Xantophobia: Symptoms, Causes and Treatments

The Xantophobia Is the irrational and sickly fear of the yellow color that a human being can suffer.

A person with this phobia can go so far as to feel fear or fear both the yellow color and the yellow word itself.

The word xantophobia comes from the Greek xanthous which means"yellow"and phobos meaning"fear". Some of the things that a person suffering from this phobia can be afraid of are: sun, yellow flowers, yellow cars, yellow fruits or, in short, any other living thing or object that is of this color .

As in all cases of phobias, this fear begins to be detrimental to the person when it limits him to do what he wants. This is where you should ask a health professional for help.

The person suffering from a phobia can not control the fear and requires a treatment to overcome it. Because the phobia controls who has it, this can significantly affect your life. And since any living being, object, situations, and even thoughts can trigger a phobia, there are hundreds of them.

Causes of xantophobia

Possible traumatic experiences

As with other specific phobias, xantophobia develops from some traumatic experience in the person's past. This traumatic event, probably linked to childhood, ended up being an irrational and exaggerated fear generator.

Cultural reasons

The yellow color is associated in many cultures to bad luck or even to death, reason why the social identity has a very close relation in this phobia.

In fact, the starting point of phobia is usually the association of this color with disease, bad luck, or even death.

It is believed that the origin of the belief that yellow gives bad luck goes back to the seventeenth century. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière , Died while representing"The Imaginary Sick"on February 17, 1673 dressed in yellow.

Before this event, the yellow had had a good social acceptance, since it was related to the gold or its representation of the sun, of the light. Since Molière's death all this has changed and bad luck is linked to the color yellow, sometimes in a generic way, but especially in the world of the scene.

Another anecdote is that the actors are strictly forbidden to take the stage dressed in some yellow garment because it gives bad luck.

Learning

Another cause may simply be that a child learned to imitate the negative responses of other people's fears.

As in many other phobias, irrational fear can be a learned fear of a reference model person they have had in their infancy. This is called vicarious learning.

symptom

The affected person of Xantofobia, can suffer severe pictures of anxiety that occur along with a great emotional alteration, which can greatly affect his quality of life Limiting it considerably.

Then I will go on to describe some of the many symptoms that may be affected by this phobia when exposed to the word or the color yellow:

• Panic or fear : It is an intense fear or terror. As a symptom, it is usually an unreasonable fear, often accompanied by the belief that"something bad will happen"when faced with the dreaded stimulus, in this case, the yellow color. A common symptom is the"desire to flee,"which is the normal human response to quitting or fighting. This is related to the production of the hormone adrenalin By the body as a response to fear.
• Anxiety : Anxiety is the experience of having worry, fear or feeling of restlessness. The mild to moderate or occasional feeling of anxiety is a normal reaction to the stress of daily life. Anxiety can manifest itself in the State of mind , The thoughts and emotions of the person.
• Shaking chills .
• Dry mouth .
• Sickness .
• Difficulty breathing .
• Fast heartbeat .
• Severe hallucinations .

Treatment

In case of any phobia it is necessary that the person go to a health professional to start an effective treatment and to overcome it or lead a life with the fewest possible limitations.

In the treatment of Xantophobia there are several psychological therapies that can be effective in overcoming it. Below, I'll go on to detail some of the most effective treatments:

Cognitive-behavioral therapy

The Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is quite effective in overcoming specific phobias. The techniques used in this type of therapy for phobias are:

• Exposure Therapy : Is the most effective behavioral treatment to deal with the behaviors of the anxiety produced by phobias. It is based on the exposure of the person with phobia to the dreaded stimulus, in this case the color or the word yellow. The key is to prevent the escape or escape route from becoming a safety signal. The exhibition interrupts the chain of escape behavior and allows to deal with the psychophysiological and cognitive symptoms produced by anxiety. These symptoms will decrease the longer the subject is exposed to yellow.
• Systematic Desensitization Therapy : With this technique, the patient can learn to confront the feared stimuli and situations that are threatening, exposing themselves in a real or imaginary way to the stimuli that produce anxiety. With this exposure, the subject learns to relax and once the anxiety is controlled by the imagination, one would perform live desensitization to the dreaded object.

Some of the cognitive techniques that are usually used for the treatment of specific phobias are the following:

• Distraction : Consists of the stop of negative thoughts and their subsequent change by positive thoughts.
• Undoing : It is the change of negative thoughts, verification of evidences that annul these thoughts and search for solutions.
• Stress Inoculation : Consists of three phases - education, testing and implementation - and was designed by Donald Meichenbaum to reduce stress.

• Identification of personal assumptions : The therapist usually uses what in psychology is called the down arrow, to detect the meanings associated with negative anticipations (eg"I'm afraid of the yellow color"- and what would happen if it encounters a yellow object?"- My breath stops and I feel that I lack the air"). It is sometimes useful to investigate the origin of these phobic meanings so that the patient gains self-understanding and motivation to change.
• Relaxation techniques Are effective Deep breathing and visualization.

NLP Techniques (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)

This technique helps us visualize, recede and correct the problems we develop in fears and phobias.

It is not a question of hiding the problems, but of facing them in a more useful way, learning a more adequate line of confrontation. If you have been able to create something as complicated as phobias and fears, you can learn to use those abilities to carry out different behaviors.

Ontological Coaching

It is a method of transformation by which people review, develop and optimize their behavior in the world.

Hypnotherapy

With hypnotic regression, the first manifestation of fear can be located in the subconscious of the subject, locating the situation, the motive... Hypnosis can be used to associate these manifestations with positive ones that make the irrational fear of that object Is reduced and even disappears.

Hypnosis breaks the negative associations that make the subject suffering from phobia continue with that irrational and exaggerated fear. At the end of the hypnosis process, the subject has complete control and mastery of the situation.

Drugs

If they are considered by the health professional as necessary because of the intensity of the problem and because of the disorder that causes in their daily life, it will be possible to resort to psychiatric treatment with drugs.

This pharmacological treatment will help to overcome the physiological symptomatology related to anxiety, which may appear due to psychological techniques such as exposure or systematic desensitization.

It will always be necessary to combine this pharmacological treatment with psychological therapy, since with the pharmacological treatment only the phobia is not cured. It helps to remit or decrease the physiological symptoms of therapy, but it is not completely eliminated. The drugs most used for the treatment of specific phobias such as xantophobia are the Antidepressants and the Anxiolytics .

Lifestyle

In addition, there are some behaviors that can help decrease the anxiety generated:

• Exercise regularly
• Sleep well
• Decrease or avoid caffeine and protein intake
• Avoid over-the-counter medications

Objectives of therapy

Finally, I would like to explain the objectives that are trying to achieve in a therapy directed to face the Xantophobia, so, in case it is your case, you can see that there is a solution to your problem:

• To make the subject stop experiencing anxiety before any object or living being yellow or the yellow word itself and be able to expose the situation without avoiding it.
• To make the subject modify his anticipatory cognitions with respect to yellow. This entails that the subject changes his catastrophic and negative thoughts regarding the yellow color by other realistic ones.

References

1. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 5th ed. Arlington, Va: American Psychiatric Publishing. 2013.
2. Hamm AO. Specific phobias. Psychiatr Clin N Am. 2009; 32: 577-591.
3. Taylor CT, Pollack MH, LeBeau RT, Simon NM. Anxiety disorders: Panic, social anxiety, and generalized anxiety. In: Stern TA, Rosenbaum JF, Fava M, et al., Eds. Massachusetts General Hospital Comprehensive Clinical Psychiatry. 1st ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Elsevier Mosby; 2008: chap 32.