Not Having It: Iowa’s Top 5 Biggest Phobias Are Wildly Specific

If you're easily spooked by random stuff, I wouldn't read on.

Right in time for Halloween, psychologists and Google results are churning out the most common phobias that Iowa residents are searching. Which, as adults can be the moment you decide you have something but you're not sure what it's called.

Merriam-Webster defines a phobia as "an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation".

There are some basic phobias we know: arachnophobia (spiders), claustrophobia (being in smushed spaces), germaphobia (the fear of germs, thanks Covid), and acrophobia (the fear of heights).

There's also the common fears of death, needles, snakes, and my greatest burden: social phobia, the fear of social situations. There's also ones straight out of leftfield, like the fear of peanut butter (not allergy, just terror), fear of belly buttons, fear of the color yellow, or even phobophobia- the fear of phobias.

Honestly some of them are probably merited, like that time in 2016 or so when people dressed as clowns and hid in the woods. That would give you a fear of clowns for the rest of your days.

If you have a specific ick that makes your skin crawl and brain backfire, you're not alone. National Institute of Mental Health says that about 19 million adults in the U.S. have a specific phobia (which is 9.1% of the adult population).

But Iowans have a specific few phobias we're learning more about and dealing with. Scroll down to see the biggest phobias in Iowa!