Emetophobia: How Emetophobia turns you into an addict
Those with emetophobia often try to get reassurance that their fears won’t happen. This can be in person by asking repeated questions to friends or family or it can be online by googling Norovirus rates, looking for social media information, or by posting questions on Facebook such as “I have eaten X, will I vomit?”.
Getting reassurance seems natural and everyone will do it from time to time. The problem is that reassurance-seeking too effective at reducing anxiety. If you have a fear and someone tells you it’s definitely not going to happen. Bam! Your anxiety is gone. Great right?!….
From a therapy perspective…. not so much! If used too much, it turns you into a reassurance addict.
Reassurance is addictive:
As reassurance-seeking is so effective at reducing anxiety it can become an automatic response for dealing with any hint of anxiety. Each time you are anxious, you feel the need to get more reassurance.
The problem with this is that reassurance acts just like a drug. You have the downsides of tolerance and dependence to deal with.
With each hit of reassurance, it starts to become less effective. Prompting you to need more of it. Think back to when you started reassurance-seeking, maybe you only needed to ask a single question before you felt relief. But now you may have noticed that you have to ask multiple times for the same level of reassurance. You may also notice you have to ask more frequently than you used to.
When your tolerance to reassurance builds up, you often start to doubt the answers you are getting. With this increased doubt comes more anxiety and more opportunities to reassurance seek.
Reassurance strengthens the belief that if you didn’t ask for reassurance something bad would have occurred:
Usually, most of our worries do not come true. If we did nothing to try and prevent it from happening, we can learn that our fears are less likely to occur than we thought and we naturally become less anxious over time.
This diagram shows this in action: If we do nothing to prevent our fears then we can learn they are not as likely as we feared.
However, the act of reassurance seeking can disrupt this learning. When your fear doesn’t occur after getting reassurance, your body unconsciously thinks that the reassurance some how prevented your fear. This strengthens your belief in how likely your fears are to occur. Feeding your anxiety in the future and prompting more reassurance-seeking.
This diagram shows how getting reassurance only increases the fear about our worries..
Reassurance-seeking prevents change:
When you decide to get reassurance to manage your anxiety, your fears are left unchanged. This stops you from moving forwards or making real change in your life. You just end up responding to the same fears over and over.
This cycle is easy to get trapped into because reassurance-seeking is so good at reducing your anxiety in the short term. But comes at the expense of maintaining your fears in the long term.
How do we change this:
Stand up to your anxiety like it is a bully. The “anxiety bully” shouts out and tries to bully you with all the threats of what might occur (e.g. I might vomit, this food might be off, what if I catch a stomach bug). You need to face up to this bully and call its bluff. Do not respond, don’t get reassurance or try to prevent it and see what occurs.
You have to be willing to endure some short-term anxiety, to reduce your anxiety in the long term.
Therapy:
Emetophobia is treatable. I recommend reaching out to a BABCP accredited CBT therapist or self-referring yourself to the NHS talking therapies services which can offer Emetophobia support.
Written by David Kaneria - CBT Therapist