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Other Phobias

Fear of Shoes – Papoutsiphobia

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Papoutsiphobia – Keep Your Feet on the Ground

Why would shoes scare you?

Do you have an issue with your feet being bound or incased in shoes? Do you have a problem with the possible smell and unhygienic condition of shoes?

Perhaps your fear is closer to the fear of feet?

There may be other aspects to the fear of shoes that affect you, so let’s dig in.

Is papoutsiphobia a phobia of Fear or Disgust?

Do you find yourself feeling uneasy when you think of shoes? Does the sight of a pair of shoes make you uncomfortable?

If you could be barefoot everywhere—all the time—would you?

If you experience these feelings whenever you think about shoes, you may have papoutsiphobia, the fear of shoes. Although you may not find it in the list of most common phobias, it is just as disturbing as the more popularly known ones.

The first step in dealing with this fear is understanding why you have it. Try self-help methods to ease the symptoms, but if you don’t experience relief, reach out for professional help.

Papoutsiphobia Causes

Even though shoes protect us and offer extra comfort and style, they may cause some ill effects, too. People may suffer the aftermath of wearing ill-fitted shoes in the form of blisters, corns, bunions, athlete’s foot, and hammertoes. Sometimes, shoes can cause nail-related injuries such as ingrown toenails and nail fungus.

Although these may not be severe injuries, they could take months to heal and can be painful. A person with a bad experience with shoes may develop a phobia of them.

Besides health issues, there may also be cultural and religious aspects associated with a fear of shoes. In some regions, it’s customary to remove shoes when entering the house. Some sacred places, like temples, require you to remove your footwear before entering. If someone has been conditioned from an early age not to wear shoes, or if they view shoes as a source of contamination, they might develop this phobia.

Some Things You Need to Know about Papoutsiphobia

We wear shoes to protect our feet and provide arch support for greater stability. But not everyone agrees with that. A shoe fear can arise from an injury or traumatic experience related to shoes.

A foot injury is more significant than any other organ injury because it limits our ability to move.  Athlete’s foot, a fungal infection, is the most severe foot infection. It’s caused by poor ventilation and moist shoes and can take a long while to heal. As a result of this experience, the person may avoid wearing shoes and eventually develop a phobia of them.

Wearing shoes can also cause the following long-term effects:

  • Back Injuries: The American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons claims that our bodies are like a chain, with every bone interconnected. So, wearing the wrong shoes can cause long-term back injuries.
  • Joint Pain: Our knees act as shock absorbers. However, constant pressure on the joints can cause arthritis and reduce the shock-absorbing properties of the cartilage, resulting in joint pain.
  • Nerve Damage: Wearing tight or narrow shoes can cause nerve damage, resulting in excessive tingling and numbness.

All of these injuries are severe and can have a lasting impact on your life. You might think that your fear of shoes is silly, but it is, in fact, quite reasonable.

Papoutsiphobia Symptoms

As with any other phobia, a fear of shoes has physical and psychological symptoms.

Physical Symptoms

  • Nausea
  • Increased heart rate
  • Excessive sweating
  • Chest pain
  • Dizziness
  • Choking sensation

Psychological Symptoms

  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Constantly thinking about shoes
  • Discomfort when someone with you is wearing shoes
  • Panic attacks

You may experience one or all of the symptoms mentioned above, depending on how severe your phobia is.

How Is Papoutsiphobia Diagnosed?

If you feel you may have a phobia of shoes, consult a primary care therapist. Your therapist will ask you questions about your phobia and provide advice on how to deal with it on a day-to-day basis.

A therapist will likely diagnose you with the phobia if:

  • Your fear is imminent
  • Your fear is greater than the danger you are in
  • You experience symptoms that another condition cannot explain
  • The symptoms have lasted longer than six months

Papoutsiphobia Treatment

Self-Help

There is no specific treatment for papoutsiphobia to eliminate the fear. However, if your fear interferes with your everyday life, you may want to consider papoutsiphobia treatment options. You can start with self-help techniques, but seek professional assistance if you don’t see progress.

Acknowledge the Fear

Make sure you acknowledge, accept, and embrace your shoe phobia. Take the time to understand your fears before trying to solve them. If you can manage your fear and stay around the source of your fear instead of escaping the situation, you will have a better chance of overcoming it.

Educate Yourself about Your Fear

Papoutsiphobia is relatively unknown and new to most people. So, if you’re dealing with it, make sure you learn as much about it as possible. Gather all the information about the fear so you can devise an effective plan to treat it.

Practice Mindful Meditation

A small study presented at the 2018 Experimental Biology Conference indicates that a single mindful meditation session can help reverse the effects of stress on the body. An hour of meditation significantly reduced the stiffness of blood vessel walls in subjects, suggesting reduced stress or strain on their arteries. A similar decrease was seen hour after hour following the meditation.

Relaxation Techniques

A fearful experience causes your heart rate to rise. Regularly practicing relaxation techniques can help lower blood pressure and relieve tension. As a consequence, you’ll feel happier and calmer. You will also be able to judge situations more accurately.

Muscle Relaxation

Muscle relaxation involves relaxing your muscles in two steps. First, you begin by tightening your neck and shoulders, followed by other muscle groups. Then, you let the tension go and observe your muscles relaxing. Practicing this while picturing the object of your fear can reduce your anxiety and stress levels when you encounter it in real life.

Yoga

Yoga has been proven helpful in treating individuals suffering from anxiety. Yoga, just like meditation, can help reduce overall stress levels. If you practice yoga regularly, you may experience fewer symptoms of your phobia.

If you do not see any positive change despite employing all these self-help techniques, you should seek professional help.

When to Seek Professional Help

If your phobia does not interfere with your daily life, you can continue leading your life without trouble. But shoe phobia is not something we can ignore. We interact with dozens of people wearing shoes every day, so ignoring this phobia may not be an option.

Get professional help immediately if:

  • Your panic attacks are becoming more frequent
  • It has become tough to lead an everyday life
  • You have started avoiding people and socializing less
  • You have been experiencing this phobia for six months now.

Professional Help

Hypnotherapy

During a 2016 study, researchers found that people who underwent guided hypnosis sessions showed greater focus, more emotional and physical control, and lower levels of self-consciousness.

During hypnotherapy sessions, the therapist will help you transition to a trance-like state. They may offer posthypnotic suggestions, as your mind is more receptive at this time.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a form of treatment that works on identifying and modifying negative thoughts, feelings, and behavior patterns. The therapist helps you cope with these unhelpful thought patterns and replace them with more rational ones.

Learning to Cope with Papoutsiphobia

There is no way to entirely free yourself of papoutsiphobia. However, you can minimize the discomfort with early diagnosis and treatment.

Combining self-help and professional therapy can slowly reduce the symptoms of your shoe phobia and help you return to everyday life.

Ensure you have your family or friends around for support through your journey to make it a little easier.

Wrap-Up

It can be hard to live with a fear of shoes. You tend to come across shoes every day, in every possible situation, and there’s no way to avoid them entirely.

However, with a good amount of self-care or professional therapy, you can return to a life of normalcy. So, tie your shoes and get it done!

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Your Fear Goes Up and Down

Are you someone who would rather climb the stairs than take the elevator? You call it squeezing in a workout after being sedentary the whole morning. Or perhaps you claim it's a faster route. These are both typical, normal, and acceptable reasons. But what if you need to be in the conference room on the eleventh floor in five minutes, and you're wearing your business suit and wingtips? Would you still prefer to take the stairs? If your answer is yes, then maybe it's time to take a closer look at your reasons for avoiding elevators. Elevators stir all sorts of emotions in passengers. From the discomfort of closeness to strangers to the sensations in our gut, elevators can be a source of the heebie-jeebies for many, but for some, they can also be a source of terror. Let's dig a little deeper into the latter, and see what this terror is all about and what can be done to manage it. To begin with, does being inside an elevator give you chills or the sweats? Or does it trigger an unpleasant memory? Perhaps you remember movies you've watched where something terrible happens inside an elevator. From Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, Final Destination 2, or the king of all elevator horror films, 2010’s Devil, the elevator becomes witness to something sinister and horrible. And you want nothing to do with any of it. You know that you're not claustrophobic. You can deal with heights just fine, too. And you know that you're not going to be trapped inside. All of these contribute to a fear of elevators—but they don't apply to you. Yet being inside one does something to you. It's hard to explain.

What is the Fear of Elevators Called?

What you have is a fear of elevators, which is called elevatophobia. It is most commonly triggered by an experience of getting stuck inside either due to a power outage or technical maintenance. Hearing about other people's experiences or watching a movie about similar circumstances can prompt a fear of elevators getting stuck with you inside. Usually, claustrophobics and agoraphobics may also develop elevatophobia because the triggers and objects of these fears are related. Claustrophobia is the fear of closed and cramped spaces, while agoraphobia is the fear of being trapped without any means of escape. Put the two together, and the elevator becomes the perfect combination of both phobias. The space is limited and closed, with only one means of entry and exit. You can add another point of access if you consider climbing the cables like they do in the movies, but that certainly isn't ideal.

Symptoms of Elevatophobia

If for some reason an elevator stops due to an outage or some technical difficulty, passengers with elevatophobia may go into full panic mode. Even if the maintenance team advises that it will just be a matter of minutes, by then, the person's mind has become irrational with the fear of the elevator falling, being stuck for hours, or other unpleasant thoughts. You would expect a person to exhibit the following physical symptoms: Additionally, you would be filled with that overwhelming anxiety where you feel that you have zero control over the situation. You start fearing the unknown and are filled with negative thoughts about death and imminent doom. You become irrational and unresponsive.

Possible Complications of Elevatophobia

When the panic sets in, the possibility of emergencies related to pre-existing conditions may make themselves known. This might include serious health crises like heart attacks or asthma attacks. When this happens, fear becomes a medical emergency. Elevator rides do not last long; it's just a matter of minutes or even less. But the fact that a person can escalate from panic to a near fatal medical situation classifies the fear of elevators as a 'hard phobia.'

Trying Some Self-Help Methods

Your fear of elevators can likely interfere with your social and work life and relationships. Not everyone understands that elevatophobia, like most phobias, can be crippling. But don't be disheartened. Depending on the level of your fear and level of control, you can gradually face and manage your phobia. Here are some recommendations you can try:
  1. Make a List of Everything that Entails Riding in an Elevator This is a systematic approach to getting over your anxiety. By following a step-by-step process, you can identify where the fear kicks in at its strongest. You can write a list of steps like pressing the topmost button and waiting to arrive on that floor, watching as the door closes and opens, being alone inside the elevator, or having delays with the doors opening. Now try doing the opposite. For example, face away from the door or occupy yourself with your phone so that you are distracted.
  2. Create Your Fear Ladder Although the name says fear of elevators, it is not the whole process that scares you. There are just phases and parts of the elevator riding experience that cause you to panic. So go back to the list you initially created and label the fear level you feel. You can do it numerically, too, like ten being 'really scary,' six, 'manageable scary,' and one, 'not scary at all.' You can put the corresponding fear levels so you can focus more time and effort into activities that are more scary to you.
  3. Face Your Fear By now, you have identified what scares you the most. You can try repetitive action to minimize your fear and increase your sense of ‘normalcy’. Remember that the longer you expose yourself to your fear, the better you get at handling your emotions. If you are feeling overwhelmed, stop. Pushing yourself too fast and too soon can backfire. Modify your pace and go slower instead.
  4. Talk About Your Fear People by nature, unfortunately, are not quick to offer understanding and support. You need to tell them what's wrong before they can empathize. Talk to someone who you trust and ask for their support, especially in the initial phase of overcoming your fear. If you are too afraid to ride the elevator alone, you can ask them to go with you, and before you realize it, you are on your floor, and there was no indication of panic.
  5. Learn To Be Patient Be patient with yourself and your predicament. This is, after all, your fight against fear. It might take hundreds of elevator ride practices before the fear gets under control. Even then, there might be some hesitations and episodes of nervousness. These are acceptable and expected, so cut yourself some slack and congratulate yourself for every progress.

Seeking Professional Help

Along with self-help, you can always enlist a medical professional's aid to support you with your elevatophobia. Talking to someone who has experience with similar cases can be comforting, because you know that you are not alone, and this situation can get better. Talk to your doctor about the severity of your fears and the symptoms that you experience. Explain how you deal with it in an attempt to control it. An exam and a health history are made to ensure that there are no unrelated or underlying problems that your symptoms might mask. Usually, phobias like this are approached with a combination of psychotherapy and medication. Your doctor will talk about these options with you, and it's entirely up to you, with your doctor's recommendation, what you want to pursue. For psychotherapy, the most common type is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which aims to help you find different ways of behaving, thinking, and reacting when about to step inside an elevator or when already inside it. With medications, there are beta blockers and benzodiazepines, but note that these can have side effects. Whatever these side effects are, you should promptly share it with your doctor.

Simple Tips to Overcome Elevatophobia

Elevators are not perfect, but their likelihood to malfunction, fall, or get stuck is very low. If you are not fully confident with this information, you can help overcome your elevatophobia by learning common elevator safety tips and basic elevator operations. These should help curb your mild fear until you become more self-assured. In addition to that, here are some of the things that you can do to gradually overcome your fear of elevators—both in getting on and riding one.

Conclusion

Yes, elevatophobia can be a challenge in today's world, but don't allow the elevator to win. Don't let it stop you from taking a job on the top floor or attending a social gathering on the rooftop. Sure, you can take the stairs if you insist and arrive winded and sweaty, with the party about to wrap up. But is this the quality of life you seek? Elevators are designed to make life easier. There are guaranteed ways to help you overcome elevatophobia. Take the first step and seek help. Soon, you’ll see yourself breezing through the floors with those arduous stair climbs little more than a memory.
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