You are waiting in a public space and suddenly a person sits next to you. You notice how he has a very strong body odor, you think he hasn’t showered in several days and you find it most unpleasant. This is not a phobia, it is something that happens to everyone, but what if this situation causes you a high degree of anxiety and you have to get out of there right away? It happens that you have bromidrosiphobia, a disorder that we discovered in our dictionary of phobias.
What is bromidrosiphobia?
Bromidrosiphobia is the fear of body odor, sweat, one’s own and that of others. It is convenient to distinguish from the natural rejection that other people’s body odors produce in us or even certain doubts about our own smell, if we have sweated and the smell is noticeable or not. For it to be a phobia, a series of characteristics must occur.
This phobia of body odor must have a component of irrational and excessive fear, with distorted thoughts in which this stimulus (body odor) is considered something dangerous, and with an increase in anxiety so evident as to require avoidance behavior.
Symptoms of bromidrosiphobia
With bromidrosiphobia, all the symptoms of anxiety are experienced. Tachycardia, feeling of suffocation, fear, headache, dizziness and can even lead to a panic attack if you cannot avoid the stimulus or the situation. Imagine that you get on the elevator and your neighbor smells bad, is it an unpleasant moment or do you have real problems to bear it?
With this phobia of body odor, other types of psychic symptoms and also consequences develop. If what you are afraid of is your own body odor, the behaviors to avoid it will be close to obsessive-compulsive disorder, low self-esteem will be the most present characteristic and you will most likely end up at risk of social isolation.
Causes of bromidrosiphobia
But how does a phobia of this type develop? If sweat or bad body odor is natural to produce some rejection, it is not difficult to imagine an anxiety disorder situation in which this and other rejections turn directly into fear and fear.
Although generally phobias find their origin in a traumatic experience. If in childhood you went through an unpleasant moment with a huge emotional charge and you can still remember that the most intense element was a bad body odor, it is possible that bromidrosiphobia develops over time.
Treatment of bromidrosiphobia
Like all phobias, bromidrosiphobia is limiting. More or less and depending on where you live, the climate or the season of the year. It may seem that this phobia can be overcome without great difficulty, but a phobia must be treated as soon as possible because it usually generates other phobias.
Psychological therapy is inevitable in order to overcome the phobia and manage all the emotions it produces. It is also necessary to transform distorted thinking in order to later modify behavior. And at all times, relaxation techniques must be present to reduce the degree of anxiety that all phobias present.