#igniterroremophobia

I have igniterroremophobia (ligyrophobia/phonophobia) which basically for me is a completely bizarre fear of alarms (mainly fire alarms).

As I’ve moved to an environment where the need to have millions of alarms for various health and safety reasons (this is the UK of course) is required, I’ve noticed this fear has escalated massively. It’s been on my mind a lot this week after an incident on Tuesday where now my entire workplace knows I was outside shaking like a leaf on a bench for an hour to avoid a fire test at a conference (I walked out of someone’s talk which was very rude of me, but good job I did as they tested the alarm early). I’ve spent the week ashamed and hiding from people as I’m aware of how ridiculous I must look, and also know that my lab group probably want to know why they tell me I need to help them with an alarm-triggering procedure and suddenly I’m nowhere to be found.

I’m not sure when my fear started exactly, but it did. Initially, I used to spend the entire end of the school year dreading class allocations as I didn’t want to be in the classroom that had an alarm in it. At the beginning of school year was fire drill season and they’d tell us at the beginning of a certain week we’d be having one and I could never focus. In sixth form I had to be excused from a lesson as i overheard a teacher talking about a fire drill that afternoon and was so embarrassed and my teacher suggested exposure therapy.

I barely slept for a year at uni because I was so terrified of being woken by the fire alarm (not a nice experience I’ll tell you) making me exhausted. I used to be terrified to take showers, to walk around without headphones (still the case) and have the toilet with a fire alarm in the room (trust me I do seem to always be on the toilet when an alarm goes off.) I thought during lockdown it got better, afterwards I went back to uni and deliberately chose my desk to be under the fire alarm as an act of defiance to myself but it wasn’t to be.

Currently, I can’t work with liquid nitrogen, I do not work with cryo-EM either for fear of the alarms going off. Everytime they do engineering work I get stressed. I hate level crossings, I hate my smoke alarm but I’m coming to peace slowly with that one. I currently can’t work in my office on Monday afternoons as they test the fire alarm at SOME point (depends when they feel like it) that day, but sometimes they just move it to Tuesday for the lols. I can’t visit the school of medicine on a Wednesday morning, biology on a Thursday morning or lecture on a Thursday morning. I know exposure therapy will help but the alarms are loud and everywhere and I can’t find a place to slowly expose myself. I missed my first year PhD taught lectures due to them always being when the fire alarm went off, in the end I had to confess my fear before I got a bad reputation and they moved the lectures! But the other students started complaining how ridiculous it was .

When I travel for conferences I stay up all night because I’m terrified I’ll have to evacuate. I moved out of my flat after one month because the students above kept setting off the fire alarm. I refuse to live in high rise tower blocks so live miles away from my workplace so the only person I know whose gonna be setting off any alarms is me.

For me, the worst part of my fear is the fear of it suddenly happening, or knowing it’s going to happen at some point that day but not exactly when. If and when it happens, I feel sick for the rest of the day. If alone when it happens there’ll be crying and screaming.

On Tuesday I was scheduled to present at a conference and I’ve got a reputation as quite a good speaker. Last year I had an awful time at the conference as I was really unwell and nearly didn’t go this year cos of memories but thought I’d suck it up and deal with it. When we turned up, they announced we were expecting a fire alarm in the afternoon. I was in the middle of the room completely unable to get out. There was no guarantee it’d go off at said time, I was terrified. My speech was a mess, I sat quietly during lunch and excused myself in the afternoon by leaving the talks to lots of stares. I sat by the river crying for an hour and was so angry at myself. I’d told a friend where I was and she later coaxed me back in saying the alarm was finished. It was not, but she wanted to make sure I was in the room for the next session. As I was walking to the building it went off again. I walked into the next session and the organiser looks at me and warned me they were probably not finished testing (in front of the whole room) I ran out crying whoops and was also embarrassed and saw the friend outside who had lured me back in (and was now tryna stop me from bolting out the door home) who then angrily told me the alarm was actually quite nice (NICE?) but that she’d go and ask them to stop. I didn’t pay attention to the rest of the conference and I didn’t go to the after party, instead going home and laying in bed humiliated and angry. I haven’t spoken to anyone from the conference since out of pure shame.