Most kids are afraid of the dark.

What you might not realize is that a fear of the dark remains a totally common thing, even into adulthood – and honestly, there’s a good reason for our natural uneasiness in shadowy spaces.

Around 1 in 9 adults in the United States fear the dark, with a lower percentage of those people claiming a diagnosable phobia. Like, no matter how sternly they tell themselves there’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark, their brain just won’t listen.

Some of that, at least, is likely down to evolution, says professor and clinical psychologist Melissa Norberg.

“People find the dark scary because it removes one of our senses. It adds to the uncertainty of a situation, and many people find dealing with uncertainty uncomfortable.”

In the way back, when sight helped us avoid things like predators, natural disasters, and attacks from other people, it would make sense to be more comfortable in the light.

“In some countries, where it’s common for children to sleep alone, the dark can also be linked to feelings of separation in young kids. The pairing of being alone with being in the dark may lead children to think that darkness is the problem.”

Not only that, but our tendency to wake with worries in the middle of the night has us associating darkness with existential dread.

“The removal of sight makes it easier to imagine things. So when night falls or we enter a dark room, our mind may immediately start to imagine things that we didn’t a few minutes earlier.”

Those things that come up in the middle of the night usually aren’t happy thoughts, and Hollywood doesn’t help.

“Stories, TV shows, and movies regularly send messages that harm comes to people in the night, when it’s dark. We are told that monsters, ghosts, criminals, and animals, hide in the dark, waiting to get us. We learn to associate these anxiety-provoking thoughts with darkness from a young age.”

Norberg says there are ways to combat your fear, rational or not, if you’d like to try.

“The gold standard treatment for phobias is exposure therapy. It has been shown to work better than waitlist control conditions, placebo control treatments, and active treatment control conditions.”

In other words, you have to face your fears.

“Exposure therapy involves confronting feared stimuli in a non-dangerous manner and learning firsthand that the stimulus doesn’t need to be feared. So for being afraid of the dark, this means going into dark rooms and being alone at night, in the absence of monsters, ghosts, criminals, and dangerous animals. You would do this over and over again until you convincingly believe the dark is not dangerous.”

As with everything, though, baby steps are the best way to acclimate yourself to a new way of being or new perspective.

And check in with yourself before and after you spend time in the darkness, regarding your fears and what actually came to pass.

“This questioning helps people focus on what they need to be learning during exposure therapy, which is: 1) feared outcomes almost never happen; 2) when they do, they are almost always not as bad as we expected; and 3) when they do happen, we can deal with it.”

So any time you can spend time in what you’re sure is a harmlessly dark spot, go ahead and do it.

And maybe don’t spend quite so much time watching true crime shows.

Just a thought.

If you found that story interesting, learn more about why people often wake up around 3 AM and keep doing it for life.