Some people hate the sight of blood and sometimes faint because of it. It turns out that this most often happens to men! The reasons for this phenomenon can be found in prehistory …

The fear of blood (hemophobia) is an exceptional phobia. Although we are afraid of snakes, spiders, water, heights, open space, all these phobias have a common denominator - they cause enormous stress: the heart begins to pound, muscle strength increases, blood strait rises, etc. These physiological reactions occur in everyone who suffers on specific phobias. This is an important discovery. Some people think that their fear is so great that they will lose consciousness because of it, e.g. during a public speech. It's impossible - fainting from fear happens in movies at best.

Fear cannot make you unconscious

Why? Because it raises your blood pressure, and it must drop significantly to cause you to faint. There is one exception to this rule - the fear of seeing blood (also of drawing blood, seeing wounds, etc.) is called haemophobia.

Hemophobia is the only phobia in which the heart slows down and blood pressure is lowered upon contact with an anxious stimulus (e.g. an injection). A person feels faint, the head starts spinning and faints. For this reason, hemophobia is unique - it is the only phobia that can cause unconsciousness. Why is this the case and why do men faint more often than ladies?

This will be useful to you

Whatever the genesis of blood blackouts, there are effective ways to deal with them. In situations where there is a risk of fainting, blood pressure should be increased by purposefully tightening the muscles - when we clench our fists, tighten our legs, back, abdomen, blood pressure will increase. And then fainting becomes impossible. Anyone who tries it loses their fear of situations in which they might pass out. It means that the fear of seeing blood has decreased!

Women see blood more often and get used to it

It seems men should be more immune to the sight of blood than women. They have a fighting instinct, they take part in wars. After all, women are the "weak sex" and almost all phobias (arachnophobia, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, acrophobia, etc.) affect them more often than men.

Hemophobia is backexception here. How can you make this meaningful? Perhaps this is because women deal with blood more often than men (e.g. during menstruation or childbirth), so they are more used to seeing it.

We know that frequent contact with fearful stimuli causes our anxiety to decrease (provided that this contact does not end in something bad). For example, a child who goes to the first grade and is afraid of his tutor (social anxiety), after some time he will stop being afraid of her (provided, of course, that the tutor does not turn out to be a wicked person).

If someone is afraid of insect stings, but has to work in an apiary, then after a year he will be afraid of insects less. This means that if we want to stop being afraid of something, we have to be with the object of our phobia as often as possible. Are you afraid of the elevator? Agree to ride it up and down for 2 hours and you will come out of it fearlessly. The existence of this effect is confirmed by many studies.

It paid off for men to faint to save their lives

The fact that men are more susceptible to hemophobia can also be explained differently. Well, fainting at the sight of blood may have its origins in genetics. We know, for example, that if one of the parents suffers from fear of blood, the risk that the child will also suffer from it increases greatly.

In the course of evolution, men were more prone to wounds (hunting, fighting). And when you are seriously injured, it "paid off" to pass out. In a horizontal position, the heart beats less, pressure drops, so less blood escapes through the wound and the enemy stops attacking. But we're talking about the cavemen days when no one knew how to use tourniquets or bandage wounds.

Category:

Psychology