The Most Feared Workplace Phobias

“I’d love to accept the position,” says Laura Walker, the eager, well-qualified 20-something you’ve just hired. “But there’s one thing I feel I should tell you. I’m a papyrophobe, so will have to work in a paperless environment. Or else, I’ll have to work from home.”If you’re unsure of whether to laugh or kick the smart mouthed kid out of your office, you’re not alone.

“The most important distinction to make is that while phobics know their fears may be irrational, they are most often powerless to control their feelings,” says John Weaver, Psy.D., a consultant psychologist. For example, a papyrophobic knows that her panicked reaction to the sight of a stack of looseleaf is entirely unreasonable — but that doesn’t mean she won’t have to leave the room.

By adding the suffix “-phobe” to the offending object, the list of known, diagnosed or referenced fears has grown to over 2,000, according to online, although non-scientific, resources. Arachnophobia (fear of spiders), ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) and acrophobia (fear of heights) afflict the majority of specific phobia sufferers, according to Weaver. “There are certain things which understandably engender phobias,” he says.  “Snakes, spiders, rats and bats are creepy creatures. They’re often poisonous or dangerous, and rather than figure out the risk, it’s easy to become phobic.” From an evolutionary perspective, he says, some phobias are quite helpful, and date back to the fight-or-flight decisions of our caveman ancestors.

Some of the more unique workplace specific fears—numerophobia (fear of numbers), deciophobia (fear of decision-making), bibliophobia and technophobia (fear of books or computers)–don’t have clearly defined or generally recognized origins, and so seem irrational and harder to understand.

“They’re not clearly threatening,” says Weaver. “Most people can have a bad experience with a book or a decision and it never becomes something bigger than that one experience. Others are scarred for the rest of their lives.”

“Human beings have an incredible capacity to represent things symbolically,” says Weaver. “The number four, for example, is really a symbolic representation of an abstract concept rather than fear of three lines drawn in the pattern we see as the number four. What happens is that in some cases this symbolic representation has become connected to something that a person fears. So the number four represents something a person is afraid of because it symbolically connects with whatever they fear most in their life.”

Abandonment, rejection, loss or ridicule often lay at the heart of many seemingly bizarre phobias.

While most of the novelty phobias discussed by the media are not clinical terms, what seems to be the most common and detrimental workplace fear falls under the official diagnosis “social phobia.” There are two different kinds of this condition:

1. The first can be termed a general social phobia. This person has anxiety about most any form of social interaction, even if they are passive.

2. The second is a performance-based anxiety, usually the fear of public speaking or the fear of being asked to perform in front of a group. For many people with a social phobia, just sitting in a meeting can be enough to raise their anxiety levels to a point where they are in significant emotional anguish or become unable to function.

For people without a social phobia, the elevated heart beat, or nerves that come before public speaking help to prepare you or increase energy before you talk. For people with social anxiety it just keeps going. Their body says fight or flight but there’s nowhere to run. These sensations, she says, are often accompanied by a particular thought pattern:  that it’s probable that something bad is going to happen.

Source: Forbes