What are Big Island Residents Afraid of Most?

Graphic courtesy of YourLocalSecurity.com.

A new national survey shows people in California are terrified of success, people in Nevada have a phobia of commitment and Texans are afraid of (literally) everything. So what are people in Hawai‘i most afraid of?

Spiders.

The survey, conducted by Your Local Security (YLS), analyzed google’s autocomplete search terms to tally the 14 most common ways to end “why am I afraid of/to.” The results were then compared using Google Trends to figure out which states searched which terms most.

According to the report, Arachnophobia (fear of spiders) is one of the top two biggest fears in the nation, shared with eight other states including Indiana, Idaho, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont.

The other term most googled by internet users in the U.S. was “why am I afraid of people?”

The survey results show that people in sparsely populated states appeared to be a bit calmer on the anxiety scale. Residents in North Dakota and Wyoming showed no “biggest fears” according to the study. Texans, on the other hand, were afraid of everything—a condition termed panophobia which refers to a generalized, lingering fear that something bad is about to happen.

People in Hawai‘i have plenty of opportunities to be terrorized by arachnids. Hawai‘i is home to about 205 species of spiders, but only a few pose any serious threat to humans, according to the Maui Invasive Species Committee.

See the full survey results: Yikes! America’s Top-Searched Phobias.

Graphic courtesy of YourLocalSecurity.com.