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Body Phobias

Urophobia – The Fear of Urine

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Urophobia – The Fear of Urine

Do you experience unimaginable and unrealistic fear when it’s time to pee? Do you deliberately avoid drinking juices, tea, or other drinks you might enjoy because you know you’ll have to empty your bladder at some point in time?

You might end up arranging your everyday schedule around your need to urinate. It might even cause you to sweat, feel restless, and jittery. It must be quite a task to attempt to explain to others what you’re going through. Then, of course, there’s those nagging feelings of shame and embarrassment.

If you experience these feelings, you might be suffering from urophobia. But don’t worry, there are ways to cope with this phobia.

What You Need to Know about Urophobia

What is urophobia?  Urophobia is a persistent and excessive fear of urine or urinating. It’s an uncommon fear. Urophobia comes from two Greek words, uro, meaning “urine” and phobia which stands for “fear”. It’s a specific phobia that falls under anxiety disorders.

While urinating is an essentially natural process of excretion, the mere thought of it may send you into panic mode. Some natural processes may sound disgusting but are vital to the body’s well-being. Urinating is one of them. Every human being must pee. In fact, people who can’t pee are at risk of serious health complications. Urinating is generally effortless and natural. It shouldn’t be hard. However, to some people, it’s a nightmare.

Some who suffer with the fear of urine have severe symptoms. They might avoid touching rails and opening doors in public places because they’re afraid. What are they afraid of? That someone visited the bathroom and later touched the rails and doors without washing their hands first. Such a person may never shake hands. You have probably seen people that fear snakes, heights, and rats, but a fear of urine is rare.

Symptoms of Urophobia

The symptoms of urophobia vary from one person to another. Here are some common symptoms that have been noted in those with a fear of urine:

Mental/Emotional Symptoms

  • Inability to organize your thoughts coherently
  • Overthinking about peeing
  • Organizing your life around peeing
  • Anxiety
  • Full-blown panic attacks

Physical Symptoms

  • Shaking and trembling
  • Dizziness
  • Increased heartbeat
  • Nausea
  • Too much sweating
  • Being unable to speak

Let’s Explore Various Urophobia Causes

Like other phobias, your fear of urine came from somewhere. The most probable cause may be the pungent smell of urine. Here are other possible causes:

Traumatizing Events

You may have had a negative incident with someone involving urine. You may have forgotten about the specific incident, but it left its mark. Can you recall ever having an unpleasant event, especially in a public restroom? Did an older person or a child harass you while you were trying to pee? Did a prank involving urine go too far? You could also have been duped into drinking urine. Gross, right? Bullying and offensive jokes push some people into emotional turmoil that affects their everyday functioning. This can last for a lifetime if not adequately addressed.

Health Factors

Do you possibly experience pain while urinating? Urinary retention is another possible cause for urophobia. Urinary retention is a condition where one is unable to excrete their urine when they need to. While such health issues require medical attention, the pain associated can cause you to be fearful when it’s time to pee.

Genetics

Do you know of anyone in your bloodline who has urophobia or other phobias? Genetics dictates that certain behaviors or practices develop from genetic conditions. If there is an alteration of your parent’s genes, the same is transferred to you. If there is a history of mental illness or anxiety disorders in your family, you are at a higher risk of developing the same.

Urophobia Treatment

There is no one specific treatment designed to treat or cure urophobia. There are, however, several possible treatment options to explore.

Self-Care

Self-care calls for you to work your way through anxiety to overcome it. The most significant step to recovery is in what you can do for yourself. Though professional treatment is helpful in learning to cope with or better manage urophobia, self-care works wonders when done right and practiced regularly.

Talk with Someone

Find someone you can trust to talk with. When you keep a problem to yourself, it worsens. Who knows, whoever you choose to talk with might have some excellent advice for you. You would be surprised how opening up can set you on the road to recovery.

Apply Relaxation Techniques

Simple relaxation methods like breathing in and out work wonders to calm you down. Since urinating is unavoidable, somewhere in the day you’ll have to visit the toilet. When that time comes, focus on your breathing. Breathe in and out until you feel calm. Try also to think about other, more pleasant things—not about how much you dislike urinating.

Professional Treatment

In professional treatment, therapy, counseling, and sometimes medication are the available options.

Medication

If you experience pain while urinating or suffer from urinary retention, seek medical help. Your doctor may be able to use medications to treat your underlying health problems. Consider seeing a urologist, a specialist in the urinary system. A urologist can determine the proper diagnosis and treat your condition accordingly.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy, or simply CBT, is one of the most common therapy treatments. It’s especially effective if you cooperate fully with your health professional. Your therapist will help you better understand your irrational thoughts. You’ll then work to replace these irrational thoughts with more rational ones. You might even be asked to keep a thought diary. With every negative thought or belief you have about something, you’ll cancel it out with a positive thought written in the diary.

Exposure Therapy

Exposure therapy is also relatively standard as a treatment method. With exposure therapy, you’re gradually exposed to the very thing that triggers your fear. In this case, urine. If the smell of urine triggers your fear, you will be exposed to that. Urine exposure can be gross, but it’s necessary to overcome your phobia. It won’t be easy at first, but you’ll adjust. When you reach the point where you can smell urine with only a bit of discomfort, you’ll be well on your way to overcoming your fear.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

MBSR is a type of therapy that incorporates meditation and group sessions. The whole idea of MBSR is to get a patient into mindful habits that distract them and reduce anxiety. In lectures and group discussions, group members talk about mental health and wellness. The conversations distract the patients from their fears. In meditation, the therapist will introduce you to a completely different phenomenon. This includes taking tea or focusing on the movements of the chest during breathing. When taking tea, for instance, you might be required to concentrate on the smell of the tea and describe that smell to the therapist.

How to Cope with Urophobia Altogether

One way or another, you must find a way to recover from urophobia. Intentionally holding your urine will lead to conditions such as kidney stones. In addition, you might end up constantly wetting your bed. This is because the urine you failed to excrete can find its way out at night when you’re most relaxed. No matter what it takes, work towards overcoming your fear of urinating.

There’s Always a Way around Fear

The fear of urine and urinating is treatable. You don’t have to live with a fear that negatively impacts your well-being and productivity. The first step is knowing that your fear is irrational. From there, find a treatment method that works for you. A combination of therapy, self-care, and counseling will yield the desired results.

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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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