The world of psychopathologies is a complex world, in which there are many disorders. One of the most frequent are phobias, which are characterized because the person who experiences them feels an extreme and persistent irrational fear, as well as a great anxiety and discomfort before a stimulus (situation, animal and object).

Phobias are part of the group of anxiety disorders, and can be experienced at any age. In this article we will talk about arithmophobia or numerophobia, the irrational fear of numbers , as well as how it affects everyday life.

What is arithmophobia

Arithmophobia is an irrational fear of numbers, mathematics or arithmetic . It is also called numerophobia and causes great discomfort to the person who suffers it, who tends to avoid the feared stimulus at all costs.

This disturbance can seriously affect the life of the individual with this disorder, since numbers and mathematical calculations are present in people’s daily lives . Seeing numbers written on a blackboard or calculating shopping costs can be situations that cause great discomfort to the phobic and which he tends to avoid.

Phobias are fairly common anxiety disorders , and there are different types: social phobias, agoraphobia and specific phobias. The latter are characterised by the fact that the phobic stimulus is a specific object, situation or animal, which provokes an irrational and disproportionate reaction of fear. Among these phobias we can find aerophobia or fear of flying, arachnophobia or fear of spiders or arithmophobia or fear of numbers.

Causes of phobias

Although you can talk about a phobic person, phobias are learned. It is common for them to appear after a traumatic experience that, in the case of arithmophobia, the person associates with numbers. This occurs because of a type of associative learning called classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning is a learning process in which the individual associates an unconditioned stimulus (traumatic event) that elicits an unconditioned response (fear response) to an originally neutral stimulus but later known as a conditioned stimulus (the numbers), which ends up provoking the unconditioned response, now called the conditioned response.

Other causes of this phobia

This phobia can also be caused by other things. For example, the person has had a bad experience with mathematics and, in view of the fear and insecurity of doing the calculations wrong, manifests the symptoms .

However, it does not necessarily have to be the phobic who experiences the traumatic event in his or her own skin, but rather the observation of the traumatic event in another person, which would be known as vicarious conditioning, can provoke the development of this pathology.

On the other hand, several experts on phobias claim that phobias have a biological component, because it is common to acquire irrational fears. Fear is a very adaptive and useful emotion , which has served the human species to survive over the centuries. The emotion of fear originates from primitive associations, in the limbic system, and not from cognitive associations in the neocortex. This explains why a person even knowing that he suffers from a phobia is unable to overcome it simply by reason.

Symptoms of number phobia

Regardless of the type of phobia, symptoms are usually common. As an anxiety disorder, anxiety is usually the main symptom along with fear, but there are others . These symptoms are classified into three types: cognitive, behavioural and physical.

Cognitive symptoms may include fear, distress, confusion or catastrophic thoughts. Avoidance of the feared stimulus is a behavioural symptom presented by phobics. Headaches, hyperventilation, nausea and stomach upset are physical symptoms experienced by people with a fear of numbers.

Treatment of numerophobia

Phobias are very common disorders, and there is much scientific evidence regarding effective treatment. According to the results of these studies, cognitive behavioural therapy seems to be the most effective type of psychotherapy .

This form of therapy includes different techniques, of which relaxation techniques and exposure techniques are effective in treating phobias. One technique that includes both and provides good results in overcoming phobic disorders is systematic desensitization.

Systematic desensitization aims to expose the patient to the phobic stimulus gradually . Before that, however, the patient must learn a series of coping strategies that help him/her to reduce the anxious symptoms when faced with the phobic stimulus.

In addition to cognitive behavioural techniques, other types of psychotherapy such as Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and acceptance and engagement therapy have proven to be very effective. Both forms of psychotherapy are considered third generation therapy, which emphasizes the functional context of the patient and acceptance.