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fear of heat
Environmental Phobias

Thermophobia – The Fear of Heat

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Thermophobia Is the Excessive Fear of Heat

Everyone perspires in the heat, but did you know that some people break out into a cold sweat instead?

These people have a severe and persistent fear of high temperatures.

Do you take extreme measures to avoid hot foods or objects? Are you terrified by the idea of scorching weather?

Do you panic at the thought of encountering fires or other sources of heat? You may be suffering from thermophobia.

Don’t worry. A little patience and effort go a long way in beating thermophobia. Read on to learn everything about this heat phobia, its causes, symptoms, treatments, and more.

fear of heat

What Is Thermophobia?

Thermophobia is the intense fear of heat. Thermophobia is derived from the Greek terms therme, meaning “heat,” and phobos, meaning “fear.” This phobia is associated with:

A person suffering from this phobia may feel extreme anxiety at the mere thought of heat. This abnormal fear is towards anything related to heat, including summer weather or hot things. It’s normal to avoid touching fire and other hot objects. After all, no one wants to get burned or scalded. High heat is not particularly pleasant, so we tend to avoid it. The key difference? This fear is persistent and irrational. You don’t just dislike the heat; you are in terror of it.

What Are Thermophobia Triggers?

Anything can trigger thermophobia: getting burned, getting parched, sweating, or the inability to tolerate heat. One may go into flight or fight mode when confronted with heat. The body goes through an unpleasant or terrifying experience and is unable to fight the fear. A person suffering from thermophobia may avoid getting near things that emit heat like fires, grills, furnaces, and stoves.

How Do Phobia Sufferers Behave?

Those with thermophobia take extreme measures to avoid heat. They may even move to colder climates or stay indoors in air-conditioned rooms all day. Some with thermophobia limit their diet to cool or cold food. And even though the person suffering may realize the fear is irrational, there’s not much they can do. They may start adopting safety behaviors like completely avoiding going out during the daytime.

What Causes Thermophobia?

Thermophobia is caused due to the same reasons as other specific phobias. Phobia of heat can be a result of past experiences or childhood trauma. Some experts claim that phobias may also have a genetic factor. Other thermophobia causes include:

Childhood Trauma

Childhood experiences play a major role in developing phobias. It may not develop at the time of the event, but it may manifest gradually. In childhood, the person may have gone through a bad experience, like heat stroke, dehydration, or burn injuries. Each time they come across heat, the negative emotions may come rushing back triggering thermophobia. It can also be a traumatic experience like the death of a loved one due to a fire. This means that heat becomes associated with grief.

Genetics

A family history of anxiety disorders increases the chances of a person developing a phobia. If one has a genetic predisposition to mental illness, one event might be enough to trigger the phobia.

Associated Fears

Other phobias contribute to the development of thermophobia, such as the fear of death, sweating, sun, getting burned, and fire. These fears can result in a person suffering from thermophobia.

Upbringing

People who are raised by phobics are likely to develop a similar condition. Being brought up by someone who transmits a sense of danger related to heat will increase the chances of having thermophobia.

Symptoms of Thermophobia

Some thermophobia symptoms sound innocent. For example, you may prefer wearing lightweight clothing and staying indoors on warm days. But for most sufferers, thermophobia is characterized by severe and chronic anxiety. Here’s an extensive list of physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of thermophobia:

Physical Symptoms

  • Muscle tension/tremors
  • Heightened senses
  • Increased heart pulse
  • Dizziness
  • Nausea
  • Migraine
  • Dry mouth
  • Butterflies in the stomach
  • Hot/cold flashes
  • Difficulty breathing
  • Sweating
  • Trembling
  • Tightening in chest
  • Ringing in your years
  • Feeling confused
  • A rise in blood pressure
  • Hyperventilation

Mental/Emotional Symptoms

  • Anxiety when encountering heat
  • Anxiety at thoughts of heat
  • Panic attack
  • Avoiding heat at all costs
  • Fear of fainting
  • Withdrawal
  • Feeling sad
  • Difficulty concentrating
  • Anger or mood swings
  • Guilt
  • Fear of dread
  • Feeling trapped
  • Expecting disaster

If you have three to five of these symptoms, and your anxiety has lasted for six or more months, you may have thermophobia. Consult a medical professional to obtain an accurate diagnosis.

Ways to Treat Thermophobia

There are various steps you can take to overcome the fear of heat. If your fear is mild, you could begin with self-help methods. You can also seek professional help.

Self-Help Guide to Treating Thermophobia

Treating thermophobia, like with any other specific phobia, needs patience, effort, and consistency. No one treatment suits all. It depends on the individual and the severity of the condition. To overcome thermophobia on your own, you can initiate stress management techniques, like meditation, yoga, and cardio. Being able to know how to help yourself and cope with your fear is important. Take good care of yourself and practice any of the following to overcome your fear of heat.

Meditate

Meditation guides one to distract and refocus on something more productive like breathing. Mastering meditation aids in maintaining a sense of equilibrium when confronted with stressful situations.

Practice Yoga

A person who has mastered yoga will know how to redirect their energy into coping rather than being anxious when experiencing a panic attack.

Limit Caffeine

You might very well save yourself from everyday anxiety by cutting down on coffee. Foods and drinks with caffeine affect your physical state. Caffeine increases your heart rate and tenses you up, increasing your chances of anxiety.

Do Cardio

Cardio workouts like swimming, jogging, and sports release feel-good hormones in your body that ease up your stress related to phobia.

Seeking Professional Help

Thermophobia treatment through professional help can assist you in understanding your situation, so you can better cope with it. Some techniques used to overcome thermophobia include:

  • Cognitive behavioral therapy
  • Counseling
  • Exposure therapy
  • Dialectical behavior therapy
  • Mindfulness-based stress reduction

Psychotherapy or counseling gives you a safe space to express how you feel without fearing that you will be judged. This talk therapy aims to help you recognize your fear and resolve complicated feelings. Why does this work? Talking to a highly trained professional helps you make sense of things and understand yourself better. Exposure therapy aims to desensitize you slowly to the objects of fear. It happens gradually until you don’t feel an intense amount of anxiety when confronted with such situations.

How to Cope with Thermophobia

Does thermophobia have a firm hold on you? Sufferers may take extreme measures to avoid situations that bring them near heat or anything remotely related to heat. Avoidance helps them escape anxiety and stress and it feels pleasant at the time. But repetitive use of avoidance behaviors can turn into compulsions and worsen the phobia instead of actually treating it. This can also affect your everyday life, relationships, and career. Learning to cope becomes important as a phobia can render you incapable of leading a normal life.

Wrapping Up

Living in fear of heat can be debilitating. Thermophobia can affect a person’s personal, social, and professional life. But proper treatment and support can ease the anxiety, if not completely rid you of it. Acknowledging the phobia is your first step towards recovery. Although treatment takes patience and consistency, living without the constant fear of heat will be worth the effort. Soon, you’ll look forward to basking in the balmy heat.

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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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