December 5, 2017 • 29 mins
No one - no one - likes to vomit, but there are some people who would prefer to die rather than vomit, people who spend their days worrying they will vomit at any moment and become so obsessed they curtail their lives to prevent it from happening.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles b Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. This
is Stuff you Should Know, very special surprisingly sad edition.
(00:23):
Oh yeah, I think so. Yeah, of course it's sad.
It's really gross. It is gross. I'm gonna have a
hard time getting through this one, so we should give
everybody fair warning. We are talking about a metaphobia, which
is a specific phobia, a fear of throwing up. And
(00:43):
we'll get way more into um all of that and
what it means, but we're talking about vomiting. It's basically
tied for first as the subject of this episode. So
we're gonna be talking about vomiting a lot. And I
found from researching this reading and I imagine hearing about
(01:05):
vomiting for a good thirty minute forty minute stretch, it
can make one queasy. So just fair warning. I don't
think it's actually going to make you queasy, but it's
possible if it starts to happen, just plow through it.
To just say, Josh and Chuck would want me to
plow through it, and your queaziness will magically go away.
(01:27):
Oh yeah, all right. Uh So, like you said, it
is a specific phobia and it is actually listed in
the d s M. Now, I'm not sure how long
it's been in there, but it is, well a meta phobia, isn't. Well,
I thought the specific phobia vomiting. Now, I guess I
think specific phobias are. I don't. I don't know if
(01:49):
it's if it's a specifically listed chuck. So when this
says it is a specific phobia a current according to
the d s M, what does that mean? I think
it means that it falls under the umbrella of a
specific phobia. Okay, you see what I mean. Not really,
but that's okay. Um. This means, well, you're afraid you
(02:11):
might vomit. You're afraid someone else might vomit around you. Um,
you're afraid what people will think of you if you
do vomit. Yeah. It's just uh, and it's not this
article where'd you get this stuff? Anyway? Was just sort
of cobbled. It was cobbled together from some pretty good sources,
including Psychology Today, the American Association of Anxiety Disorders UM,
(02:34):
the National Institutes of Health Library, the BBC Vice and
I want to give a shout out to the listener
who wrote in to share her a metaphobia story. I
had never heard of it before, and she had a
very harrowing experience and overcame it just through sheer grit
and willpower, um, and came through the other side of
(02:57):
this very serious phobia. Yeah, which you know, we'll to
the how to do that later. But um, these articles
and make great pains to point out that it is. Uh.
I think all people think it's gross and are very
much repulsed and turned off by the sound or the
smell or the look or anything that deals with somebody
(03:18):
getting sick like this. Um. But this is different than that.
This is a debilitating fear that can overtake your life. Yeah,
that would specifically be a metaphobia. There's actually it seems
like a spectrum where you can also suffer from what's
called fear of vomiting, which is much less um overwhelming,
(03:40):
but still you're preoccupied with the idea of vomiting. With
the metaphobia, your life does not resemble what your life
would be if you if you weren't afraid. Yeah, it's
a it's a real impairment to your life in a
lot of different ways, which will go over It seems
like there's not a lot of study about it. I
(04:02):
mean I ran across a few studies, but even in
the studies I found, they specifically say not a lot
of studies about us. So a lot of the guests
is about the prevalence are guesses. But um, one thing
I saw was that UM in the general population eight
point eight percent. I think that's actually fear of vomiting.
I think a metaphobia is more like less than one
(04:23):
percent of the population has actual a metaphobia, but that
it tends to be UM about four to one ratio
of women to men. Women suffer from it. They have
a tendency to suffer from it more. Yeah, and I
certainly do not have it. But um, like I said,
like almost everyone in the world probably it is a
trigger for most folks. Yeah, nobody wants to throw up.
(04:47):
But if you have a metaphobia, just seeing the title
of this come through your podcast feed could have set
off an anxiety attack. And like I feel very guilty
about that. There nothing we could do because even if
we warned everybody in the episode before this that this
was coming that would set off a panic attack. Just
the mere mention of the word vomit can can set
(05:10):
the the anxiety disorder into UM full gear. Yeah. This
one article you sent. One of the clinicians they interviewed UM,
who treats anxiety disorder, said it is, in her practice,
the most common fear among children that they see. Yeah. Uh,
And that's typically how it starts. So it's a chronic disease,
meaning that if you don't treat this, it's going to
(05:32):
persist basically every day of your life, and it tends
to get worse over time. UM. And it usually starts
with a traumatic experience of vomiting, most frequently of all
in childhood, So it's it's more common I think, among kids,
but it can survive into adulthood and it can start
(05:52):
in adults. But what seems to happen is you have
a traumatic experience from vomiting, and just like with any
other true attic experience, whether it's surviving UM, a violent
crime or being in war, UM, vomiting can have that
same effect on the brain apparently, and you developed something
(06:13):
pretty closely akin to PTSD at the thought of vomiting,
and it overwhelmed the life as a result. I had
a traumatic experience with this when I was a kid. Um.
I might have told the story before for another reason,
but um, I was on the bus going to elementary
school and there was a scary kid. Remember an elementary school.
(06:35):
They were just the scary kids. I remember my scary
kids first and last name. Yeah, right, And they're scary
for various reasons, whether they were bullies or I mean,
you could probably diagnose something that was wrong as an adult,
but as a kid, they were just scary kids. And
I'm not talking about like I mean, I'm talking about
(06:56):
like sociopathic behavior, not something that you know, like some
They weren't, yeah, exactly. They had like real issues that
were affecting other people around exactly. So this one kid,
I remember his name was Tony something, but he on
the way to school one day would or many days,
he would make himself throw up outside of the uh
(07:19):
with his face out of the window, and it would,
you know, the school bus was going down the road
and it would fly down and land on the windows
all the way down and other windows, and he would
make himself vomit, and it just it's scared the crap
out of me. Man, and it wasn't like I was
scared scared, scared scared of this dude. Yeah, well that's
(07:42):
really bizarre, yeah behavior, especially if he was doing it
to like intimidate, to freak other people out. Yeah, and
I think I might remember a story because it's you
know how sometimes a certain event can tie something else
in your brain. You know. My dad was my elementary
school principal. I don't know why I was riding the
bus because he usually just went to work with him.
He wanted to normalize things maybe, but um, I ran
(08:05):
to my dad's office right when I got to school crying.
He wasn't in there, and the secretary, Dot Jones let
me in the office, and Dot let me stay in
his office because I was sad. And he had one
of those big um cabinet stereos record so the stereo
was already on. But the song that was on, weirdly
(08:28):
was the BGS How Deep Is Your Love? And to
this day I hear that song and it makes me
want to cry. Yeah, it's just a trigger from that
day with that guy, you know what, and that weird
that's a sad story because that's a good song. I know,
it makes me want to weep. It makes me want
to thinking about Tony making himself throw up, And I
(08:49):
always wonder what happened that guy. He's in Jim Rose's
side show right now. Maybe is that still around. I
don't know, Puky Tony, but yeah that was him, Yukiitonian,
hippie robber and like a little jug band together. But anyway,
that's a long way of saying that that was not enough.
Even the traumatize me to the point where I have
(09:10):
a metaphobia. No, but I mean it could have been.
It just it seems to be like and it's not
even necessarily like a type of person or um. It's
it's the brain can just the synapsies can fuse in
a certain way, and all of a sudden you have
this phobia. And the problem is this is it starts
(09:32):
from a traumatic experience. So let's say that that had
had this impact on your chuck, right, what would have
come next if you were on the road to a
metaphobia would have been to um, start to fear throwing up,
seeing somebody throw up, probably is how it would have started.
And then that would have spread to throwing up yourself,
and then you would have become hyper vigilant. You would
(09:53):
you would want to protect yourself from seeing somebody throw
up or from throwing up. Well, how do you do that?
To prevent yourself from throwing up? You're gonna monitor every
single weird feeling you have to say it would mind
about to throw up, I need to like tamp this down,
or I can't eat that food it might make me
throw up. Or I can't read in the car, it
(10:13):
might make me car sick and I'll throw up, Or
that person looks kind of sick. I'm going to avoid them,
and then let's just take it a little further and
avoid everybody altogether, because anybody could really throw up at
any given time. And you start to become preoccupied with this,
and you adjust your life and alter it, and then
you're constantly worried about throwing up. And once that happens,
(10:38):
it's the phobia is complete. Your life has changed, you're
constantly worried about it. And then the cherry on top
of the whole thing is that when you finally are
confronted with the word vomit actually seeing somebody something like that,
you enter a panic attack, an actual panic attack, and um,
the only way to overcome that is to get away,
(10:59):
to run, to get out of there, to um, I'm
not sure all the ways you can handle a panic attack,
but then it calms down and your anxiety returns to
normal levels, which is to say hi for the average person. Yeah.
So in my case an elementary school, how that could
have gone was, um, I had another ride to school.
(11:20):
But if I hadn't, I might have stopped taking the
school bus and started skipping class and not going to
school at all because I was afraid to get on
the school bus because of puky tony and gone weeks
in a row. And then my parents get a call saying,
Chuck hasn't been in school for weeks, what's going on?
And that's exactly what's going on. Like it can get
that severe, and it all boils down to the at
(11:44):
least in most cases, the anticipation of this more so
than the actual act in every case, because the the
people that are struck with this, by all accounts, are
less vomitous than the general population, so much so because
they've tried to avoid it, so much so that this
one article said that most of these people can even
(12:06):
name like the three or four times in their life
they have ever puked and what they ate that day,
and what they had on television and what they wore,
because it stands out that singularly to them. And then
so that's horribly ironic that the people who are the
most worried about throwing up are the people who are actually,
statistically speaking, at least likely to throw up. Right. Um,
(12:28):
But there's an even greater irony to the whole thing,
and we'll talk about that after this break. How about
that it's a chuck where you're on the irony train
(12:56):
and I want to keep going. Okay, Yes, the the
irony of paying attention and being hyper vigilant about vomiting,
especially when you are, um, worried that you're going to vomit,
because again, there there's a number of things that you're
you're worried about. You're going to be worried that you
won't be able to find a bathroom in time to
(13:18):
go throw up. You're worried about throwing up in front
of other people, um, and embarrassing yourself for being teased
for throwing up. Um. You're worried about just the experience
of throwing up, this horrible experience. But once you start
to get a metaphobia, you you lose perspective completely, Like
(13:39):
it becomes like I've seen multiple they call them a metaphobes,
people with a metaphobia. I have seen multiple people say
you would prefer to die than to throw up. That's
how much they fear throwing up, and the rest of
us it's like, God, that would suck to throw up,
but I know I'll be fine on the other end
of it, not to a person with a metaphobia. So
(14:00):
the irony of all this is the more you start
to focus on this and you start to uh think
about every gurgle in your stomach or every weird twist
or turn um, it actually produces more anxiety. And here's
the ironic part. Anxiety can actually make you queasy when
you're thinking about throwing up, that's right, So it makes
(14:23):
the whole thing worse and it becomes this vicious cycle. Yeah,
and they recommend trying to tell yourself, like, I might
feel queasy, but I'm not going to throw up. My
anxiety might be making me feel nauseous, but I am
not going to throw up. Yeah, Because there's a confusion
of queasiness equals nausea equals throwing up and that's just
not the case. Like, you can make yourself sick with anxiety,
(14:46):
but you can't make yourself throw up from being anxious,
so the whole thing is just wasted. Worry. Yeah, some
of the other things you might do because of the spear.
You might not shake hands with anyone ever again you Well,
I think a lot of people avoid looking at television
puke scenes. Yeah, you cannot watch. You really can't watch
(15:08):
those at all. You can't watch Stand by Me or
The Meaning of Life. Those are so funny looking though,
but still probably not. Uh. You might throw away food
in your fridge that uh is not even past this
expiration date. You might have a trigger there. Um. You
might overcook your food on purpose, and then before you
(15:30):
eat it, you will lift the bread a bunch of
times called checking behavior. Sure. Um, you might not eat
on vacation as readily because you only trust your trusted
food sources. You might go into a place and like
you know, when some people go into a music venue,
like they check for the exits, like you're checking for
the bathrooms. You you may not even make it to
(15:53):
the music venue. You A lot of them. A lot
of people with the metaphobia end up being agoraphobic and
just don't leave their house really developing it's it's often
confused for agaphobia by by UM counselors. Yeah, shrinks, I've
got another one, all right. Apparently a lot of people
who have a metaphobia walk around with a plastic bag
(16:13):
on them at all times, something to throw up into,
an emergency throw up bag. They walk around with this
because they're so afraid of throwing up that they never
need to use because they probably don't ever throw up,
I know. And some of them will actually carry a
change of clothes around with them as well, for the
same reason. If they throw up on themselves, they can
change their clothes. Yeah, And of course, air travel, drinking
(16:36):
alcohol um, any of those things are, or car travel
even like any kind of travel is probably avoided. Definitely
don't booze it up or Yeah, they probably don't drink
at all, and subsist on things like pasta and bananas
and very very safe um digestively speaking foods, although banana
(16:58):
could gag you. Yeah, you know, God, that would be
a nightmare if you had a metaphobia. I wonder if
they mash them up and eat it like like mashed
up with a fork. Maybe maybe you could see it. Yeah,
and I could see cutting your food up into you know,
the tiniest pieces, because you feel if you're choking. And
that's one of the fears too. I don't think we
(17:19):
mentioned like they're not just afraid of the vomiting, but
they sometimes can fear choking on vomit and dying and
affixiating and or going to the hospital or starting to
vomit and the vomiting never ending. That's another fear of
a metaphobia. One other thing that I saw people do,
um is prevent getting pregnant because of a fear of
(17:41):
mourning sickness. Um. So yeah, so your life is is
altered and curtailed because you're afraid of vomiting. Everywhere you
look there's some potential trigger out there. So it just
be easier to stay home and eat your pasta and
not watch movies basically, and it just lie there and
(18:01):
monitor your stomach for signs that you're about to throw up.
That's what they do. That's what you do when you
have a metaphobia. That's your life. It's no way to live. So,
like this is not all just academic and stuff. We're
grasping at shows and pulling together from different cases like
this is. There's actually a case study we found, UM
that was of an eight year old girl who had
(18:24):
a terrible experience throwing up and really kind of encapsulates
the experience of a metaphobia. She had full blown to metaphobia.
She had appendicitis and had been throwing up before the
doctors figured out she had a pendicitis and had her
appendix removed. And that experience throwing up was um while
(18:44):
it triggered a metaphobia in her. She when she came
to and Um was recovering from her surgery, about ten
days later, she started getting really worried she was going
to start throwing up like that again. Yeah. It was
a really sad case and uh pretty much covered everything
we've said and and even then some to the point
where her father traveled for business and she didn't want
(19:06):
him to travel anymore. Her father to travel anymore for
fear that he would uh get some sickness and then
bring it back to the house. Uh, I mean that's
pretty extensive, you know. Yeah, Like she didn't want to
eat herself. She she didn't want to eat any outside food.
She had her safe food, but she also didn't want
her parents to eat any outside food either because she
(19:27):
didn't want them throwing up. She stopped um playing with
other kids because she was worried about throwing up in
front of him and being teased. That was her big thing.
Um And as as one of the clinicians who we
came across in this research said, it's not the vomiting
that's really the problem, Like that's the focus, that's the obsession,
(19:48):
But the real problem is the worry, the constant worry.
It's the worry that's altering your life, and it altered
this little girl's life, you know, very sad. So let's
let's take another break and then we'll come back and
put a silver lining on this thing and talk about treatment.
(20:26):
All right, So we've talked a lot on the show
over the years about CBT cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure
and response prevention e r P, basically exposure therapy, and
this is definitely probably the way to go when it
comes to a metaphobia. So depending on who you go see,
(20:47):
you might undergo various kinds of treatments, ranging from starting
out by literally saying the words vomit out loud or
throw up or puke or just all the words um,
because that's literally the first step sometimes into getting over
this is just being able to speak the word yeah.
(21:08):
And you may have to start out by writing it
down first before you can say it out loud for real.
And so once you move past that, um. The the
therapies range from um, they're kind of all over the board,
from looking at fake vomit that your therapist has made
in a toilet. Yeah, now you're starting to move into
exposure therapy, right, Yeah, I mean this is all of
(21:30):
this stuff, uh E r P and CBT, but um,
you know, they'll make up some fake vomit, put it
in the toilet, make you go look at it. They themselves,
the therapists might make the noises in front of you,
just out of nowhere. Well I imagine they probably prep
them or maybe not. Uh may may go in the
bathroom and jump up and say I gotta go get sick.
(21:51):
And all of this is just exposing this patient over
and over to the point where they can handle hearing
the sound, seeing the thing, saying the word. Hearing the
smell is another one too. One of the recommendations for
exposure therapy is you make your own throw up, like
in the toilet, a little bit of um, cold soup
(22:11):
something like that, maybe mixed in some oatmeal with it,
and then pour a little vinegar in there to like
make it pungent, and sit around and think about that
being vomit. Maybe try to make the sound of throwing
up yourself, um, try to make yourself gag and and
all this is to show you, when you have a
metaphobia that this is, first of all, it's manageable. That's
(22:34):
the first part. Is what you're trying to do is
get to this point without having a panic attack. But
then also um that if you gag, it doesn't mean
you're automatically going to throw up. And if you do
throw up, it doesn't mean you're never going to stop
throwing up, or that everyone's going to ridicule you for
throwing up. And and that's you know, the point of
(22:54):
any cognitive behavioral therapy is just kind of change your
perspective and give you a more realistic view of the
thing you're worried about. Um. There's also a website called
rate my Vomit. Have you heard of it? Yeah? I
wouldn't get to mention that, But go ahead, you have
heard of it before, No, no, no, I read about it,
but I just it just sounds like, I mean, that's
like classic internet stuff, right, Somebody's like, oh, let's put
(23:16):
pictures of throw up on there, and you guys tell
me how gross it is. Well, it's actually used by
people with a metaphobia too, as exposure therapy at home
to just go look at this stuff and see it.
There's also videos of people throwing up. There's a lot
of stuff the internet like unintentionally is this great place
(23:37):
for people with a metaphobia to go get over their fears?
And I'm sure, like if you have a fear of snakes,
it's good for that too, But so is like a
time life book. You're not gonna find a time life
book that's nothing but pictures of vomit. You're gonna find
it on the internet, Yes you will. That's not in
the Old West series. And then I found this other
(23:58):
um to other type of therapy Chuck called eye movement
desensitization and reprocessing e m d R, and it's used
for post traumatic stress disorder. And it's the most bizarre
treatment I've ever heard of in my life. But apparently
it really really works. Are you ready for this? So
(24:19):
say I was your therapist and you were you have PTSD, uh,
and it's been used to treat a metaphobia a couple
of times. But you're talking about the thing that gave
you PTSD. You're focusing on the worst aspect of this
traumatic experience, and you're talking about it out loud. But
while you're doing it, I'm moving my finger back and
(24:41):
forth and up and down and maybe in a slow circle,
and I've instructed you to follow my finger wherever I
move it while you're recounting this horrible traumatic experience. Supposedly
just doing this over multiple sessions, but sometimes just in
one long session, PTSD can be treated. And the way
(25:03):
that this they think this happens, if it actually does work,
it just sounds like such, just like totally made up
that in fifty years are going to be like they
actually thought this worked. But if it does work, they
think that it works because it it taxes your working
memory to follow the finger, and your recall then is
(25:25):
not aided fully by your working memory, So the vividness
of this horrible memory isn't as as robust as it
would be if your full working memory. Was was working
on it, and so it when it when you reprocess it,
when you file it away again, this memory it's lost
its luster, it's lost a lot of its um bite
(25:47):
because you've gotten it out there and reprocessed it in
a way that's not nearly as traumatic because you're working
memory was being used in part to follow your therapist finger.
Supposedly it works, Yeah, and that nuts it's pretty neat. Yeah,
I think so too. I wonder if it really does work.
You should try it. Anybody, anyone who has ever undergone
(26:10):
eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. I would love to hear
your story if it actually helped you or not. And
if you have a metaphobia, godspeed, We hope you get
well soon. And to take this on or any phobia
really has so much courage and grit that just taking
(26:30):
a first step towards treatment, My hat is off to
you for life. Yes, and chances argued probably didn't even
listen to this episode. Yeah, but if you have a
different phobia, yeah, you know, any phobia. Uh And since
I said phobia a couple of times, that means it's
time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this our second
p s A in as many weeks. If this releases
(26:54):
the same week, okay, but this one's about dogs. It's
very sad. Hey, guys, take a while to write this
because it's been very difficult to talk about your animal lovers.
Oh so, probably a good majority of your listeners are,
and I thought sharing our tragic story would help prevent
others from experiencing the same thing. We lost our our
(27:14):
dog River about two months ago because I left the
bag up chips out. We were at work while she
got her head stuck in the bag, and we came
home to find our dogs stiff and lifeless from suffocation.
We've always been careful about plastic bags and stuff like
that and kept them stored away for recycling, but never
occurred to us said a chips bag on the counter
(27:35):
would something would need to be concerned about. No one
ever would ever think about that. Everyone we've also told
said it was something they never thought about either. So
now we keep all of our bag foods in the
cupboard and cut the bottoms off of anything that goes
into the recycling and waist pins. It's a good idea too.
I started doing that since these guys wrote it in. Yeah,
(27:56):
we were and still are extremely heartbroken. I hope no
one else will have to go through experience. Um, it
was the worst and if I can help save just
one other dog's life, it's been worthwhile. So thanks for
being you guys. Thanks for being you guys. There's a comment,
there's not, but I think that's how I'm supposed to
read it. I hope you make it into your next
(28:16):
Seattle show. That's Jackie W from Seattle. Jackie, thank you
for writing in. I'm so sorry about River. Um, but
I hope you guys are doing okay. Yeah, that sounds
like a guest list. Yeah, I agreed action to me. Yeah,
right back in and uh we'll guest Yeah, we're coming
in January. So yes, so just right back in. We'll
(28:39):
throw you on there. And she sent a picture of River,
beautiful dog, very very sad, River look very sweet. Um,
if you have a p s A that happened to
you that you think we should share to warn everybody
else about, we want to do that. UM. You can
tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. I
met Josh ump Clark. You can also check out my website.
(28:59):
Are you see is clark dot com Chuck's on Facebook
at Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's the official Stuff
you Should Know Facebook. Two. You can send all of
us and Jerry an email to Stuff Podcast at how
stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at
our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
(29:20):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
that how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles b Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there. This
is Stuff you Should Know, very special surprisingly sad edition.
(00:23):
Oh yeah, I think so. Yeah, of course it's sad.
It's really gross. It is gross. I'm gonna have a
hard time getting through this one, so we should give
everybody fair warning. We are talking about a metaphobia, which
is a specific phobia, a fear of throwing up. And
(00:43):
we'll get way more into um all of that and
what it means, but we're talking about vomiting. It's basically
tied for first as the subject of this episode. So
we're gonna be talking about vomiting a lot. And I
found from researching this reading and I imagine hearing about
(01:05):
vomiting for a good thirty minute forty minute stretch, it
can make one queasy. So just fair warning. I don't
think it's actually going to make you queasy, but it's
possible if it starts to happen, just plow through it.
To just say, Josh and Chuck would want me to
plow through it, and your queaziness will magically go away.
(01:27):
Oh yeah, all right. Uh So, like you said, it
is a specific phobia and it is actually listed in
the d s M. Now, I'm not sure how long
it's been in there, but it is, well a meta phobia, isn't. Well,
I thought the specific phobia vomiting. Now, I guess I
think specific phobias are. I don't. I don't know if
(01:49):
it's if it's a specifically listed chuck. So when this
says it is a specific phobia a current according to
the d s M, what does that mean? I think
it means that it falls under the umbrella of a
specific phobia. Okay, you see what I mean. Not really,
but that's okay. Um. This means, well, you're afraid you
(02:11):
might vomit. You're afraid someone else might vomit around you. Um,
you're afraid what people will think of you if you
do vomit. Yeah. It's just uh, and it's not this
article where'd you get this stuff? Anyway? Was just sort
of cobbled. It was cobbled together from some pretty good sources,
including Psychology Today, the American Association of Anxiety Disorders UM,
(02:34):
the National Institutes of Health Library, the BBC Vice and
I want to give a shout out to the listener
who wrote in to share her a metaphobia story. I
had never heard of it before, and she had a
very harrowing experience and overcame it just through sheer grit
and willpower, um, and came through the other side of
(02:57):
this very serious phobia. Yeah, which you know, we'll to
the how to do that later. But um, these articles
and make great pains to point out that it is. Uh.
I think all people think it's gross and are very
much repulsed and turned off by the sound or the
smell or the look or anything that deals with somebody
(03:18):
getting sick like this. Um. But this is different than that.
This is a debilitating fear that can overtake your life. Yeah,
that would specifically be a metaphobia. There's actually it seems
like a spectrum where you can also suffer from what's
called fear of vomiting, which is much less um overwhelming,
(03:40):
but still you're preoccupied with the idea of vomiting. With
the metaphobia, your life does not resemble what your life
would be if you if you weren't afraid. Yeah, it's
a it's a real impairment to your life in a
lot of different ways, which will go over It seems
like there's not a lot of study about it. I
(04:02):
mean I ran across a few studies, but even in
the studies I found, they specifically say not a lot
of studies about us. So a lot of the guests
is about the prevalence are guesses. But um, one thing
I saw was that UM in the general population eight
point eight percent. I think that's actually fear of vomiting.
I think a metaphobia is more like less than one
(04:23):
percent of the population has actual a metaphobia, but that
it tends to be UM about four to one ratio
of women to men. Women suffer from it. They have
a tendency to suffer from it more. Yeah, and I
certainly do not have it. But um, like I said,
like almost everyone in the world probably it is a
trigger for most folks. Yeah, nobody wants to throw up.
(04:47):
But if you have a metaphobia, just seeing the title
of this come through your podcast feed could have set
off an anxiety attack. And like I feel very guilty
about that. There nothing we could do because even if
we warned everybody in the episode before this that this
was coming that would set off a panic attack. Just
the mere mention of the word vomit can can set
(05:10):
the the anxiety disorder into UM full gear. Yeah. This
one article you sent. One of the clinicians they interviewed UM,
who treats anxiety disorder, said it is, in her practice,
the most common fear among children that they see. Yeah. Uh,
And that's typically how it starts. So it's a chronic disease,
meaning that if you don't treat this, it's going to
(05:32):
persist basically every day of your life, and it tends
to get worse over time. UM. And it usually starts
with a traumatic experience of vomiting, most frequently of all
in childhood, So it's it's more common I think, among kids,
but it can survive into adulthood and it can start
(05:52):
in adults. But what seems to happen is you have
a traumatic experience from vomiting, and just like with any
other true attic experience, whether it's surviving UM, a violent
crime or being in war, UM, vomiting can have that
same effect on the brain apparently, and you developed something
(06:13):
pretty closely akin to PTSD at the thought of vomiting,
and it overwhelmed the life as a result. I had
a traumatic experience with this when I was a kid. Um.
I might have told the story before for another reason,
but um, I was on the bus going to elementary
school and there was a scary kid. Remember an elementary school.
(06:35):
They were just the scary kids. I remember my scary
kids first and last name. Yeah, right, And they're scary
for various reasons, whether they were bullies or I mean,
you could probably diagnose something that was wrong as an adult,
but as a kid, they were just scary kids. And
I'm not talking about like I mean, I'm talking about
(06:56):
like sociopathic behavior, not something that you know, like some
They weren't, yeah, exactly. They had like real issues that
were affecting other people around exactly. So this one kid,
I remember his name was Tony something, but he on
the way to school one day would or many days,
he would make himself throw up outside of the uh
(07:19):
with his face out of the window, and it would,
you know, the school bus was going down the road
and it would fly down and land on the windows
all the way down and other windows, and he would
make himself vomit, and it just it's scared the crap
out of me. Man, and it wasn't like I was
scared scared, scared scared of this dude. Yeah, well that's
(07:42):
really bizarre, yeah behavior, especially if he was doing it
to like intimidate, to freak other people out. Yeah, and
I think I might remember a story because it's you
know how sometimes a certain event can tie something else
in your brain. You know. My dad was my elementary
school principal. I don't know why I was riding the
bus because he usually just went to work with him.
He wanted to normalize things maybe, but um, I ran
(08:05):
to my dad's office right when I got to school crying.
He wasn't in there, and the secretary, Dot Jones let
me in the office, and Dot let me stay in
his office because I was sad. And he had one
of those big um cabinet stereos record so the stereo
was already on. But the song that was on, weirdly
(08:28):
was the BGS How Deep Is Your Love? And to
this day I hear that song and it makes me
want to cry. Yeah, it's just a trigger from that
day with that guy, you know what, and that weird
that's a sad story because that's a good song. I know,
it makes me want to weep. It makes me want
to thinking about Tony making himself throw up, And I
(08:49):
always wonder what happened that guy. He's in Jim Rose's
side show right now. Maybe is that still around. I
don't know, Puky Tony, but yeah that was him, Yukiitonian,
hippie robber and like a little jug band together. But anyway,
that's a long way of saying that that was not enough.
Even the traumatize me to the point where I have
(09:10):
a metaphobia. No, but I mean it could have been.
It just it seems to be like and it's not
even necessarily like a type of person or um. It's
it's the brain can just the synapsies can fuse in
a certain way, and all of a sudden you have
this phobia. And the problem is this is it starts
(09:32):
from a traumatic experience. So let's say that that had
had this impact on your chuck, right, what would have
come next if you were on the road to a
metaphobia would have been to um, start to fear throwing up,
seeing somebody throw up, probably is how it would have started.
And then that would have spread to throwing up yourself,
and then you would have become hyper vigilant. You would
(09:53):
you would want to protect yourself from seeing somebody throw
up or from throwing up. Well, how do you do that?
To prevent yourself from throwing up? You're gonna monitor every
single weird feeling you have to say it would mind
about to throw up, I need to like tamp this down,
or I can't eat that food it might make me
throw up. Or I can't read in the car, it
(10:13):
might make me car sick and I'll throw up, Or
that person looks kind of sick. I'm going to avoid them,
and then let's just take it a little further and
avoid everybody altogether, because anybody could really throw up at
any given time. And you start to become preoccupied with this,
and you adjust your life and alter it, and then
you're constantly worried about throwing up. And once that happens,
(10:38):
it's the phobia is complete. Your life has changed, you're
constantly worried about it. And then the cherry on top
of the whole thing is that when you finally are
confronted with the word vomit actually seeing somebody something like that,
you enter a panic attack, an actual panic attack, and um,
the only way to overcome that is to get away,
(10:59):
to run, to get out of there, to um, I'm
not sure all the ways you can handle a panic attack,
but then it calms down and your anxiety returns to
normal levels, which is to say hi for the average person. Yeah.
So in my case an elementary school, how that could
have gone was, um, I had another ride to school.
(11:20):
But if I hadn't, I might have stopped taking the
school bus and started skipping class and not going to
school at all because I was afraid to get on
the school bus because of puky tony and gone weeks
in a row. And then my parents get a call saying,
Chuck hasn't been in school for weeks, what's going on?
And that's exactly what's going on. Like it can get
that severe, and it all boils down to the at
(11:44):
least in most cases, the anticipation of this more so
than the actual act in every case, because the the
people that are struck with this, by all accounts, are
less vomitous than the general population, so much so because
they've tried to avoid it, so much so that this
one article said that most of these people can even
(12:06):
name like the three or four times in their life
they have ever puked and what they ate that day,
and what they had on television and what they wore,
because it stands out that singularly to them. And then
so that's horribly ironic that the people who are the
most worried about throwing up are the people who are actually,
statistically speaking, at least likely to throw up. Right. Um,
(12:28):
But there's an even greater irony to the whole thing,
and we'll talk about that after this break. How about
that it's a chuck where you're on the irony train
(12:56):
and I want to keep going. Okay, Yes, the the
irony of paying attention and being hyper vigilant about vomiting,
especially when you are, um, worried that you're going to vomit,
because again, there there's a number of things that you're
you're worried about. You're going to be worried that you
won't be able to find a bathroom in time to
(13:18):
go throw up. You're worried about throwing up in front
of other people, um, and embarrassing yourself for being teased
for throwing up. Um. You're worried about just the experience
of throwing up, this horrible experience. But once you start
to get a metaphobia, you you lose perspective completely, Like
(13:39):
it becomes like I've seen multiple they call them a metaphobes,
people with a metaphobia. I have seen multiple people say
you would prefer to die than to throw up. That's
how much they fear throwing up, and the rest of
us it's like, God, that would suck to throw up,
but I know I'll be fine on the other end
of it, not to a person with a metaphobia. So
(14:00):
the irony of all this is the more you start
to focus on this and you start to uh think
about every gurgle in your stomach or every weird twist
or turn um, it actually produces more anxiety. And here's
the ironic part. Anxiety can actually make you queasy when
you're thinking about throwing up, that's right, So it makes
(14:23):
the whole thing worse and it becomes this vicious cycle. Yeah,
and they recommend trying to tell yourself, like, I might
feel queasy, but I'm not going to throw up. My
anxiety might be making me feel nauseous, but I am
not going to throw up. Yeah, Because there's a confusion
of queasiness equals nausea equals throwing up and that's just
not the case. Like, you can make yourself sick with anxiety,
(14:46):
but you can't make yourself throw up from being anxious,
so the whole thing is just wasted. Worry. Yeah, some
of the other things you might do because of the spear.
You might not shake hands with anyone ever again you Well,
I think a lot of people avoid looking at television
puke scenes. Yeah, you cannot watch. You really can't watch
(15:08):
those at all. You can't watch Stand by Me or
The Meaning of Life. Those are so funny looking though,
but still probably not. Uh. You might throw away food
in your fridge that uh is not even past this
expiration date. You might have a trigger there. Um. You
might overcook your food on purpose, and then before you
(15:30):
eat it, you will lift the bread a bunch of
times called checking behavior. Sure. Um, you might not eat
on vacation as readily because you only trust your trusted
food sources. You might go into a place and like
you know, when some people go into a music venue,
like they check for the exits, like you're checking for
the bathrooms. You you may not even make it to
(15:53):
the music venue. You A lot of them. A lot
of people with the metaphobia end up being agoraphobic and
just don't leave their house really developing it's it's often
confused for agaphobia by by UM counselors. Yeah, shrinks, I've
got another one, all right. Apparently a lot of people
who have a metaphobia walk around with a plastic bag
(16:13):
on them at all times, something to throw up into,
an emergency throw up bag. They walk around with this
because they're so afraid of throwing up that they never
need to use because they probably don't ever throw up,
I know. And some of them will actually carry a
change of clothes around with them as well, for the
same reason. If they throw up on themselves, they can
change their clothes. Yeah, And of course, air travel, drinking
(16:36):
alcohol um, any of those things are, or car travel
even like any kind of travel is probably avoided. Definitely
don't booze it up or Yeah, they probably don't drink
at all, and subsist on things like pasta and bananas
and very very safe um digestively speaking foods, although banana
(16:58):
could gag you. Yeah, you know, God, that would be
a nightmare if you had a metaphobia. I wonder if
they mash them up and eat it like like mashed
up with a fork. Maybe maybe you could see it. Yeah,
and I could see cutting your food up into you know,
the tiniest pieces, because you feel if you're choking. And
that's one of the fears too. I don't think we
(17:19):
mentioned like they're not just afraid of the vomiting, but
they sometimes can fear choking on vomit and dying and
affixiating and or going to the hospital or starting to
vomit and the vomiting never ending. That's another fear of
a metaphobia. One other thing that I saw people do,
um is prevent getting pregnant because of a fear of
(17:41):
mourning sickness. Um. So yeah, so your life is is
altered and curtailed because you're afraid of vomiting. Everywhere you
look there's some potential trigger out there. So it just
be easier to stay home and eat your pasta and
not watch movies basically, and it just lie there and
(18:01):
monitor your stomach for signs that you're about to throw up.
That's what they do. That's what you do when you
have a metaphobia. That's your life. It's no way to live. So,
like this is not all just academic and stuff. We're
grasping at shows and pulling together from different cases like
this is. There's actually a case study we found, UM
that was of an eight year old girl who had
(18:24):
a terrible experience throwing up and really kind of encapsulates
the experience of a metaphobia. She had full blown to metaphobia.
She had appendicitis and had been throwing up before the
doctors figured out she had a pendicitis and had her
appendix removed. And that experience throwing up was um while
(18:44):
it triggered a metaphobia in her. She when she came
to and Um was recovering from her surgery, about ten
days later, she started getting really worried she was going
to start throwing up like that again. Yeah. It was
a really sad case and uh pretty much covered everything
we've said and and even then some to the point
where her father traveled for business and she didn't want
(19:06):
him to travel anymore. Her father to travel anymore for
fear that he would uh get some sickness and then
bring it back to the house. Uh, I mean that's
pretty extensive, you know. Yeah, Like she didn't want to
eat herself. She she didn't want to eat any outside food.
She had her safe food, but she also didn't want
her parents to eat any outside food either because she
(19:27):
didn't want them throwing up. She stopped um playing with
other kids because she was worried about throwing up in
front of him and being teased. That was her big thing.
Um And as as one of the clinicians who we
came across in this research said, it's not the vomiting
that's really the problem, Like that's the focus, that's the obsession,
(19:48):
But the real problem is the worry, the constant worry.
It's the worry that's altering your life, and it altered
this little girl's life, you know, very sad. So let's
let's take another break and then we'll come back and
put a silver lining on this thing and talk about treatment.
(20:26):
All right, So we've talked a lot on the show
over the years about CBT cognitive behavioral therapy or exposure
and response prevention e r P, basically exposure therapy, and
this is definitely probably the way to go when it
comes to a metaphobia. So depending on who you go see,
(20:47):
you might undergo various kinds of treatments, ranging from starting
out by literally saying the words vomit out loud or
throw up or puke or just all the words um,
because that's literally the first step sometimes into getting over
this is just being able to speak the word yeah.
(21:08):
And you may have to start out by writing it
down first before you can say it out loud for real.
And so once you move past that, um. The the
therapies range from um, they're kind of all over the board,
from looking at fake vomit that your therapist has made
in a toilet. Yeah, now you're starting to move into
exposure therapy, right, Yeah, I mean this is all of
(21:30):
this stuff, uh E r P and CBT, but um,
you know, they'll make up some fake vomit, put it
in the toilet, make you go look at it. They themselves,
the therapists might make the noises in front of you,
just out of nowhere. Well I imagine they probably prep
them or maybe not. Uh may may go in the
bathroom and jump up and say I gotta go get sick.
(21:51):
And all of this is just exposing this patient over
and over to the point where they can handle hearing
the sound, seeing the thing, saying the word. Hearing the
smell is another one too. One of the recommendations for
exposure therapy is you make your own throw up, like
in the toilet, a little bit of um, cold soup
(22:11):
something like that, maybe mixed in some oatmeal with it,
and then pour a little vinegar in there to like
make it pungent, and sit around and think about that
being vomit. Maybe try to make the sound of throwing
up yourself, um, try to make yourself gag and and
all this is to show you, when you have a
metaphobia that this is, first of all, it's manageable. That's
(22:34):
the first part. Is what you're trying to do is
get to this point without having a panic attack. But
then also um that if you gag, it doesn't mean
you're automatically going to throw up. And if you do
throw up, it doesn't mean you're never going to stop
throwing up, or that everyone's going to ridicule you for
throwing up. And and that's you know, the point of
(22:54):
any cognitive behavioral therapy is just kind of change your
perspective and give you a more realistic view of the
thing you're worried about. Um. There's also a website called
rate my Vomit. Have you heard of it? Yeah? I
wouldn't get to mention that, But go ahead, you have
heard of it before, No, no, no, I read about it,
but I just it just sounds like, I mean, that's
like classic internet stuff, right, Somebody's like, oh, let's put
(23:16):
pictures of throw up on there, and you guys tell
me how gross it is. Well, it's actually used by
people with a metaphobia too, as exposure therapy at home
to just go look at this stuff and see it.
There's also videos of people throwing up. There's a lot
of stuff the internet like unintentionally is this great place
(23:37):
for people with a metaphobia to go get over their fears?
And I'm sure, like if you have a fear of snakes,
it's good for that too, But so is like a
time life book. You're not gonna find a time life
book that's nothing but pictures of vomit. You're gonna find
it on the internet, Yes you will. That's not in
the Old West series. And then I found this other
(23:58):
um to other type of therapy Chuck called eye movement
desensitization and reprocessing e m d R, and it's used
for post traumatic stress disorder. And it's the most bizarre
treatment I've ever heard of in my life. But apparently
it really really works. Are you ready for this? So
(24:19):
say I was your therapist and you were you have PTSD, uh,
and it's been used to treat a metaphobia a couple
of times. But you're talking about the thing that gave
you PTSD. You're focusing on the worst aspect of this
traumatic experience, and you're talking about it out loud. But
while you're doing it, I'm moving my finger back and
(24:41):
forth and up and down and maybe in a slow circle,
and I've instructed you to follow my finger wherever I
move it while you're recounting this horrible traumatic experience. Supposedly
just doing this over multiple sessions, but sometimes just in
one long session, PTSD can be treated. And the way
(25:03):
that this they think this happens, if it actually does work,
it just sounds like such, just like totally made up
that in fifty years are going to be like they
actually thought this worked. But if it does work, they
think that it works because it it taxes your working
memory to follow the finger, and your recall then is
(25:25):
not aided fully by your working memory, So the vividness
of this horrible memory isn't as as robust as it
would be if your full working memory. Was was working
on it, and so it when it when you reprocess it,
when you file it away again, this memory it's lost
its luster, it's lost a lot of its um bite
(25:47):
because you've gotten it out there and reprocessed it in
a way that's not nearly as traumatic because you're working
memory was being used in part to follow your therapist finger.
Supposedly it works, Yeah, and that nuts it's pretty neat. Yeah,
I think so too. I wonder if it really does work.
You should try it. Anybody, anyone who has ever undergone
(26:10):
eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. I would love to hear
your story if it actually helped you or not. And
if you have a metaphobia, godspeed, We hope you get
well soon. And to take this on or any phobia
really has so much courage and grit that just taking
(26:30):
a first step towards treatment, My hat is off to
you for life. Yes, and chances argued probably didn't even
listen to this episode. Yeah, but if you have a
different phobia, yeah, you know, any phobia. Uh And since
I said phobia a couple of times, that means it's
time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this our second
p s A in as many weeks. If this releases
(26:54):
the same week, okay, but this one's about dogs. It's
very sad. Hey, guys, take a while to write this
because it's been very difficult to talk about your animal lovers.
Oh so, probably a good majority of your listeners are,
and I thought sharing our tragic story would help prevent
others from experiencing the same thing. We lost our our
(27:14):
dog River about two months ago because I left the
bag up chips out. We were at work while she
got her head stuck in the bag, and we came
home to find our dogs stiff and lifeless from suffocation.
We've always been careful about plastic bags and stuff like
that and kept them stored away for recycling, but never
occurred to us said a chips bag on the counter
(27:35):
would something would need to be concerned about. No one
ever would ever think about that. Everyone we've also told
said it was something they never thought about either. So
now we keep all of our bag foods in the
cupboard and cut the bottoms off of anything that goes
into the recycling and waist pins. It's a good idea too.
I started doing that since these guys wrote it in. Yeah,
(27:56):
we were and still are extremely heartbroken. I hope no
one else will have to go through experience. Um, it
was the worst and if I can help save just
one other dog's life, it's been worthwhile. So thanks for
being you guys. Thanks for being you guys. There's a comment,
there's not, but I think that's how I'm supposed to
read it. I hope you make it into your next
(28:16):
Seattle show. That's Jackie W from Seattle. Jackie, thank you
for writing in. I'm so sorry about River. Um, but
I hope you guys are doing okay. Yeah, that sounds
like a guest list. Yeah, I agreed action to me. Yeah,
right back in and uh we'll guest Yeah, we're coming
in January. So yes, so just right back in. We'll
(28:39):
throw you on there. And she sent a picture of River,
beautiful dog, very very sad, River look very sweet. Um,
if you have a p s A that happened to
you that you think we should share to warn everybody
else about, we want to do that. UM. You can
tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. I
met Josh ump Clark. You can also check out my website.
(28:59):
Are you see is clark dot com Chuck's on Facebook
at Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's the official Stuff
you Should Know Facebook. Two. You can send all of
us and Jerry an email to Stuff Podcast at how
stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at
our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
(29:20):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
that how Stuff Works dot com
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