Emetophobia: when the fear of being sick begins to shape your life

Emetophobia is often described as a fear of being sick or seeing others be sick, but for many people it’s much more complex than that. This fear is rarely about sickness alone - it’s about loss of control, uncertainty, safety, and not knowing how you’ll cope if the worst happens, and if you live with this fear there’s a good chance it quietly shapes far more of your life than people around you realise.

For many, emetophobia is something they live with all year round. However, it often ramps up during winter and around the festive period, when talk of stomach bugs, norovirus, school closures, cancelled christmas plans, and illness 'going around' becomes harder to escape.

If this time of year leaves you feeling more on edge, more alert to risk, and more exhausted by your own thoughts, there’s a reason it feels this intense - and you’re not alone.

What is emetophobia?

Most people don’t enjoy being sick, but for them it’s an unpleasant inconvenience - the body doing what it needs to do to protect itself.

When someone has emetophobia, though, the fear isn’t just about the moment itself. It’s about constant vigilance, avoidance, and trying to control every possible risk.

This often leads to avoidance behaviours that can slowly shrink life down.

How emetophobia can affect daily life

People with emetophobia often find themselves:

• Avoiding alcohol, or avoiding people who are drinking

• Avoiding social events, parties, or gatherings

• Avoiding public transport or crowded places

• Avoiding certain foods, buffets, or food prepared by others

• Eating very restrictively “just in case”

• Avoiding medication that might cause nausea

• Feeling anxious about travelling, especially abroad

• Worrying about pregnancy

• Becoming highly focused on cleanliness, germs, and contamination

• Avoiding places, activities, people, or situations if illness is circulating

  
  

During winter, this fear can intensify further when the winter vomiting bug is mentioned in the news, schools report norovirus outbreaks, or school closures occur due to sickness. For many people, even hearing about these things can trigger heightened anxiety and hyper-vigilance.

“I know it’s unlikely… so why do I still feel this way?”

If you live with emetophobia, you’ve probably already tried logic.

You may know that being sick is rarely dangerous. You’ve likely been sick before - and it didn’t resolve the fear. And if you could think your way out of this, you would have already.

That’s because phobias don’t live in the rational, thinking part of the brain. They live in the nervous system, where the fight-or-flight response is triggered automatically.

This isn’t a weakness - it’s a learned response designed to keep you safe, even when it becomes overprotective.

Gentle, practical support when anxiety flares

These aren’t quick fixes, but they can help soften the intensity when fear ramps up:

• Notice safety behaviours without judgement. Awareness is a first step, not a failure.

• Support your nervous system daily. Slow breathing (especially longer exhales), gentle distraction, comforting activities, and simple self-care can all help. Anything that helps you feel a little more safe, secure, relaxed or comforted — warmth, familiar routines, calming music, being with someone you trust — can genuinely reduce anxiety over time.

• Reduce reassurance-seeking where possible. Repeated checking, googling symptoms, or scanning others for signs of illness can unintentionally maintain the fear cycle.

• Meet yourself with compassion. Shame and self-criticism often increase anxiety; kindness creates space for change.

  
  

If winter, Christmas, or periods of widespread illness feel like something to endure rather than live through, that matters and it affects your quality of life.

How counselling and hypnotherapy can help emetophobia

When I work with emetophobia, I often combine counselling and hypnotherapy, as they support different parts of the experience.

Counselling for emetophobia

Counselling can help you:

• Understand how your fear developed

• Explore avoidance, control, and hyper-vigilance

• Gently challenge beliefs around danger, responsibility, and uncertainty

• Build a more compassionate relationship with yourself

  
  

For many people, emetophobia isn’t only about sickness - it’s also about safety, control, and coping with the unknown.

Hypnotherapy for emetophobia

Hypnotherapy works with the subconscious mind - the part that drives automatic fear responses and the fight-or-flight system.

Hypnotherapy for emetophobia can help:

• Calm the nervous system

• Reduce automatic fear reactions

• Create safer internal associations

• Help your body learn that it doesn’t need to stay on high alert

  
  

This is not about forcing exposure or overwhelming technqiues. You remain in control, and everything is approached gently and at your pace.

Used together, counselling and hypnotherapy can support both understanding and nervous system change.

Joanne Flatt

Psychotherapeutic Counsellor MNCPS (Acc.)

I'm Joanne Flatt, a counsellor and hypnotherapist who helps people dealing with anxiety, fears, and phobias, among other issues. I’ve lived with emetophobia myself and research suggests up to 8.8%* of the population experience it, with the majority being women. If this resonates with you, please remember: you are not silly, you are not weak, and you are not broken. If you are looking for help for emetophobia, I provide one-on-one counselling and hypnotherapy for fear of sickness and other phobias, available both online and in-person. If you would like to talk about how therapy may be able to help you, please get in touch here.

*https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21695748/