Word: phobias
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...flying or heights or other things that can actually be dangerous. I'm filled with overpowering, irrational dread by the sight or sound of another human being eating or drinking. It doesn't make any more sense to me than it does to you. But that's what a phobia is: a fear that has nothing to do with logic or common sense. (Find out how to prevent anxiety...
Weird as it sounds, phobias are not that unusual. According to a study published in 2008 by the National Institute of Mental Health, 8.7% of people in the U.S. over the age of 18 have a specific phobia of some kind or other. It doesn't take much to set mine off. A swig from a water bottle can do it, or someone chewing gum. Every morning when I get on the subway, I scan the passengers like an air marshal looking for terrorists. At any moment, somebody could whip out a bagel or a danish. I do well...
...treatment for a phobia like mine is simple and routine, and I avoided it for as long as humanly possible. That's because it involves deliberately, systematically exposing yourself to the thing you fear. It's part of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. It's a very practical kind of therapy - it has no truck with mystical Freudian mumbo jumbo. CBT views your symptoms not as clues to the secrets locked in your tormented unconscious but as a set of learned behaviors and bad habits that you can be trained to give up. As far as CBT is concerned...
...example, both come from a western continent where there is a giant desert. The orcs are angry and firey and reside in the desert; the dwarfs, on the other hand, live in the dry, shady mountains and think that exposure to the sun will kill them. Because of their phobia of the sun, dwarves revere plants and the plant goddess because these living systems have the ability to live...
...first time a phobia of socialism has made U.S. headlines. Since the early 20th century, few issues have stirred more political alarm. Facing a series of massive worker strikes in the years after the start of the Russian Revolution, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and rising Justice Department star J. Edgar Hoover took on a "red menace" of radicals, anarchists and Bolsheviks. By 1920, the pair had arrested up to 10,000 alleged subversives. (Most cases were thrown out.) With the onset of the Cold War, fears flared anew. Indeed, the term socialized medicine was coined in the late...