Emetophobia is a fear of vomiting or vomit. It can make being around sick people very stressful, and can impact your life significantly. Read on to learn about this phobia and how to overcome it.
Fear of Vomit – Some Basics
Although it relates to a bodily function, emetophobia is a mental health condition, not a physical one. Phobias like emetophobia are irrational, intense fears that cause anxiety that is out of proportion to the actual risk.
Dealing with emetophobia can feel similar to dealing with other fears. Youâre constantly worried and preoccupied with vomiting to the point that it may be all you think about. This can stop you from participating in many everyday life activities, like traveling or going out to restaurants. You might feel anxious and panicked, and experience sensations like palpitations, trembling, sweating, nausea, tingling, or dizziness.
Vomiting is involuntary, and you can’t fully predict when it will happen. If you have emetophobia, this unpredictability can keep you feeling you have to be constantly on guard. Vomiting can also make you feel out of control, which can be scary. For these reasons, the uncertainty of not knowing when vomiting might happen can become the most stressful part of emetophobia.
Causes of Emetophobia
You might be wondering: Why am I so scared of vomiting? Did something have to happen to cause this?
Humans are hard-wired to avoid anything disgusting or off-putting at all costs. Our biology drives us to avoid things that have led to vomiting in the past. For example, itâs common to feel nauseous and disgusted if you think about going back to a restaurant if you got sick after you were last there. This makes fear of vomiting easy to develop, sometimes even without a clear reason.
The ability to vomit evolved as a helpful survival mechanism. Itâs important for your body to be able to detect if thereâs something toxic in what you consumed, and to get rid of it quickly. In early human society, the people nearest to you also likely ate and drank the same things as you. So, if others started vomiting, it could be a sign that you should too. Perhaps thatâs why many people will feel nauseous or even vomit if they see someone else who vomits. Â So again, our biology makes us predisposed to see others’ nausea and vomiting as signs of danger.
There are some life experiences that can make emetophobia more likely. One of those is having a past vomit-related experience that caught you by surprise, or was particularly intense or painful. Similarly, if someone near you vomited unexpectedly, or you couldnât get away from them, it may have made you anxious about similar moments in the future. Another reason you might develop emetophobia is if you spent time around others who were fearful of vomiting and displayed this, such as parents or caregivers.
Emetophobia and OCD
Emetophobia can also be part of suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). When this is the case, it is most often associated with a fear of contamination with germs or contracting an illness that causes vomiting. People with OCD and emetophobia often have obsessive fears about how bad vomiting can feel, being near someone else vomiting, or unintentionally eating spoiled foods. They also typically perform compulsions aimed to stay âcleanâ or âsafeâ from germs, such as compulsive handwashing, checking for signs of illness, or avoiding situations they fear will lead to illness or vomiting.
Struggling with Emetophobia
The ways you cope with a fear of vomiting have the potential to make your phobia more severe, or less severe â without you even realizing it. If youâre afraid of vomiting, itâs easy to start worrying about it, and monitoring your body for any signs of nausea. Whenever you pay close attention to anything, it becomes easier to notice that thing over time. People who are afraid of vomiting can often detect smaller changes in their stomach sensations than others, and start to feel anxious and worry at the slightest hint of stomach discomfort.
Worrying about vomiting doesnât prevent it from happening, but it can make you more anxious and nauseous. And when someone with emetophobia starts to feel nauseated, worry and anxiety grow even stronger, which often leads to more nausea.
Fear about vomiting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because anxiety and nausea form a vicious cycle. This is why emetophobia can take such a toll on both your mental and your physical health.
The role of avoidance
Fear can also grow stronger from avoiding places and activities that you believe would make vomiting more likely. Avoidance is a natural reaction to anything scary or fearful, but the more you avoid, the greater your fear and anxiety become.
Many people who are afraid of vomiting avoid these places and activities:
- Amusement parks and thrill rides
- Eating new foods, or food when youâre not at home
- Bars, nightclubs, and parties where people are drinking alcohol
- Doctorâs offices, hospitals, and other medical facilities
- Airplances, subways, and other public transit
- Concerts, festivals, fairs, and other crowded public events with food and/or alcohol
- Public restrooms
- Watching TV shows and movies that show people vomiting
- Talking about or hearing stories about vomit or vomiting
- Becoming pregnant
- Medications that can cause nausea as a side effect
- Eating large amounts of food
- People that feel âhigh riskâ for vomiting (e.g., drunk, sick-looking people, children)
- Saying or hearing words like âvomit,â âpuke,â or âbarfâ
Emetophobia often causes significant impairment in everyday life, and people go to great lengths to avoid vomiting. This can lower your quality of life by making you miss out on meaningful activities, even though vomiting is a relatively rare event for most people. Many people with emetophobia havenât vomited many times or for long stretches of time, which can make any instance of vomiting stand out more and feel scarier.
Getting Relief from Emetophobia
Fortunately, emetophobia doesnât have to run your life â effective treatment is available and relief is possible! Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a type of talk therapy proven effective at treating many kinds of anxiety, including phobias like emetophobia. In CBT, there are various techniques used to reduce anxiety and treat phobias. Some of these include:
Relaxation training
Staying constantly vigilant for signs of nausea is stressful and creates tension in your body. Worrying also increases anxiety and stress, and nausea is part of the bodyâs reaction to anxiety. All of these factors make it difficult to relax is youâre dealing with emetophobia. So, CBT uses relaxation training. This involves techniques, including breathing and visualization exercises, to help you learn how to relax your body and reduce physical sensations of anxiety and fear.
Facing your fears with exposure exercises
Exposure therapy helps you learn to overcome your fear. It teaches you to gradually approach or confront the things that trigger your fear that you normally avoid, with guidance and support from your therapist. Approaching your fears rather than avoiding them teaches you how to withstand discomfort, desensitizes you to those things, and reduces your anxiety and fear of vomiting over time.
To treat emetophobia, you and your therapist would design activities called exposures to help you overcome your fear. Some exposure exercises for emetophobia may include:
- Saying or hearing words like âvomit,â âthrowing up,â or âbarfâ
- Spinning around in a circle to bring on mild nausea so you can get used to it
- Spending time in places you avoided due to fear (e.g., bars, doctorâs offices, etc.)
- Watching scenes from TV shows or movies that show vomiting
- Participating in fake vomiting exercises in collaboration with your therapist
Changing your thinking
A CBT therapist will often help you practice thinking differently to lower your anxiety, by changing unhelpful patterns in your thinking that keep you anxious. You learn to identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts, while learning to practice more helpful thoughts.
Many people with emetophobia believe that if they simply try hard enough, they can outrun or prevent vomiting altogether. However, this isnât true â if it were, we could all prevent vomiting! Learning to think more rationally and helpfully about vomiting can lead to relief from anxiety.
Conclusion
Now you know what emetophobia is, why it happens, and what kinds of treatment can help. Emetophobia can have a sneaky but significant impact on your life, but it doesnât have to be like that forever.
Working with a CBT therapist can help you live without limitations stemming from a fear of vomiting. If you struggle with emetophobia, contact us if youâre ready to get started with treatment.
