Irrational fears are weird. It’s human nature to feel the “fight or flight” response, of course. But the things which trigger said response are very peculiar indeed.

Take spiders. I remember being mortally afraid of spiders when I was a kid, and I’m still not particularly fond of them right now. As in, I’d probably freak out and do the dance of fear should one start crawling up my arm. Though I’m fine with little ones now, whereas any spider of any size used to scare the shit out of me. And, growing up in the country, we got some quite big spiders.

Now, fear of the kind of car-sized man-eating spiders you get in hot countries and/or under your toilet seat in Australia? That’s perfectly rational. But fear of tiny little spiders that you can literally blow away accidentally by breathing on them? Less rational.

And then you get into the more esoteric phobias out there. Pogonophobia: the fear of beards. How does that come about? I remember suffering from this one, too, when I was a kid. My father returned from a trip abroad with a beard he didn’t have before and I was freaked out by it. I don’t know if it was because he looked so different from how he did before, or if I just had some deep-seated need to be far away from beards at that particular age. Thankfully I’ve got over that particular fear now, otherwise my Bearded Justice credentials would surely be revoked.

And then there’s the really odd ones, like Lyssophobia, which is fear of hydrophobia. A phobia of a phobia is almost too meta for words. Except it’s not, because there’s a word for it. But surely it’s possible to get into an endless loop in that way? Is there someone out there who’s afraid of being afraid of hydrophobia? Possibly.

The human mind is a mysterious, strange and wonderful thing, and there are some things which will probably never be understood. Fear is one of those things. It’s a powerful motivating factor for some people; driving oneself to stay as far away from one’s fears as possible can spur people on to do things that they really want or need to. But at the other end of the spectrum, it’s surely easy for some fears to become dangerous obsessions, or crippling social disabilities.

In that sense, those of us who are just afraid of the idea of a big hairy spider with poison fangs have probably got the better end of the whole deal.

Though I think we can probably all agree that encountering a bright red spider with a beard who looked like the devil and was offering you a jar of peanut butter would be a fairly universally terrifying experience.