The fear of fears is called phobophobia, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: an intense fear of being afraid. Rather than dreading a specific object or situation like spiders or heights, people with phobophobia dread the experience of fear itself. This creates a uniquely frustrating loop where worrying about becoming afraid actually triggers the very anxiety you’re trying to avoid.
How Phobophobia Works
Most phobias have an external trigger. You see a snake, you feel afraid. Phobophobia is different because the trigger is internal. Your body’s own anxiety signals, a racing heart, tight chest, or surge of dread, become the thing you fear. You start scanning yourself for early signs of panic, and that hypervigilance produces more anxiety, which confirms the fear, which produces more scanning. The cycle feeds itself.
This mechanism has a clinical name: anxiety sensitivity. It refers to the tendency to interpret normal anxiety sensations as dangerous. Someone with high anxiety sensitivity doesn’t just feel their heart speed up and think “I’m nervous.” They feel it and think “something is seriously wrong with me.” Anxiety sensitivity is especially elevated in people with panic disorder, and research shows it can actually predict future panic attacks. In one line of studies, people who scored high on a standard anxiety sensitivity measure were more likely to experience spontaneous panic episodes later, even if they hadn’t had one before.
People who experience panic attacks often overestimate both the likelihood of having another attack and the consequences if one happens. That continued fear of fear kicks off a fresh wave of anxiety, which then sends the brain searching for evidence of threat and danger. It’s a self-reinforcing system that can expand over time, making a person increasingly avoidant of situations where they might feel anxious.
What It Feels Like
Phobophobia shares the physical symptoms of other anxiety responses because it activates the same stress pathways. Your heart races, your breathing quickens, your muscles tense, and you may feel dizzy or nauseated. The difference is context. These sensations aren’t triggered by something external. They’re triggered by noticing, or even imagining, the early stirrings of anxiety in your own body.
On the cognitive side, catastrophizing is common. A small flutter of nervousness becomes “I’m about to have a full panic attack” or “I’m losing control.” This pattern of somatic hypervigilance, constantly monitoring your body for signs of fear, adds to the sense of disability and reinforces the cycle. Many people also develop avoidance behaviors, steering clear of situations, places, or even conversations that might provoke anxiety. Over time, this avoidance can shrink a person’s world significantly.
Who Is at Risk
Phobias in general have a genetic component, though it’s moderate rather than dominant. Twin studies estimate the heritability of phobias at roughly 20 to 39%, meaning genes account for a meaningful but minority share of the risk. The larger contributor is your individual environment, the specific experiences, stressors, and learned associations unique to you rather than anything shared with siblings growing up in the same household.
Personality traits also play a role. People who score high in neuroticism (a tendency toward negative emotions) and low in extraversion are more prone to anxiety-based conditions like agoraphobia and social phobia. In genetic modeling studies, these personality traits accounted for nearly all of the inherited vulnerability to those conditions. Even susceptibility to fear conditioning itself, how easily your brain learns to associate a neutral stimulus with danger, appears to be partly heritable, with acquisition and extinction of conditioned fear responses each showing heritabilities around 35 to 43%.
A history of panic attacks is one of the strongest practical risk factors. Once you’ve experienced the overwhelming physical intensity of panic, it’s natural to develop a secondary fear of that experience happening again. That secondary fear is, essentially, phobophobia.
How It Differs From Other Phobias
With most phobias, you can at least theoretically avoid the trigger. If you’re terrified of flying, you can take a train. But you can’t avoid your own nervous system. This makes phobophobia particularly persistent and difficult to manage through simple avoidance, because avoidance itself generates anxiety about what you’re trying to avoid.
Phobophobia also tends to layer on top of other anxiety conditions rather than existing in isolation. Someone might start with a fear of public speaking, then develop a secondary fear of the panic symptoms they experience before a presentation, until the fear of fear becomes as disabling as the original phobia. In panic disorder, this layering effect is considered one of the primary mechanisms that keeps the disorder going.
Treatment Approaches
The most effective treatment for phobophobia targets the core problem: your brain’s learned belief that anxiety sensations are dangerous. Cognitive behavioral therapy does this through a technique called interoceptive exposure, which involves deliberately inducing mild anxiety symptoms in a controlled setting. You might breathe through a narrow straw to create a sensation of breathlessness, or spin in a chair to trigger dizziness. The goal is to experience those feared body sensations repeatedly and learn, at a gut level, that they pass without harm.
A study of 120 participants with elevated anxiety sensitivity compared different intensities of interoceptive exposure. The intensive version, where people faced feared sensations without relying on controlled breathing techniques or long rest breaks between exercises, produced significantly greater reductions in anxiety sensitivity and fearful responding than gentler approaches. The principle behind this is called expectancy violation: the more your actual experience contradicts your catastrophic prediction, the more powerfully your brain updates its threat assessment.
Therapists optimize exposure using several strategies. These include removing safety signals (the crutches you lean on to feel okay), varying the exercises so your brain can’t habituate to just one scenario, practicing in multiple environments so the learning generalizes beyond the therapy room, and using affect labeling, which simply means putting your feelings into words as you experience them.
Breaking the Cycle on Your Own
While therapy is the most reliable path, daily practices can help interrupt the fear-of-fear loop between sessions or as a starting point. The common thread is shifting your relationship with physical sensations from “something is wrong” to “this is just my body responding.”
Controlled breathing is the most accessible tool. Box breathing, where you breathe out for four counts, hold for four, breathe in for four, and hold for four, directly slows the autonomic arousal that feeds the cycle. Diaphragmatic breathing works similarly: place one hand on your chest and one on your belly, breathe slowly through your nose until your belly rises, then exhale through slightly pursed lips. Starting with just a minute or two and building to ten minutes daily can meaningfully shift your baseline.
Meditation builds on this by combining slow breathing with deliberate mental focus. Even a few minutes of sitting quietly, eyes closed, observing your breath without trying to change it, trains your brain to notice physical sensations without reacting to them with alarm. Working up to 10 to 20 minutes daily is a reasonable goal, though consistency matters more than duration. The underlying skill you’re building is the ability to observe anxiety as a passing state rather than a signal of catastrophe, which is the exact cognitive shift that weakens phobophobia over time.