Brontophobia: symptoms, causes and treatment

This phobia is frequent in young children, and can become very intense.

If we were to make a complete and exhaustive list of all the fears and phobic fears suffered by human beings, it would be an almost impossible task, since any object or situation is susceptible to become a phobic stimulus.

However, some of these fears are easy to recognize, since it is quite likely that we have experienced them at some point in our lives, including childhood. Brontophobia is one of these fears that are so common in children, but if they are not dealt with, they can be very serious.but that if they are not approached correctly they can end up by taking root in the adult age.

What is brontophobia?

The brontophobia is within the immense list of specific anxiety disorders and is related to the phobic fear of storms, including thunder and lightning..

People who suffer from brontophobia tend to experience an exaggerated, irrational and uncontrollable fear of thunder and lightning, developing an intense anxiety response whenever they are exposed to these agents of nature. What produces terror is usually the possibility of receiving a lightning strike, but there are people who fear other aspects of the storm, such as the danger of too much water falling and collapsing nearby structures or those in which they are at that moment.

As a consequence, this anxiety response tends to originate a whole repertoire of behaviors, acts and behavior that are carried out with the intention of avoiding the feared situation or escaping from it as soon as possible.

This phobia usually presents a much higher incidence in children of younger ages.. During childhood, experiencing a certain degree of fear of thunderstorms is natural, however if this fear intensifies and strengthens over time, it can end up becoming a real and intense phobia in adulthood.

Brontophobia can interfere significantly in the life of the person, especially in those situations or locations where weather conditions are conducive to the origin of thunder and lightning. However, research in psychology has developed a series of highly effective treatments, thanks to which the person can overcome brontophobia and restore normality in his life.

Characteristics of this anxiety disorder

Since brontophobia is part of the category of specific anxiety disorders, it shares symptoms, causes and treatments with them. The most direct consequence of brontophobia is that the person who suffers from it constantly avoids or avoids all situations or places where the generation of a storm, lightning or thunder is possible.

Like the rest of specific phobias, brontophobia is characterized as a phobic fear with a specific aversive stimulus, in this case thunderstorms, and it presents the following characteristics:

• The person experiences excessive and disproportionate fear considering the real threat posed by the phobic stimulus.
• The fear does not possess any logic. That is to say, it is irrational or based on erroneous ideas.
• The sufferer of the phobic fear is unable to control it and the responses it provokes.
• The occurrence of the phobic stimulus or the anticipation that it may appear automatically triggers a series of avoidance and escape behaviors.
• If the person does not undergo treatment, the fear may become permanent and constant over time.

What are the symptoms?

The most distinctive symptom of brontophobia, and of the rest of specific phobias, is the manifestation of high levels of anxiety in the person who suffers from it.. However, this symptomatology does not necessarily arise in the same way and with the same intensity in all people.

Even so, for the fear to be classified as phobic, the person must present some of the symptoms of the three categories associated with phobias: physical symptoms, cognitive symptoms and behavioral symptoms.

1. Physical symptoms

As with all other anxiety-related responses, the experience of an exacerbated fear often involves a series of changes and alterations in the organism.. These changes are originated by the hyperactivity that the autonomic nervous system experiences before the appearance of the aversive stimulus.

This symptomatology includes:

• Increased Heart rate.
• Acceleration of breathing..
• Choking sensation and shortness of breath.
• Muscle tension.
• Increased sweating levels.
• Headaches.
• Gastric alterations and problems.
• Dizziness.
• Nausea or vomiting..
• Fainting and loss of consciousness.

2. Cognitive symptoms

In addition to the physical symptoms, brontophobia is accompanied by a series of irrational ideas and distorted beliefs about the phobic stimulus, in this case storms, lightning and thunder. This cognitive symptomatology can manifest itself in the following ways:

• Intrusive and uncontrollable ideas about the danger posed by storms.
• Obsessive speculations related to the phobic stimulus.
• Catastrophic imagination related to this meteorological phenomenon.
• Fear of losing control and not knowing how to manage the situation adequately.
• Feeling of unreality.

3. Behavioral symptoms

Finally, all specific phobias share a series of behavioral symptoms or patterns that appear in response to coping with the phobic stimulus. These behavioral symptoms appear with the aim of avoiding the feared situation, or fleeing when the aversive stimulus has already appeared. Such behaviors are known as avoidance or escape behaviors.

The behaviors aimed at avoiding the encounter with a storm, or avoidance behaviors, refer to all those behaviors or acts that the person performs to avoid the possibility of encountering them. In this way, the person momentarily avoids momentarily avoid experiencing feelings of anguish and anxiety. that these environmental conditions generate in the person.

On the other hand, escape behaviors appear when the person with brontophobia is already immersed in the feared situation. During this period of time, the person will perform all kinds of acts or behaviors that allow him/her to escape from the situation as quickly as possible.

What causes this phobia?

For the time being, no evaluation techniques or methods have been developed that allow to know in a completely reliable way the origin of a phobia. In many occasions the person is not conscious of the reason of this fear, and is not able to associate it to any experience.

However, due to the common components that exist between phobias, it is estimated that the causes of these can be common. Therefore, a possible genetic predisposition to phobias a possible genetic predisposition to the harmful effects of stressThe experience of a highly traumatic or highly emotional situation related to storms, accompanied by the experience of a highly traumatic or emotional situation, can lay the foundations for the development of this and any other phobia.

However, there are other factors to take into account such as personality, cognitive styles or learning by imitation, which can favor the appearance and development of irrational fear of any type of object or situation.

Are there treatments?

As mentioned above, brontophobia can be highly disabling, especially in climates that favor the occurrence of storms, so that the person's daily life can be conditioned by the appearance of these phenomena, as well as the wear and tear involved in constantly enduring the high levels of stress that it causes.

Fortunately, there is the possibility of to approach the disorder from a psychotherapeutic point of view.. Throughout the investigations it has been verified that the cognitive-behavioral therapy obtains fantastic results in the treatment of the phobias.

In these cases a series of techniques are carried out with the aim of reducing and eliminating the three groups of symptoms. By means of the cognitive restructuring it is tried to modify those irrational beliefs that the person has with respect to the storms.

As for the physical and behavioral stimuli, practices such as systematic desensitization or live exposure, accompanied by training in relaxation techniques have proved to be have proven to be of great help.

This type of techniques applied to patients during weekly sessions help the person with storm phobia to overcome their fear by gradually associating these feared stimuli with the experience that nothing bad happens. It starts with the easiest situations to deal with and ends with those that are more challenging, following a gentle but steadily rising difficulty curve.

Therefore, the combination of all these techniques will help the person to be able to overcome his phobic fear and rebuild his life in a normal way.

Bibliographical references:

• American Psychiatric Association (2013), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.), Arlington: American Psychiatric Publishing.
• Craske, M.; Martin M.A.; Barlow, D.H. (2006). Mastering your fears and phobias. US: Oxford University Press.
• Whalen, P.J.; Phelps, E.A. (2009). The Human Amygdala. New York: The Guilford Press.
• Hamm, A.O. (2009). Specific phobias. The Psychiatric Clinics of North America. 32(3): pp. 577 - 591.