Let’s talk about having a permanent fear of everything

Introduction

It is not uncommon for anyone to know at least one person who always looks like he is scared of something, like experiencing a constant state of nervousness no matter the place nor the circumstances.

Since today none of us, or at least the majority of us don’t live in an environment with enough dangers to justify a permanent feeling of fear, for this to happen the person needs to have a certain mental instability, that makes him more prone to adopt and maintain a flawed impression about the things that are happening around him, and if there are past experiences that can trigger the feeling of fear, it could manifest itself disproportionately, without any way of controlling it by the individual in question.

How come some people can have a permanent feeling of fear?

There is a phobia called pantophobia, and it is defined as follows:

Pantophobia refers to the condition of having an abnormal, extreme, and persistent fear of everything. | Source
is a vague and persistent threat or fear of some unknown evil. It is an irrational fear there is no logical cause that triggers it. | Source

As we all surely know, phobias are intense fears that are directed towards certain situations, animals or objects. People may have an irrational phobia or fear towards interaction with other people, or spiders which is extremely common, closed spaces, among other examples.

But when people suffer from pantophobia, irrational and intense fear is towards everything and not towards specific things or circumstances, so people can feel fear at the same time because of an animal, because of a situation, and any other thing we can imagine.

These people will obviously live under a perpetual state of alertness and may even end up worrying about their own tendency in being permanently scared, because it can become something very disabling and might complicate the possibility of having a normal life.

The panophobic person is always worried and fearful that something horrifying would happen. | Source

It is very easy for these individuals to fall into social isolation and begin to develop other issues such as depression and anxiety, which can only make the initial problem worse, and make their self esteem decrease to very low levels, causing them to feel a lot of sadness, guilt and even feelings of helplessness, because handling something as frustrating as this can be very demanding on all aspects.

They can also start having frequent thoughts questioning the fear they experience, which might not allow them to think clearly and concentrate on whatever activity they are doing. The discomfort they feel can sometimes be so intense that they may become afraid of losing control or feel they may go crazy as a result of going through all of this, which can have as a result the following physical manifestations:

Difficulty breathing

Racing or pounding heart

Chest pain or tightness

Trembling or shaking

Feeling dizzy or light-headed

A churning stomach.. | Source

Another important aspect is that they experience a constant adrenaline rush due to the state of alert in which they remain throughout the day. After this adrenaline increase, there are periods of fatigue as the body needs to recover, this causes people who suffer from this type of phobia to usually have a very limited life.

What can trigger the development of this problem?

In order for an individual to suffer from this problem, he possibly already suffered from an intense fear or phobia towards something in particular. For example, a person could have started having acrophobia (fear of heights), claustrophobia (fear of being trapped in a small space), hematophobia (fear of blood) and endeding up generalizing this fear to the symptoms that he experienced when facing that type of situations.

When the fear starts to expand itself beyond its initial environment, the person begins to avoid anything that might make him feel scared of nervous, which causes the fear to become persistent and in this case a pantophobia is produced.

Other thing that can trigger this issue is having traumatic experiences during childhood or teenage years, so the person experiences an intense fear of that situation and lives tormenting himself about that possibility of it happening again to him or to someone close and loved. This circumstance can also cause the person to start avoiding situations, people or places, making the fear in question to keep increasing as time goes by.

When people have parents that show a frightened behavior towards certain things, the same pattern of behavior is more likely to develop in the children. This is due to the fact that as children, the behavior of the parents tends to be mimicked, so as a result, they can end up adopting it and adding it to their own personality, without filtering out the possibly defects there might be.

Parents can be such a big conditioning, that there is a possibility of genes being also a factor that can develop a phobia later in life.

Memories can be passed down to later generations through genetic switches that allow offspring to inherit the experience of their ancestors, according to new research that may explain how phobias can develop. | Source

"From a translational perspective, our results allow us to appreciate how the experiences of a parent, before even conceiving offspring, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations. "Such a phenomenon may contribute to the etiology and potential intergenerational transmission of risk for neuropsychiatric disorders such as phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder." | Source

All of this can make the person feel like he his incapable of achieving anything important in his life, and believing this is clearly a considerable hit in the emotional well being of anyone, which makes achieving goals such as gaining independence and eventually forming a family, something much more difficult than what it actually is.

What can people do to overcome this?

How do we address baseless fears? Being in the right company can make a huge difference. The person next to you can help you overcome and of course on a more sophisticated scale you could seek professional help, and hypnotherapy is one of them... | Source

As is the case with every type of irrational believe, the most important thing the person must do is to manage to identify the fact that he is having irrational thoughts, in this particular case, an irrational fear that has no justification to exist.

Once this fact is identified and accepted, the person can start to realize there is no risk whatsoever by exposing himself little by little to the situation that is causing the fear, in a way in which he feels in control, getting used to the idea that there is no actual danger whatsoever. This is the only way to actually reduce and eventually completely eliminate all types of irrational fears.

There is also a very common technique called mindfulness, which consists in:

a state of active, open attention on the present. When you're mindful, you carefully observe your thoughts and feeling without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to your current experience, rather than dwelling on the past or anticipating the future. | Source

With the practice of mindfulness, the interpretation of everything that happens to them is eliminated and it promotes the acceptance of undesirable things as part of the life experience everyone goes through, which is a contribution towards stop worrying about everything.

This can be of great help because it can help people in focusing on the present moment, that is, on what happens moment by moment and to stop judging each of the experiences they go through.

One thing is for sure, do not continue to live in that fear that haunts and taunts you as it is a leech that sucks every moment of life out of you. | Source

Conclusion

No one likes to have irrational fears, nor having to deal with all of their consequences capable of affecting the life of anyone in a negative way. This is something that for people who unfortunately have to experience it, must be dealt with the sooner the better, so it doesn’t get stronger with time.

At the end of the day, all of this is a product of the person’s mind and nothing more, so in order to fix this, said person must be willing to collaborate fully, especially when it comes to accepting the fact that what is happening is a product of some irrational thought process, as mentioned before.

For some people accepting they have irrational thoughts that are affecting their life, might not be something very comfortable to do for obvious reasons, but it is still necessary if the goal is overcoming this issue once and for all.