What is monophobia?

Approximately 8% of people have some type of phobia. The most frequent are the fear of dying, the fear of drowning and the fear of being attacked. But have you heard or know what is monophobia? This is a phobia that we need to pay attention to, as it has started to have a significant increase in cases.

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What is monophobia?

As a clinical concept, monophobia is a phobia that, as its name suggests, is characterized by a persistent and excessive fear of being without anyone, just alone. Like other types of phobias, the fear of being alone can cause a variety of physical and psychological symptoms.

Physical and psychological symptoms of monophobia

The way in which monophobic symptoms manifest varies between each individual, but all are linked to signs of intense anxiety that can lead to an anxiety attack or, if more severe, attacks of panic. Some of them are:

• Dizziness or vertigo;
• Shortness of breath and feeling of suffocation;
• Chest pain and tachycardia;
• Sweating and shivering:
• Sickness;
• Inability to separate the real from the unreal;
• Fear of dying and unknown places.

What causes monophobia?

People who were raised in homes marked by a lot of anxiety, tension and worry are often affected by phobias and anxiety. This is due to the fact that people tend to repeat their parents' behaviors over time and experience.

This trauma can also result in witnessing others having difficulty being alone or people avoiding or judging you just because you are single. Sometimes, social pressure to have a partner or regular abandonment can be traumatizing enough to cause this phobia.

In the pandemic, cases increased

We can say that anxiety is one of the main feelings that affect a person when he is faced with a new situation. That way, depending on your personality and life experience, each and every situation can be a different threat.

To make matters worse, with the need for isolation created by the pandemic in 2020, many people began to develop monophobia. Many people started to have crises inside their own homes and the fear of being alone was taking over.