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Emetophobia and Jinxing or Negative Energy

There’s a phrase you’ve probably seen in the comments section of social media: “I don’t claim this negative energy.” It shows up under posts about illness, bad luck, or anything remotely threatening. On the surface, it looks harmless—even empowering. But for many people struggling with anxiety, especially emetophobia, this kind of response can quietly reinforce a cycle that keeps fear alive.

Let’s talk about why.

At the heart of emetophobia is a deep fear of losing control—of the body, of uncertainty, of “what if.” And like many anxiety disorders, it often overlaps with obsessive-compulsive patterns. One of those patterns is what we call magical thinking: the belief that our thoughts, words, or small actions can influence real-world outcomes in ways that aren’t actually connected.

This is where the idea of jinxing comes in.

If you’ve ever thought, “If I say I feel fine, I’ll get sick,” or “If I read this story and don’t cancel it out, something bad will happen to me,” you’re not alone. The brain is trying to protect you. It’s creating a false sense of cause and effect—linking neutral actions (like reading a post) with feared outcomes (like vomiting).

So when someone comments, “I don’t claim this negative energy,” it can feel like a protective move. Almost like putting up a shield.

But psychologically, it functions as a safety behavior.

Safety behaviors are things we do to try to prevent a feared outcome or reduce anxiety in the moment. They work—temporarily. You might feel a brief sense of relief after typing that comment or thinking that phrase. But the brain takes note: “Ah, we avoided danger because we did that.” And next time? It asks you to do it again. And again.

Over time, this strengthens the belief that you need the behavior to stay safe.

For someone with emetophobia, this can expand quickly. It’s not just social media anymore—it’s avoiding certain words, certain conversations, certain thoughts. It might look like mentally “undoing” things you’ve read, repeating phrases silently, or seeking reassurance that you’re okay.

The tricky part is that it feels logical. It feels like you’re being cautious. But in reality, it’s keeping your nervous system on high alert.

Recovery involves gently stepping out of this loop.

That doesn’t mean forcing yourself to engage with triggering content all at once. It means beginning to notice these patterns and experimenting with not doing the safety behavior. For example, reading a post and choosing not to neutralize it. Letting the anxiety rise—and fall—on its own.

Because it will fall.

Your brain learns through experience, not logic. And every time you resist the urge to “protect” yourself in these ritualistic ways, you send a new message: “I can handle this. I am safe without doing that.”

It’s a quiet shift, but a powerful one.

So the next time you see that phrase—or feel the urge to use it—pause for a moment. Not with judgment, but with curiosity. Ask yourself: Is this helping me move forward, or keeping me stuck?

That awareness is where change begins.

The 5-minute solution

Giving up safety behaviour is probably the hardest part of recovery from emetophobia. Your safety behaviours don’t actually keep you safe, but because you rarely vomit, your brain (the anxious part) convinces you (the logical you) that you didn’t vomit because the safety behaviour worked. It also convinces you that there was something to fear all along, and that vomiting is therefore very dangerous. This isn’t true either, but your use of safety behaviours keeps your phobia frozen in place, as you go ’round and ’round with what you believe is cause-and-effect.

I haven’t vomited since 2010, going on 16 years now, and I have no safety behaviours at all. Yes, of course I wash my hands before eating and after using the bathroom and I never put my fingers in my mouth, but that’s just good hygiene as I don’t want to catch a cold or Covid or RSV or whatever else may be lurking about to take over the world.

Your therapist may have told you to give up all your safety behaviours at once. I think this is a bit rash, so I give my patients a couple of months to ease into giving them up. But it’s still hard not to reach for that Zofran (Ondansetron), ginger, sip of water, or a hot water bottle. It’s also easier to run away or avoid going out to dinner, to a friend’s house, on a play date, to an indoor playground, etc.

When giving up a safety behaviour seems exceptionally hard, I suggest the “5-minute solution.” Don’t reach for your safety behaviour for 5 minutes. Sit with the feeling of nausea and the anxiety it produces, and don’t try to lower your anxiety or calm down. Just notice the feelings and where they are in your body. Notice your thoughts about them. Say to yourself nothing more than “I’m having a thought that….. (I’m nauseous and will probably vomit).” Just try it for 5 minutes.

When the 5 minutes are up, assess yourself again. Is your anxiety higher, lower or the same as it was? If it’s lower or even the same, ask yourself if you can go another 5 minutes without the safety behaviour. Keep doing this exercise for a half-hour. Clearly, if that’s the case, you’d have been sick by now – so you don’t need the safety behaviour!

Recovery and Setbacks with Emetophobia

One of the hardest parts of recovering from emetophobia is realizing that progress isn’t a straight line. You can have weeks—or months—of feeling braver, eating more freely, going out more often, and managing sensations with confidence. Then suddenly, without warning, a setback hits. A stomach flutter, a virus going around, a stressful life event, or even an unrelated anxiety spike can bring the fear roaring back. This can feel discouraging and confusing, especially for people who thought they were “done” with the phobia.

But setbacks are not signs of failure. They are signs that your brain is still learning. Anxiety circuits are sticky—they take time to weaken. When a setback happens, the brain is simply falling into an old habit. This doesn’t erase your progress. It doesn’t mean you’re back at the beginning. It means you have an opportunity to practice again.

The most important thing during a setback is how you talk to yourself. Many people panic when old fears return. They think, “I’m going backwards,” “I can’t handle this,” or “I’ll never get better.” These thoughts fuel the fear and make recovery feel harder than it is. A more helpful response is, “This is a setback, not a failure. I’ve done this before, and I can do it again.” Self-compassion reduces the emotional intensity and helps you return to your coping skills more quickly.

Another helpful perspective is remembering that recovery is about courage, not comfort. Comfort is unreliable—it changes day to day. Courage is what grows over time. When you face your fear even while uncomfortable, you strengthen the new pathways in your brain. You’re teaching your nervous system, “I can handle this sensation.”

Parents supporting a child with emetophobia can also help frame setbacks as normal. Instead of saying, “Why is this happening again?” try saying, “Hard moments happen, and you know what to do.” This teaches children resilience rather than shame. Children learn that they can cope even when fear returns.

Setbacks also give you the opportunity to review what tools worked well before. You practiced gradual exposures. Hopefully you eliminated safety behaviors. Maybe you leaned on supportive people or routines. These tools haven’t disappeared—you can return to them anytime.

It can also help to visualize the long-term path of recovery. Imagine it like a hiking trail: sometimes the trail dips, curves, or becomes steep, but you are still moving forward. Every brave step counts, even if you stumble.

Recovery from emetophobia is absolutely possible. You have already proven your strength by seeking understanding, practicing new habits, and facing sensations that once felt unbearable. Trust that the work you’ve done is still within you. Setbacks are temporary, but the resilience you are building lasts a lifetime.

Pop Culture and Emetophobia

I often lament that while many mental illnesses and phobias are depicted on television, in movies, and social media, emetophobia is not. At least, not at this writing at the end of 2025. I keep waiting for someone on Grey’s Anatomy or the latest Netflix mini series to have emetophobia, so that more people might become aware of it.

Unfortunately, however, pop culture has a funny way of exaggerating things for shock value, and vomiting is no exception. From slapstick comedies to horror movies, it’s often portrayed as grotesque, loud, and over-the-top. For someone with emetophobia, these depictions can reinforce the belief that vomiting is catastrophic, or that it happens to adults all the time, and often in public which is not the case. Unless you’ve been around drunk people, you don’t actually see people vomiting in public at all. If you have, it was a very rare event indeed. Adults almost always have enough time to “hold it in” until they get to a washroom or at least a receptacle of some kind.

In real life, vomiting rarely looks like the chaotic scenes in movies. But when you see it dramatized on screen, your brain interprets it as a threat. This makes even fictional scenes triggering. Interestingly, now that I’m recovered from emetophobia I don’t remember all the scenes of vomiting in movies. When I was afraid of seeing others vomit, I could remember every last time I saw it on screen.

Some of the more memorable vomiting scenes on screen are in the movie Bridesmaids (although the diarrhea scenes are the really funny ones), the one in Pitch Perfect and the one in Bring It On. There are also very graphic scenes in both The Sandlot and Stand by Me. Back in the 80s there was a Monty Python film called “The Meaning of Life” which had a ridiculous vomit scene in it. In the film “The Green Mile” the main character opens his mouth and whole bunch of grey flies kind of swarm out. Some people look upon this scene as “vomiting” and I recently read an article where the writer described it as the worst vomiting scene ever, whereas others don’t even see it as a vomiting scene.

People with emetophobia may avoid entire genres of movies, skip TV shows, or even panic when an unexpected scene pops up – quickly changing the channel, closing their eyes or plugging their ears. On Instagram, X and Facebook there are people with accounts who preview movies and tell you whether there are scenes of vomit in them so you can avoid them. This avoidance reinforces the idea that you can’t cope with vomiting.

Some therapists want to begin exposure therapy with their clients in emetophobia treatment by showing them videos from YouTube or movie scenes with vomiting. This is far too far up the hierarchy ladder of emetophobia resources, however. One should begin with easy things like words and drawings, moving on to pictures and so forth before ever looking at video.

If you’re ready to start using exposure to tackle these triggers, you can sign up for my group exposure and response prevention classes for people with emetophobia. The next set of 11 classes begins in January. More info can be found at http://www.emetophobiahelp.org/classes.

What-If Thinking and Emetophobia

People with emetophobia often don’t live in either the present moment – they live in the past and the future. Asking “what if _____________” moves you from the here and now to a future time. “What if,” grammatically, is conditional. That means it’s not reality or what’s actually happening – it’s taking you to a future time when something might happen. But also, it might not.

You live in the past in the sense that when something triggers your emetophobia, your body “flashes back” to a time in the past, usually in childhood, when you felt emotionally alone, vulnerable, or afraid. This is not about blaming your parents for some terrible, heinous crime like child abuse. You hear stories of parents who hook their kids up to the clothesline outside or lock them in a dog crate in the basement without food or water. If you had parents like that, you may very well have emetophobia and/or a host of other problems, but more than likely your parents were just not emotionally available to you as a child and probably not when you were sick. There are other contributing factors to emetophobia besides these, but that’s not the point of this blog.

“What-if” Thinking goes something like this:

• What if I touched something with norovirus particles on it?
• What if I forget to wash my hands?
• What if the food I ate was expired?
• What if they’re not very clean in the restaurant kitchen?
• What if my kids pick up something from the other kids at school?
• What if I get so panicked that I throw up?
• What if I get sick on the plane?
• What if I sit beside someone else who is sick on the plane?

You get the idea. Sometimes, it’s tough to get yourself out of thinking this way once you start. It’s as if the thoughts go round and round in your head and just won’t stop plaguing you.

You can help change these thoughts by:

1. Telling yourself they’re not helpful thoughts
2. Telling yourself “STOP!”

The method, above, doesn’t work for everyone because some people experience the thoughts just coming back within a few minutes. If that’s the case for you, you can try:

1. Change the “what if” to “right now” and find something you can see, something you can hear and something you can touch, and name it. So for example, “Right now I can see a pen, I can hear kids playing outside, and I can feel the blanket on my couch beside me.”
2. Try grounding yourself in the present moment.
   1. If it’s warm enough outside you can take off your shoes and socks and walk outside on the grass. Feel the earth under your feet.
   1. Tell yourself what year it is, and how old you are.

The techniques above also don’t work for everyone. You may have to just leave those “what if” thoughts alone, as though they’re a jerk who crashed your birthday party. Instead of spending all the time talking to the jerk to convince them to leave, just ignore them and enjoy your party.

Commit yourself to doing things that you find important. Those things could be mundane, like the dishes or walking the dog. But you find your family and pets important in your life, so therefore those things are important to do.