phobia

Mostly because it is the season for midterms (high stress!), I've been thinking about fears a lot lately. It's interesting what we subconsciously or consciously choose to feel threatened by. Though phobias are foreign to me, it seems peculiar that something like a bug having more than 6 limbs could send someone into seizing fits. Is there some sort of genetic disposition for these bizarre irrational fears or have people with terror gripping phobias experienced an infantile trauma? Clearly I am no expert.

Recently I went to the fitness center with my friend Beth, and with extensive persuasion she got me on a treadmill. Maybe I've watched too many funny cat videos online or something (the ones where the cats tumble over themselves and get shot against a wall or the carpet), but those torturous devices just terrify me. During that 20 minutes of fast jogging/brisk walking I was literally hugging the machine, petrified that I was going to trip and fall off the back end of the tread. Irrational behavior yes, but I saw what happened to those cats and I will not take that chance. I don't know where this bizarre fear came from. I know that running on a treadmill is completely safe and in a few months I will probably be instructing patients to use them in the clinic, but for some reason trying it myself makes me anxious.

This isn't exactly the type of video where the cats get flung backwards, but it certainly is cute!

What also interests me about fears is how they manifest in our dreams and subconscious minds. We Months ago I had several of my teeth falling out. Usually, according to renowned psychologist Dr. Wikianswers the meaning of having teeth in a dream is most often an archetypal image of the dreamer's sense of confidence and competence in the waking world (but if you look at the Freudian perspective, apparently I am a male who wanted to masturbate - he might have been a little off with that interpretation or my online sources are somewhat unreliable).

At that point, academia was becoming an almost unbearable stress and I was incredibly worried about not doing well. In one of the dreams, I had 2 loose teeth that came out easily and I told someone that they were my "radius and ulna." Naturally, I thought that the dream must be about my schoolwork relating to physical therapy because the radius and ulna are forearm bones. What strikes me as strange is that my two front teeth were actually knocked out when I was about 7 years old, and eventually one was capped. About 6 months ago, around the time when the dreams started, the cap got loose and it kept falling out. So I had both a thick history of teeth issues and insecurity with my schoolwork.

Maybe I'm a little too preoccupied with what causes me to freak out but it is interesting to wonder why we allow certain things to grasp ahold of us, especially when it is otherwise unthreatening. How did we as a species evolve to a degree where some people will have panic attacks when they see everyday objects? Why would it benefit us to have hypersensitive awareness of random things to the level of being debilitated? Just something to think about.