Fear of responsibility is one of the varieties of modern social phobias, scientifically called hypengiophobia. This word comes from the Greek: hypengyon - responsibility and phobos - phobia. Thus, hypengiophobia is an obsessive fear of responsibility, a painful irrational fear of taking on obligations.
The problem of fear of responsibility
The modern world is multivariate and requires the individual to make difficult decisions. People have to take responsibility for their own actions and face the consequences of their choices every day. Many people experience stress as a reaction to the fear of not meeting the expectations of others, missing something and making a mistake.
Panic fear of responsibility causes uncontrollable anxiety and the person becomes hostage to the phobia. Even the simplest tasks seem impossible. Hypengiophobe is afraid of being let down, of not being able to cope, and is slow to make a decision and does not take any action.
What does it represent?
Hipengiophobia, another name for this disorder, is one of the most common phobias.
What person has not felt a chill in the back at the thought that he would have to take risks and take responsibility for some events, work issues, the lives of other people?
And if someone simply has anxiety, they experience anxiety at such a moment, then the phobe may well lose consciousness from horror. So right at the meeting, having learned that he has new tasks, he will simply faint or try to escape.
Human life already involves a lot of responsibilities. Starting from the fact that he needs to be responsible for his health, the quality of every day, relationships with other people, and ending with the choice of clothing, a way to earn money for needs, and so on.
Why you won’t envy a hypengiophobe, he often experiences depression due to unmet needs, and neurosis due to frequent stress.
After all, the nervous system is constantly under tension, which depletes the body and provokes the development of chronic diseases. They are also called psychosomatic.
How to determine the presence of a phobic disorder?
Experts in the field of psychology have established that fear of responsibility is a real disease that has its own manifestations.
Physical symptoms of hypongiophobia:
- quiet voice;
- cardiopalmus;
- inability to concentrate on a task;
- nausea;
- headache;
- inability to clearly formulate thoughts;
- increased sweating.
Psychological manifestations of hypengiophobia:
- a feeling of depression caused by a feeling of pressure from the outside;
- the desire to hide, dissolve, disappear;
- panicked state when thinking about the task;
- the desire to postpone solving problems until later;
- irrational feeling of anxiety.
The carrier of the phobia feels internal discomfort, but cannot even explain to himself why he experiences such a set of sensations. He convinces himself that he is tired, that the demands placed on him exceed his authority, and shifts responsibility to others. If an individual can honestly admit to himself: “I am afraid of responsibility,” then this will be the first step towards solving the problem.
Reasons for fear of liability
Fear of taking on obligations can have several reasons for its development:
Childhood education
If parents often criticized the child for mistakes, severely punished him, compared him with other children, demanded excellent studies, then this attitude is imprinted in the mind for the rest of his life. Parental figures are an indisputable authority for the child, who absorbs any attitudes like a sponge, without subjecting them to critical filtration. Due to age, the child’s psyche does not know how to do this.
An adult grows up, expecting accusations, considering himself guilty of everything in advance. In his head, like a record, an accusing monologue sounds: “You are not worthy, you are incompetent, you are a loser, people like you do not achieve anything in life.” The more a person idealizes his strict parents, the more he feels that he is the subject of the evaluative attitude of others, feeling that he will again “get a bad mark.” A fear of responsibility is formed.
Such a person is convinced that he will not be able to take an adult position associated with obligations. Subconsciously, he identifies himself with a punished child who must obey or run away.
Perfectionism
A person is not satisfied with just decent performance indicators of his work; he needs an ideal result. The individual places high demands on himself, just as his parents did in the past. The desire for ideal is characteristic: a perfectionist believes himself to be obliged to produce an excellent result, ahead of the rest. Any activity is perceived as competition.
If it is not possible to achieve the highest indicator in an activity, then self-esteem begins to tend to zero. At work, an employee rarely identifies refusal to perform job duties with the state of “I’m afraid of responsibility”; he prefers to explain it by the erroneous actions of others or inappropriate working conditions. As a result, a person stops trying to achieve something new and gets stuck in the so-called comfort zone, performing long-familiar actions.
Fear of responsibility causes a stop in development, because an irresponsible person does not live up to his own high expectations. At the same time, he does not agree to accept his fairly good indicators, considering them a failure.
Dependence on other people's opinions
This reason, which causes fear of responsibility, contains doubts about one’s own social status, viewing oneself as an outsider, low self-esteem, and fear of public condemnation. A person prefers to “keep a low profile” once again, avoids taking on obligations, and hides behind the backs of more proactive and active people.
The origins of this dependence should also be sought in childhood, where a person had problems entering social life. For example, if a child, as a schoolchild, experienced difficulties with communication, then in adulthood they can develop into social phobia. Self-help tips for dealing with self-doubt are presented here.
Past bad experience
If a person who is not confident in his abilities once failed to cope with the assigned responsibility, there is a high probability that in the future he will begin to avoid repeating such situations. Especially if failure was followed by punishment, for example, deprivation of a bonus for late submission of reports. A suspicious person develops an attitude about the danger of obligations and a fear of responsibility. An avoidance reaction appears.
Advice from a psychologist ↑
Fear of responsibility is not biologically determined; its basis is in the mental characteristics of the individual.
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Several tips from psychologists will reduce the manifestations of increased anxiety in situations of responsibility:
- Get used to responsibility gradually . Global tasks can be postponed until later or divided into small parts. It’s better to start with single steps and actions (walking the dog, keeping the room clean, etc.), gradually “increasing the load.”
- Use the help of loved ones : it is possible to reduce the amount of responsibility by turning to relatives and friends for help. Their advice or actions will allow us to cope with the task through joint efforts.
- Identify situations that lead to avoidance of responsibility. A more specific set of them will allow you to analyze your fears in more detail.
- Generate motivation to overcome hypongiophobia . It is much more attractive to be a determined and successful person than to avoid even small tasks and decisions.
- Act under any circumstances . It is the performance of behavioral acts that is the initial stage of the fight against fear. Fear will initiate inaction; you should not give in to it under any circumstances.
- Cultivate faith in yourself - even if it seems that a situation of complete hopelessness has arrived, you need to look for a way out and believe that you will definitely find it.
- Forget about the habits of the past : pessimism and depression create the basis for a negative attitude towards everything. But if you have developed a habit of negative assessments, you can create the opposite attitude - optimism and positive approaches to the situation.
- Use self-questioning to work through your fear of responsibility. By asking yourself questions about the occurrence of a phobia and the manifestation of its characteristics, you can get to the bottom of it and avoid a black-and-white attitude towards the situation of responsibility.
It is a person’s desire to be responsible, and not hide behind his own weakness, anxiety and fear, that will create the foundation for overcoming hypongiophobia.
Ways to avoid responsibility
The problem of fear of responsibility is a developed habit, reinforced by repeated repetition. The human psyche shows miracles of ingenuity where it is necessary to change established patterns of behavior. Gravitating toward stability, the psyche resists change. A person unconsciously looks for ways to avoid obligations.
The main methods include:
- Procrastination, or putting off important tasks until later. Instead of doing the main job, a person does secondary things. May get stuck on social networks for a long time or devote hours to online games. The result is often careless performance of the task, accompanied by feelings of guilt.
- Bad habits. Alcohol, smoking, overeating - these methods of escaping reality for a while help get rid of the psychological oppression of obligations. Being destructive in nature, they harm the psyche and physical health of the individual.
- Shifting responsibility. Conventionally, this strategy is called “loser behavior.” The individual justifies his inaction by unfavorable external factors. Blaming other people helps you avoid commitment without feeling guilty.
Help from a psychotherapist
In psychotherapy, special attention is paid to types of social phobias. Hypengiophobia occupies one of the first places among them, since its effects are long-lasting and the consequences are dangerous. Fear of obligations in society and life leads to an imbalance of physiological functions and internal state. A person becomes sluggish, lacking initiative, inhibited, or, on the contrary, fusses a lot. You can't brush the problem aside. When you ignore fear and refuse to fight it, more serious consequences arise.
Social disorder affects the patient's well-being, causing physical health problems. Its consequences may include diseases such as:
- Stomach ulcers.
- Cardiovascular pathologies.
- Somatic diseases.
Uncontrollable fear, along with diseases of internal organs and systems, leads to greater disability of the patient and a serious life crisis.
Psychotherapists advise eliminating hypengiophobia gradually with an increase in the degree of responsibility and importance of tasks. Therapy consists of completing the development of the subject’s personal qualities, changing attitudes towards abilities, and organizing healthy behavior through highly specialized training. Only the physical symptoms of anxiety are treated with medication. Fear remains in the depths of consciousness.
Hypengiophobia is present in almost everyone, no matter who he is: a school student, a university student, an office worker, an unemployed person. The only difference is the level of fear of it. Fear of responsibility, unlike other social phobias, arises without historical reasons and without the influence of external factors. The roots of a variety of social phobia lie, as a rule, in the qualities of a person’s character, subsequently developed by society.
Consequences of hypengiophobia
The result of this behavior is broken obligations, dissatisfaction with management up to and including dismissal, an unsettled personal life, prolonged stress, and psychosomatic illnesses. Sometimes this state is experienced by top managers of successful companies, realizing that they are responsible for the financial well-being of the entire company.
Regularly postponing decisions and sitting in a corner, a person tries to reduce the likelihood of errors, but in reality he methodically destroys his life. Problems with your personal life, difficulties in building a career, loss of respect from colleagues and acquaintances - this is an incomplete list of the destructive consequences of such a life strategy.
By the way! Psychobiological scientists from Harvard University (USA) discovered that sensitivity to stress is influenced by hereditary factors. About 20% of infants are born with neurochemical characteristics of the psyche, which in adulthood will contribute to the development of hypongiophobia. Such people experience hyper-reactivity in the part of the brain that is responsible for fear.
