There are many types of phobias. You can be afraid of specific or general situations, sensations, weather phenomena, places, animals, and even certain colors. This is what happens with chrysophobia or fear of the color orange, a disorder that is as surprising as it is irrational and limiting because we continually encounter this color in our day to day. We tell you more about chrysophobia in our dictionary of phobias.
What is chrysophobia?
Chrysophobia is the fear of the color orange. By extension, this is also sometimes called the irrational and excessive fear of gold or golden objects, because gold is also a kind of orange color, right? In any case, it is a color phobia, in this case more specific than chromo phobia that can arise from any color.
Without a doubt, we are facing a conflictive, problematic and limiting disorder that must be treated as soon as possible. Because the most natural reaction to a phobia is to flee, to avoid. And how can you avoid the color orange? Maybe you don’t have anything orange in your house, no decorative objects with that color, maybe you avoid eating oranges and tangerines and surely you don’t have clothes of that color in your closet.
But surely you can’t help but see orange products when you go to the supermarket, a car of this color will cross your path and you may use this orange color a lot in your work because it stimulates creativity and productivity.
Symptoms of chrysophobia
As with all phobias, the symptoms are the same as those of anxiety. After all, what happens with fear taken out of context and raised to a higher level is a series of bodily reactions that can lead to a panic attack if you cannot avoid the stimulus.
And, as we say, avoiding the color orange in your day to day is going to be very complicated. That feeling of dizziness that difficulty breathing that tachycardia and that tingling in the extremities occur at the mere sight of color. What if in your city the urban buses are orange? What if you go through a shop window where there are a lot of orange things? What if the walls of your office are painted orange?
Causes of chrysophobia
Chromo phobia or fear of colors is one of those phobias in which treatment is much more important than finding the origin. Generally the cause is found in a traumatic experience from the past. But what harm can a color do? Indeed, it cannot do any damage. But maybe you received the news of the death of a loved one day wearing an orange T-shirt and since then you have associated that color with a great emotional charge of suffering.
Or perhaps it is an anxiety disorder that causes fear to arise in the face of the most diverse stimuli without any clear or logical explanation. We insist that fear, in the case of phobic disorders, is irrational. Anyway, if you suffer from chrysophobia, what is most urgent is a treatment.
Chrysophobia treatment
You cannot overcome a phobia without psychological help. Phobic disorders trigger a series of complex mental mechanisms that only a professional can stop. As? Generally through cognitive behavioral therapy, a technique that takes time, but which has excellent results in both phobic disorders and anxiety or depression.
Accompanying cognitive behavioral therapy, gradual exposure techniques are usually used so that the person suffering from chrysophobia gradually faces the color orange and checks that nothing bad is happening. And, of course, relaxation techniques are always welcome due to the high degree of anxiety that a phobia generates.