Fear of Snow

Why the avoidance means moving house

The Cleveland Clinic's page on chionophobia, last reviewed in March 2022, describes a fear severe enough that the thought of a light snowfall can produce serious anxiety, with panic attacks at the sight of snow.

What follows is the part that separates this from the object phobias. People with the fear may move to a warm climate, or avoid travelling to colder ones, or stay indoors for the whole of a winter where snow is common. The page notes that this can damage relationships and cause financial problems where somebody cannot get to work.

Almost every other entry in this catalogue describes an object a person can arrange not to meet. A lift can be avoided by taking the stairs and a dog by crossing the road. Snow arrives on a whole region for months at a time, so the only complete avoidance available is to live somewhere else, and the cost of the accommodation is measured in a life rather than an inconvenience.

How a newspaper diagnosed its readers

The earliest recorded use of the word is a column in the Bedford County Press of Everett, Pennsylvania, on 1 January 1959. It reads as a symptom checklist:

• does the reader hesitate to step outside when it snows?
• do they insist on keeping off snow-packed highways?
• do they wish they were in Florida every time a flake falls?
• does even a flurry send them into a frenzy?

If so, the column concludes, nobody should call them a fraidy-cat, because they have chionophobia.

The same column supplies a second word and an observation. Snowbirds, it says, have an often-contagious case of cryophobia, the fear of cold, along with chionophobia. A local newspaper offering two Greek names, a symptom list and an aetiology in one paragraph is what the popular circulation of this vocabulary has always looked like, and it was doing it sixty-seven years ago.

The word is still used the same way. A newspaper columnist writing about early snow in November 2021 opens by saying he does not have chionophobia, that he is an avid snowshoer and a snowball flinger of some repute. The term is available to anyone who wants to say they are not afraid.

Why snow and cold are separable

The 1959 column pairs chionophobia with cryophobia and does not distinguish them, and neither do most later accounts. They are separable. Cold is a bodily sensation and can be met indoors and in a wind; snow is a visible material that changes what a landscape looks like and what a road does.

The distinction matters for the same reason it matters everywhere in this catalogue: it decides what exposure would consist of. A person afraid of cold can be exposed in a room. A person afraid of snow can only be exposed in weather that arrives on its own schedule, which makes graded exposure for this fear a matter of waiting for a forecast, the same problem astraphobia has.

What is not recorded

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias gives chionophobia three words: fear of snow. No case has been published, no prevalence measured, and no diagnostic manual carries the term. The Cleveland Clinic treats it as a specific phobia and names exposure therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy as the treatments, which is the standard recommendation for the class rather than a finding about this member of it.