Nictoophobia, the fear of darkness
The fear of darkness or nictophobia (from the Greek NYCTOSMeaning what Night And Phobos or fear) is a type of specific phobia concerning a natural environment.
The fear of darkness often begins in childhood and is seen as a normal part of development. It is considered clinically significant, and therefore becomes phobia, if exposure to the dark causes an extreme reaction of stress and/or fear generates significant limitations in everyday life.
It must also persist for a period of at least six months or more. It must therefore be excessive, irrational and limiting.
Although it could be thought that the disorder only presents itself in childhood, it has been shown that this phobia can also be found in teenagers and adults.
Nictoophobia, in fact, can have an explanation and a content different from subject to subject: the darkness in itself is a universally shared opponent stimulus, since it hides information regarding its environment, which is read as a danger index.
The content of the threat, however, can be very specific from person to person (attacks, animals, supernatural entities, etc.). It is no coincidence, in fact, that nictophobia is often accompanied by other anxiety disorders, such as separation anxiety or generalized anxiety disorder. It is also associated with sleep disorders in teenagers and adults.
A study on university students with insomnia, for example, discovered that almost half of them was afraid of darkness. Those who had more problems sleeping were also those who were most easily frightened by the noises in darkness.
Not only that, over time those who managed to sleep better get used to the noises, while instead the students who suffered from insomnia became more and more anxious and vigilant to the threat (Carley et al., 2014). The latter reported a high rate of self-defined discomfort compared to the dark.
Symptoms of the fear of darkness
The symptoms found with nictophobia are very similar to those of other phobias. Different phobias, in fact, share very similar symptoms, but are characterized by specific trigger stimuli.
With nictophobia, for example, the symptoms can be triggered by being exposed to darkness, both day and night, or even by thinking about situations in which to find themselves in the dark.
Physical, cognitive and behavioral symptoms can be distinguished.
Physiological symptoms related to anxiety
- Increase in heart rate
- sweating
- feeling of malaise (nausea, headache and diarrhea)
- breathing problems
- sense of oppression or chest pain
- sensations of tremor or tingling
- dizziness
- hot or cold flashes
Cognitive symptoms
- intense perception of imminent threat
- think of losing control or feeling crazy
- think of dying or losing knowledge
- feel powerless
Behavioral symptoms
- become nervous and restless in any little enlightened environment
- be reluctant to go out in the evening
- need to sleep with a source of light
- tendency to escape from dark rooms
- get angry or get on the defensive if someone tries to encourage you to spend time in the dark
- stay at home during the night
- Difficulty falling asleep or falling asleep following night awakenings
Neurobiology of nictophobia
Specific phobias are extreme and persistent fears of certain objects, situations, activities or people. Those who suffer from it commit hardly to avoid their phobic stimuli, even if they know that there is no threat or danger, they feel unable to curb their irrational fear.
It has been suggested that the structuring of a specific phobia derived from an adverse experience, is due to classic conditioning, while its maintenance is due to the operating conditioning. This, in turn, strengthens avoidance behaviors (Tillfors 2004).
The maintenance of a specific experiential phobia can be explained through the inability to obtain a reduction in the conditional response in the occurrence of repeated presentations of a conditioned stimulus.
The specific non -experiential or innate phobia instead is caused and activated by stimuli that arouse fear without previous associative, direct or indirect learning. Genetic, family, environmental or development factors play an important role in the development of this type of specific phobia. The fear of darkness is an example.
From an evolutionary point of view, in fact, this fear may have been functional to the monitoring of the threat since, then as today, many predators hunt at night.
Bus awareness
Awareness is a form of non -associative learning, which is expressed with exaggerated emotional reactions to specific stimuli (for example, nictophobia is characterized by fear sensitized during exposure to darkness or during anticipation of its exposure).
It is functionally useful for the detection of threats. In the brain level, it is a specific increase in the stimulus of neuronal responses. Non -experiential phobia is thought to be supported by dysfunctions in the circuits of fear “Learning-dependent” (i.e. circuits that include the amygdala and guide defensive behavior without previous learning) (Rosen et al. 2015).
For example, the darkness can activate the amygdala, however, this activation can be exaggerated (sensitized) in those suffering from nictophobia, due to pathological changes in the threshold of excitability of the circuits of fear.
Another characteristic of the dark phobia, like other specific phobias, is the lack of addiction: habit is also a form of non -associative learning, which occurs with increasingly smaller emotional reactions to stimuli repeatedly presented.
It can serve in order to protect the brain from being flooded with excessive and repetitive information that thus, over time, become irrelevant. Even the fear of darkness, in fact, is often lost over time through the exposure repeated to darkness, accompanied by a constant decrease in the activation of the amygdala.
In other words, the excessive activity of the Amigdala can play a very important role in the structure of a specific or innate specific phobia, inducing a awareness of fear. At the same time, a usual usual deficit could be responsible for the persistence of fear in patients with this type of phobias (Garcia, 2017).
Treatment of the fear of darkness
The success rate of specific phobias treatment such as the nictophobiaobtained through cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques (CBT), is usually very high.
The CBT approach leads patients to get used to facing their fears by working on the content and cognitive processes of the anxious events. The process of changing the cognitive perspective is indispensable for the treatment of nictophobia.
Subsequently, the modification on a behavioral level, as a manifestation of cognitive change, becomes the point of reference for the success of this therapy. In the therapeutic process, the patient is invited to act in the real environment to face his fears.
The approach aims to modify the perceptions of patients regarding the actual danger of activating situations, in this case the darkness, and to confront the object or the situation that triggers its fear.
Exhibitions to feared situations, and therefore desensitization, are gradually implemented and calibrated on the patient’s resources, calculated from time to time. By exposing people to their fears repeatedly and with criteria, from milder levels to the highest ones of subjective discomfort, a decrease in anxious and panicosa activation is obtained.
Treatment in children
This treatment is also used for minors, subjects very susceptible to this type of phobias. In these cases the path varies from child to child according to the problem that accompanies the fear of darkness.
In general, children should gradually expose themselves to darkness. For example, it is often useful to start with exposure to a dark room during the day, gradually moving exposures ever closer to the moment to bed.
In addition, the exhibitions can be performed first with a parent present and gradually gradually removing it more and more from the child’s room.
In conjunction with the exhibitions, children must learn to challenge the anxious thoughts they experience in the darkness: if they fear that a thief will enter home or if they fear ghosts or other creatures invented, they can learn to “respond” to these thoughts trying to question them or self-raping.
The intent is to change their threatening perception of darkness, teaching them to face these situations, such as repeating themselves: “it’s dark, but I’m safe“.
Many children who fear the darkness also need to learn good strategies to fall asleep and remain asleep independently. Teaching these strategies is another integral part of the treatment: for example, they can be educated to the use of relaxation strategies with positive images, progressive muscle relaxation and breathing exercises such as means to calm down (Milosevic & McCabe, 2015).
The gradual exposure and the desensitization of fear, accompanied by cognitive techniques, remains the most preferable and effective path for the treatment of specific phobias (Hofmann & Smits, 2008; Norton & Price, 2007).
How to overcome the limits of traditional therapies
Sometimes, however, it is difficult, if not impossible, to be able to take advantage of the environment to practice. Thus, together with the exhibitions in imagination, new techniques and methods are always studied to face their fears.
The development of technology, including the virtual reality (VR), is increasingly used and integrated, within traditional psychotherapeutic approaches, to facilitate and optimize the paths of change. Virtual reality is a computerized, visual or environmental simulation, which generates increasingly realistic experiential sensations.
Unlike traditional therapeutic approaches, virtual reality can simulate problematic situations that are difficult to achieve in reality. With the same paradigm of in vivo exhibitions, the simulation of phobic stimuli can be gradually introduced to help people overcome their ailments.
VR therapeutic approaches reported encouraging results in improving the conditions of the patients treated, both from a cognitive and physiological point of view (Pereira et al., 2020).
The effectiveness of the treatments, regarding the temporal criterion, can be further improved thanks to “condensed therapies”, through the use of technological applications such as the VR (Nimnual & Yossatororn, 2019).
Bibliography
- Carney, CE, Moss, Tg, Atwood, Me, Crowe, BM, and Andrews, AJ (2014). Are Poor Sleepers Afraid of the Dark? A Preliminary Investigation, Journal of Experimental Psychopathology Jep Volume 5, Issue 1, 2-13
- Hofmann, SG, & Smits, Ja (2008). Cognitive-Behavoral Therapy for adult Anxiety Disorders: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trials. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry69, 621–632.
- Milosevic, I., & McCabe, Re (2015). Phobias: The Psychology of Irrational Fear: The Psychology of Irrational Fear, ABC-CLIO
- Nimnual, R., & Yossator, Y. (2019). Therapeutic Virtual Reality for Nylecthophobic Disorder. Icvars ’19: Proceedings of the 2019 3rd International Conference on Virtual and Augmented Reality Simulation, Pages 11–15
- Norton, PJ, & Price EC (2007). A Meta-Aalytic Review of Adult Cognitive-BEHAVIORAL TREATMENT OUTCOME ACROSS THE ANXIETY DISORDERS. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease195: 521–531.
- Pereira, JS, Faêda, LM, and Coelho, AM (2020) “Evolution of Vret to Assist in the Treatment of Phobias: A Systematic Review,” 2020 22nd Symposium On Virtual and Augmented Reality (SVR)pp. 386-390.
- Tillfors, M. (2004). Why Do Some Individuals Develop Social Phobia? A review with emphasis on the neurobiological influenceces. North J Psychiatry 58: 267–276.
