Inspirational Emetophobia Recovery Stories - must-see videos...

Emetophobia is a fear of vomiting and/or other people vomiting. It is widespread; it is one of the most common phobias for which people consult The Thrive Programme.

Research into Emetophobia suggests that around 0.1 to 8.8% percent of the population have a fear of being sick. These different figures probably depend upon whether the researchers assessed participants for any sort of ‘fear’ of vomiting or solely focused upon a severe ‘phobia’. These prevalent figures suggest that somewhere between around 63,000 and 5.5 million people in the UK suffer from emetophobia.

When you consider the vast majority of other fears and phobias that are prevalent worldwide today, such as fears of spiders, flying, needles, dogs, snakes, the dark, the dentist, you may note that all of these fears are based on specific objects that are, to a large degree, avoidable.

Fear of needles? Simply avoid getting vaccinated or going to countries abroad where jabs are required. Phobia about flying? Take the car or train to more local holiday destinations. The dark? The lightswitch is your friend. All of these phobias are based on singular, distinct objects or environments that, with a little effort and planning, can be avoided without causing too much distress.

Being sick, however, is significantly more difficult to avoid as the potential to be sick is something that can be present in all areas of our lives. As it is a normal, human response, it is something that we cannot ever truly eliminate from our lives, no matter how much emetophobes try! There is no specific thing/area/environment emetophobes can avoid that can guarantee not being sick.

This unavoidability, along with the sheer number of safety-seeking behaviours that emetophobes adopt to try to avoid it,  supports the claim that when someone overcomes their emetophobia with The Thrive Programme (and there have been 20,000 of them!) it really is a tremendous and inspirational achievement.