When it comes to anxiety disorders, such as monophobia, the effects the disorder can have on a person’s everyday life are crippling. What starts out as an eccentric trait can quickly develop into a serious condition that influences almost every aspect of a person’s life. In the case of monophobia, the fear of being alone, this can lead to lonely behaviors, panic attacks, and cause a person’s social, emotional, and mental well-being to collapse around them.
When you see stories on the news or on TV about these disorders, it’s always about the latest treatments or expensive programs that are guaranteed to succeed. Of course, these come at a substantial monetary cost and can often involve flying to the other side of the world. Worst of all, almost none of these programs are guaranteed to cure your anxiety. Few even guarantee that your symptoms will improve.
What these programs don’t tell you is that many of the most powerful methods available for managing your anxiety and its symptoms are within you. With a little work and patience, it is quite possible to control and significantly reduce your symptoms using proven methods such as deep breathing, desensitization, and meditation. While professional assistance may be required for extreme cases or as occasional assistance throughout your healing process, you can create lasting results on your own. If you feel unable to handle the process on your own, there is nothing wrong with seeking professional help.
The key to this is to find the root of your monophobia or anxiety problem. Most phobias are based on a traumatic life experience. More often than not, this is an event that occurred during your childhood. Common causes of monophobia include the death of a parent at a young age and abandonment. Once you know what’s causing your anxiety, you can start working to reduce your symptoms.
For many monophobia sufferers, the best results come from exposure therapy. This is a method of therapy that involves exposing yourself to your anxiety triggers and then staying in the situation for as long as possible. You can start by simply having the person comforting you leave the room. When it becomes too much to bear, ask them to come back. Each time you repeat this, try to add a few minutes to your time. This provides an easy to track way of monitoring your progress. Before you know it, you’ll be able to go long periods of time without anxiety. Eventually, the problem may even be permanently resolved.