Imagine if every light around you was suddenly turned out. How would you react? With laughter, bemusement, nonchalance? I hate to have to break it you, but somewhere inside you're terrified.

A debilitating phobia of pregnancy and childbirth left an already bereaved mother with no choice other than to abort her second baby. Tokophobia a...

More needs to be done to help women who have a morbid dread of childbirth, a condition that affects up to one in 10 women, an expert said today. Be...

I measure the arrival and progress of Autumn by one simple thing. Not the changing colours of the leaves. Not the darkening evenings. Not the increasing wind and nip in the air. Not even the shops stuffed with Halloween costumes. No. I measure the arrival and progress of Autumn by how many times I have to leave the room in a cold sweat because of a spider.

I have friends who developed anxieties later in life. Many say having kids makes you worse, somehow hyper protective. One was in such a state on a recent flight, she accepted a random pill of a fellow flyer.

It's amazing what goes into your head, and won't come out. As a teenager, I read an article about sneezing. There was a picture of a person sneezing, and a huge cloud of germs around them. Ever since, if someone sneezes near me, my mind sees the huge cloud of germs.

In the spirit of the season, I was talking to my daughter the other day about our biggest fears: I said mine was spiders, and being trapped in small dark spaces, and being trapped in small dark spaces with spiders.