There are many types of phobias. You can be afraid of specific or general situations, sensations, meteorological phenomena, places, animals and even certain colors. This is what happens with chrysophobia or the fear of the color orange , a disorder that is as surprising as it is irrational and limiting because we find this color continuously in our day to day life. We tell you more about chrysophobia in our dictionary of phobias .
What is Chrysophobia
Chrysophobia is the fear of the color orange. By extension, sometimes it is also called that way to irrational and inordinate 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 the chromophobia 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 run away, to avoid. And how can you avoid the color orange? Maybe you don’t have anything orange in your house, no decorative object 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 cannot avoid seeing 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 out-of-context and elevated fear is a series of bodily reactions that can lead to a panic attack if you can’t 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 shortness of breath, that tachycardia and that tingling in the limbs are produced at the mere sight of color. What if the urban buses in your city are orange? What if you go through a shop window in which there are many orange things? What if the walls of your office are painted orange?
Causes of chrysophobia
Chromophobia or fear of colors is one of those phobias in which the treatment matters much more than looking for the origin . Usually the cause is found in a traumatic experience from the past. But what harm can a color do? Indeed, it cannot do any harm. But perhaps you received the news of the death of a loved one one day wearing an orange 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 before 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, the most urgent thing is a treatment.
Treatment of chrysophobia
You cannot overcome a phobia without psychological help. Phobic disorders set in motion a series of complex mental mechanisms that only a professional can tackle. How? Generally through cognitive behavioral therapy, a technique that takes time, but has excellent results both in phobic disorders and in anxiety or depression .
Accompanying cognitive behavioral therapy , gradual exposure techniques are usually used so that the person suffering from chrysophobia faces the color orange little by little and verifying that nothing bad happens. And, of course, relaxation techniques are always well received due to the high degree of anxiety that a phobia generates.