Arachnophobia (fear of spiders): meaning, causes, how common it is and how to overcome it

Arachnophobia is the fear of spiders: an intense, lasting fear of spiders, out of proportion to any real danger, that leads people to avoid them. It is a specific phobia of the animal type, and one of the best known. If you are wondering what the fear of spiders is called, the answer is arachnophobia; people also say spider phobia or simply being scared of spiders.

This article is general information, not medical advice. If a fear of spiders affects your daily life, talk to a doctor or a therapist trained in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

What does arachnophobia mean?

Arachnophobia means “fear of spiders”. It joins the Greek arakhnē, “spider”, and phobos, “fear”, according to Wiktionary. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the English word to 1925, built from arachnid, the class of animals that includes spiders.

How do you pronounce arachnophobia?

Say it uh-RAK-nuh-FOH-bee-uh, with the main stress on “FOH”. Wiktionary gives /æˌɹæk.nəˈfəʊ.bɪ.ə/.

What does arachnophobia feel like?

Symptoms appear near a spider, at the sight of a web, or just from thinking about one. The NHS lists the typical symptoms of a phobia:

• feeling dizzy or light-headed, a pounding or unusual heartbeat, tightness in the chest;
• feeling sick, trembling or shaking;
• severe anxiety, and an intense fear of fainting, losing control or dying.

Then comes avoidance: checking rooms before entering, refusing to go into the garden, the cellar or the shed, asking someone else to deal with every spider, or leaving a room until it has been removed. Many people know the spider is harmless and still can’t stay near it.

Why are spiders scary to so many people?

Spiders move fast and unpredictably, appear suddenly in homes, and have many legs and a body shape very unlike ours. One influential theory, from Öhman and Mineka (Psychological Review, 2001), proposes that humans evolved to learn fears of certain animals such as snakes and spiders more easily than fears of other things. It is a theory, not a settled fact, and it does not mean the fear can’t change: what keeps it going day to day is mostly avoidance.

What causes arachnophobia?

There is no single known cause. The MSD Manual states that the causes of phobias are unknown. The NHS notes that many phobias can be linked to a frightening event or a stressful situation, such as a frightening childhood experience with an animal, and that a phobia can also be learned from family or friends who have one. Phobias usually develop in childhood, the teenage years or early adulthood.

Whatever started it, avoidance keeps it alive: each escape brings relief, and the relief teaches you that escaping was necessary. Exposure research by Craske et al. (Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2014) shows that new, safer learning happens when you stay and discover that what you expected does not happen.

How common is arachnophobia?

Fear of spiders is among the most common phobias, especially in women:

• in a Swedish survey of 704 adults, phobias of animals, defined there as spiders and snakes, affected 12.1% of women and 3.3% of men at the time of the survey (Fredrikson et al., Behaviour Research and Therapy, 1996);
• fears and phobias of heights and of animals are the most common kinds of specific phobia (Eaton et al., The Lancet Psychiatry, 2018);
• across 25 surveys in 22 countries, about 7.4% of adults have had a specific phobia of any kind at some point in their life, usually starting in childhood (Wardenaar et al., Psychological Medicine, 2017); in the United States the estimate is 12.5% (NIMH).

Studies count spider phobia with other animal phobias or with specific phobias as a whole, so a precise figure for spiders alone depends on the survey.

Do I have arachnophobia? A quick self-check

This is not a test and it cannot diagnose anything. It follows the summary of the DSM-5-TR criteria for specific phobia in the MSD Manual, and only helps you decide whether to talk to a professional.

Tick what applies to you

I have felt a marked fear or anxiety about spiders for six months or more. Seeing a spider, or even a web, almost always triggers that fear straight away. I avoid places where spiders might be, or I get through them with intense fear. I feel the fear is out of proportion to the actual danger. The fear or the avoidance causes me real distress or gets in the way of my daily life, work or social life.

This is not a diagnosis. If you ticked most of these boxes, or if the fear bothers you, talk to your doctor or a therapist trained in CBT. Only a professional can assess a phobia.

How to overcome arachnophobia

The best-supported way to overcome a fear of spiders is gradual exposure, the core of cognitive behavioural therapy: you approach spiders in small steps, stay long enough to learn that the feared outcome doesn’t happen, and repeat until real encounters feel manageable. According to the MSD Manual, exposure therapy helps around 85% of people with a specific phobia, and even a single session can make a real difference. For spiders, a therapist-led one-session treatment of real-life exposure, first described by Öst (Behaviour Research and Therapy, 1989), is the reference treatment that newer approaches are compared against.

Our step-by-step guide explains how to build a fear ladder, how long to stay, how often to practise and when to get help: How to overcome arachnophobia.

Can virtual reality help with a fear of spiders?

Yes: fear of spiders is one of the phobias where virtual reality has been studied most.

• In a controlled study, 83% of people treated with VR exposure, over about four one-hour sessions, showed clinically significant improvement, against 0% on the waiting list, and nobody dropped out (Garcia-Palacios et al., Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2002).
• In a trial of 100 adults, a single automated VR session using consumer hardware brought large reductions in fear and avoidance, approaching the gold-standard real-life one-session treatment over time and found non-inferior to it at follow-up (Miloff et al., Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2019).

More in Why virtual reality works for phobias.