out since people sometimes make this mistake–homophobia and islamaphobia and so on are not specific phobias, they’re not anxiety disorders. You can’t be diagnosed with transphobia. We just use the same suffix for a different thing.
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