Objectively speaking, there is nothing intrinsically dangerous about darkness. Sure, you might bump into things a bit more if you’re not used to the surroundings, but that’s hardly cause for a panic attack – and yet, for an estimated one in nine US adults, that’s precisely the kind of reaction it can elicit. The question is, why? In fact, why do we have any phobia? And most importantly of all – is there any way to beat it?
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?
If you can’t see a spider without flinching, or start hyperventilating at the thought of being stuck in an elevator, you’re in good company: “Over 70 percent of people have an irrational fear,” Melissa Norberg, a clinical psychologist and professor in Macquarie University’s School of Psychological Sciences, tells IFLScience.
But an irrational fear, it turns out, is not exactly the same thing as a phobia. “Phobias, by definition, need to regularly cause distress or interfere with someone’s life,” Norberg explains. “To be called a specific phobia, a fear must be irrational or greatly exaggerated.”
That can make diagnosing phobias kind of a slippery problem. Take snakes, for example: you may think you suffer from ophidiophobia, but there’s a fair chance you don’t, really. If you live somewhere without snakes, Norberg explains, then you probably can’t have a snake phobia, because the slithery reptiles simply can’t impact your life all that much.
“However, if [a person] move[s] to an environment where snakes are common, and their distress increases or they stop doing things because they’re afraid they might encounter a snake, they might now meet criteria for a snake phobia,” she tells IFLScience. “And nothing has changed except their environment.”
The number of people with diagnosable phobias, therefore, is much lower than 70 percent – even at the higher end of the estimates. “Prevalence varies quite a bit across studies,” Norberg says. “Some suggest that as few as 3 percent of the population meet diagnostic criteria for a phobia, while other studies show it may be as high as 24 percent of the population […] If studies are averaged, it seems that around 7 percent of the population may experience a clinically relevant phobia at some point in their life.”
That proportion isn’t spread as evenly as you might hope, with women more at risk than other groups, and, curiously, people from East Asian countries less so, Norberg tells IFLScience – and “if [someone] experience[s] one phobia, they are likely to experience another,” she adds.
Why we fear
On a pretty obvious level, it makes sense for us – for any animal, really – to have a fear response. After all, if your prehistoric ancestor didn’t run from the hungry lion they just bumped into, they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to become your ancestor.
But phobias are different, Norberg tells IFLScience. “Overall, research hasn’t supported the idea that we fear certain things because it’s evolutionarily beneficial,” she says. “What seems more likely is that we’ve been built to learn about threat.”
“Combine our ability to learn about danger with genetics and events that teach us about harm, like a children’s movie with a wicked witch dressed in black, casting spells in the night, and princesses being harmed by those spells, and voila, the stage is set for the development of a phobia.”
In other words, we’re taught our phobias – at least in part. Untangling precisely how much of an irrational fear is genetic and how much learned has proved incredibly difficult, for obvious reasons: do you and your parent share a fear of spiders because you inherited their arachnophobia genes, or just because you were repeatedly exposed as a child to their fearful reactions to the little critters?
“Overprotective parents model often model fearful behavior, engage in behavior to protect their children from harm when harm is unlikely, and often accommodate their children’s unnecessary avoidance behavior, like co-sleeping with a child every night because they are afraid of the dark,” Norberg tells IFLScience.
“Their intention may be to show their children that they love them and want to protect them and keep them happy,” she says, “but by doing so, [they] also inadvertently teach them that the dark is only safe when they are present.”
Are you afraid of the dark?
By definition, phobias are irrational. As real as the threat may feel to you in that moment, objectively, you’re not in any danger.
But it can be difficult to convince yourself of that. “When people experience a clinically significant phobia, it’s not just the objectively dangerous situation they are afraid of, but also irrational situations and stimuli,” Norberg explains.
“I admit that I have a difficult time holding rubber cockroaches,” she tells IFLScience. “I intuitively know they are fake, but because of their resemblance, I can be caught off guard by them. And even when I focus on them and tell myself they are safe, my brain still seems to have a hard time believing me.”
So, what is it about being in the dark that sets off our danger signals? Well, to a certain extent, it’s more sensible – and simple – than you might expect.
“People find the dark scary because it removes one of our senses,” Norberg explains. “It adds to the uncertainty of a situation, and many people find dealing with uncertainty uncomfortable.”
As with other phobias, some of it is likely the result of conditioning: “In some countries, where it’s common for children to sleep alone, the dark can also be linked to feelings of separation in young kids,” she tells IFLScience. “The pairing of being alone with being in the dark may lead children to think that darkness is the problem.”
Ultimately, though, much of the problem lies in that oh-so-human tendency to, well, ruminate. As anyone who’s found themselves lying awake at 4 am knows, it’s basically the catastrophizing hour: your mind fills with all sorts of worries and stresses, essentially doing a round-up of all the worst things you can think of.
That would be tough even with the lights on, Norberg points out – but it’s worse in the dark. “The removal of sight makes it easier to imagine things,” she tells IFLScience. “So when night falls or we enter a dark room, our mind may immediately start to imagine things that we didn’t just a few minutes earlier.”
And those things are rarely happy thoughts, she adds. “Stories, TV shows, and movies regularly send messages that harm comes to people in the night, when it’s dark,” Norberg explains. “We are told that monsters, ghosts, criminals, and animals, hide in the dark, waiting to get us […] We learn to associate these anxiety-provoking thoughts with darkness from a young age.”
Overcoming fear
So, short of keeping the lights on 24 hours a day, is there any way to deal with an overwhelming fear of the dark? In fact, there is – but you’re probably not going to like it.
“The gold standard treatment for phobias is exposure therapy,” Norberg tells IFLScience. “It has been shown to work better than waitlist control conditions, placebo control treatments, and active treatment control conditions.”
In other words, you have to face your fear. “Exposure therapy involves confronting feared stimuli in a non-dangerous manner and learning first-hand that the stimulus doesn’t need to be feared,” she explains. “So for being afraid of the dark, this means going into dark rooms and being alone at night, in the absence of monsters, ghosts, criminals, and dangerous animals. You would do this over and over again until you convincingly believe the dark is not dangerous.”
Maybe that’s too terrifying for you right now – that’s okay, Norberg says. In that case, a graded approach can be used: “As a therapist, I would ask you to go into a dim, but not fully dark room,” she explains.
The idea isn’t just to jump in headfirst – you have to be mindful about it. “Before engaging in an exposure activity, people should always ask themselves, ‘What do I think is going to happen? How likely do I think it will happen? And if it happens, how bad will it be?’,” Norberg explains.
“Immediately afterwards, they should ask themselves, ‘Did the feared outcome occur? If it did, how bad was it? How likely do I think the feared event will happen in the future?’,” she continues. “This questioning helps people focus on what they need to be learning during exposure therapy, which is: 1) feared outcomes almost never happen; 2) when they do, they are almost always not as bad as we expected; and 3) when they do happen, we can deal with it.”
For real success, though, one thing is key: once you can spend time in the dark, you should. “Every chance you have to confront the dark, that is objectively harmless, do it!” Norberg tells IFLScience. “You want to show yourself, no matter where you are, or how you feel that day, the dark will not harm you.”
“If you only confront the dark in a closet at your therapist’s office, then that might be the only dark place you’re not afraid of,” she says, “and that won’t be super helpful for you.”
