Nature & Natural Environment · 19 entries
Nature and Environment Phobias
Heights, deep water, storms, darkness and fire. These are the fears with the strongest claim to being useful, and the natural environment type is one of the five DSM-5-TR sorts specific phobia into, alongside the animal and situational types. A person who is careful near a cliff edge has an advantage, and the line between that carefulness and a phobia is drawn at what it costs rather than at whether it makes sense.
That line is where most of the reading is. Acrophobia is the severe end of a scale that begins with something ordinary: visual height intolerance, which up to a third of people report, sits below it and is not a diagnosis. Astraphobia belongs to the natural environment group alongside heights and water, and between fifty-five and ninety per cent of people with a natural environment phobia are female. The filing rule is the element itself, so a built setting, a bridge or a lift or an aircraft, is a situational fear and files there instead.
In this category
All 19 nature and environment phobias
19 entries
- Fear of DepthsA swimmer who can see the bottom may be fine and the same person may not be, ten metres further out. What is feared is unmeasured extent rather than depth.
- Fear of Environmental CatastropheCoined in a 1988 newspaper column to name fear of an inhospitable planet, it now names the indifference toward nature that is making it that way.
- Fear of FallingThe fear of falling is measurable in infants who have never fallen, and a Dunedin cohort found it least common in the people who had been hurt.
- Fear of FireOne reference defines a fear of fire; the other adds a fear of starting one, which is a different condition entirely. Neither has a study or a figure behind it.
- Fear of ForestsAristotle took hyle from timber to name matter, and the phobia word inherited both. One reference entry defines it as fear of a forest or fear of materialism.
- Fear of Fresh Air and DraftsA word from 1785 meaning dread of a draught. Merriam-Webster now records only the aviation sense, and the original survives in one place: as a sign in rabies patients.
- Fear of HeightsWikipedia gives 2 to 5 per cent and names no survey. What a Dunedin birth cohort found about childhood falls, and why vertigo is the wrong word for it.
- Fear of NatureBiophobia has no clinical record, and the biophilia hypothesis counts a fear of nature as evidence for an inborn attachment to living things.
- Fear of SnowWeather cannot be walked around, so the avoidance described is moving to a warmer climate or not leaving the house between November and March.
- Fear of Stars and Celestial SpaceOne vowel from astraphobia and constantly swapped with it. A religious movement published a second definition in 2020 and copyrighted it.
- Fear of the DarkThe object of this fear cannot be produced, which is why reassurance fails. Two real prevalence figures exist for it and they are constantly quoted as one.
- Fear of the SeaA bath is not thalassophobic and a lake is. Four incompatible explanations for the fear, one film blamed for it, and no prevalence figure anywhere.
- Fear of the SunFour medical conditions make sunlight genuinely painful, and the fear can produce the same sensation without them. What the record on heliophobia holds.
- Fear of Thunder and LightningIts defining behaviour is surveillance, not avoidance: weather networks, storm tracking, no leaving the house before checking. Westefeld named the pattern in 1996.
- Fear of Tornadoes and HurricanesWikipedia's own etymology section calls this term a fallacious neologism. The correct form is lailapophobia, and the fear underneath it is often trauma.
- Fear of TreesThe encyclopedia gives dendrophobia one line. Frost, Chekhov's critic and a 1914 naturalist all use it for hostility to trees, not fear of them.
- Fear of WaterHydrophobia was already in use for a symptom of rabies, so the fear of water took a Latin root. Three prevalence studies exist for it and none agrees with the others.
- Fear of WindA fear inferred entirely from moving trees and waves, described in an article that names no study, no researcher and no figure. What actually survives the description.
- SolastalgiaGlenn Albrecht named the distress of a home environment changing around a person who has not moved. Wealth reliably softens it, and poverty does not.
Keep going
The other categories
- Social & InterpersonalFears whose object is other people: being judged by them, being among them, or being without them.
- The Body, Illness & DeathDeath, dying, disease, contamination, ageing and the body itself.
- Abstract & ExistentialFailure, the future, change, infinity, being forgotten.
- Places & SituationsEnclosed spaces, crowds, bridges, lifts, tunnels and flight.
Common questions
Questions about nature and environment phobias
What is the difference between a fear of heights and acrophobia?
Severity and cost. Visual height intolerance is the ordinary version, reported by up to a third of people, and it is not a diagnosis. Acrophobia is the severe end of the same scale, where the fear interferes with a chair or a staircase, and the English Wikipedia article reserves the word phobia for people at that end.
Is fear of the dark a real phobia?
Nyctophobia is named in the manuals and is filed here as recognised, which puts it in a small minority of the terms on this site. It is also the entry where childhood onset does most of the explaining, and the six-month threshold in the diagnostic criteria exists precisely to let ordinary childhood fear pass rather than be diagnosed.
Which phobias count as natural environment type?
Heights, water, storms and darkness are the standard examples, and astraphobia is described as belonging to that group alongside heights and water. The type is one of five DSM-5-TR uses. It sorts by what the feared thing is rather than by how the body reacts, which is what separates it from the blood-injection-injury type.
What is the fear of deep water called?
Thalassophobia names the fear of the sea, and bathophobia the fear of depths. Neither is named in a diagnostic manual under that word. Aquaphobia covers water more broadly, and the entries record which of the three the sources actually use for what.