If you’ve spent any time wandering around the Bored Panda community, you know it’s full of oddly specific fears, wholesome chaos, and extremely talented doodlers.
The “Hey Pandas, Draw A Phobia (Closed)” challenge fits right into that tradition: instead of just talking about what scares you, you grab a pen, a tablet, or a crayon from the bottom of your junk drawer and you draw your fear.

The result? A mix of creepy, funny, and surprisingly moving phobia drawings that show how different and how similar our fears really are. Even though this particular thread is now closed to new submissions, the idea behind it is still powerful:
when you sketch your fear, you stop letting it lurk in the dark and start putting it under a lamp where you’re in charge.

What Is “Hey Pandas, Draw A Phobia” All About?

Bored Panda’s Hey Pandas challenges are community prompts: someone posts a theme (for example, “draw something as best you can,” “show us your creepy drawings,” or “what’s an unreasonable fear to most people but not to you?”), and readers from around the world respond with images, stories, or both.
These posts usually have simple rules like “no AI art,” “be kind,” and “no judging other people’s drawings unless it’s positively.”

A “Draw A Phobia” challenge invites people to visually represent something that makes their brain want to scream and slam the metaphorical laptop shut:

• A towering spider with too many knees.
• An airplane drawn as a giant metal bird flapping over storm clouds.
• A crowded room of faceless people staring straight at you.
• A tiny elevator in a bottomless shaft, just hanging there.

When the title says “Closed”, it simply means the submission period is over the community can still scroll, comment, react, and relate, but can’t add new drawings to that specific thread. The spirit of the challenge, though, is easy to recreate on your own or in other online art prompts.

First, What Even Is a Phobia?

A phobia is more than “oh, that makes me uncomfortable.” It’s an intense, often irrational fear of an object, situation, or experience that can trigger powerful anxiety, avoidance, or even panic.
Mental health experts usually group specific phobias into broad categories like:

• Animal phobias: spiders, snakes, dogs, insects.
• Natural environment phobias: heights, deep water, storms, darkness.
• Blood-injection-injury phobias: needles, blood, medical procedures.
• Situational phobias: flying, elevators, bridges, tunnels, driving.
• “Other” phobias: choking, clowns, loud sounds, buttons, balloons, and more.

The key difference between a regular fear and a phobia is how strong the reaction is and how much it interferes with life. A lot of people don’t love spiders; a person with arachnophobia might be unable to enter a room if they think a spider could be there at all.

Phobias That Often Show Up in Drawings

In a “Draw A Phobia” style challenge, you tend to see some themes over and over again:

• Arachnophobia (fear of spiders) – Long legs, giant eyes, webs stretching across entire pages.
• Acrophobia (fear of heights) – Tiny figures on huge bridges, endless staircases, or skyscraper edges.
• Thalassophobia (fear of deep water) – Dark oceans with enormous shadows just below the surface.
• Claustrophobia (fear of confined spaces) – Bodies trapped in small boxes, elevators, or crawling tunnels.
• Social or performance fears – Spotlights, audiences, classrooms, and everyone staring only at you.
• Medical phobias – Over-sized needles, cold exam rooms, and looming doctor figures.

Phobia drawings exaggerate, distort, and stylize these fears and that exaggeration is exactly what makes this kind of challenge so helpful and oddly fun.

Why Drawing Your Fear Works Better Than Pretending It Doesn’t Exist

Drawing your phobia might sound like a horror movie assignment, but it actually lines up with how many anxiety and phobia treatments work.
Therapists sometimes use art therapy and creative exercises to help people express emotions, process anxiety, and gently approach what scares them in a controlled way.

Giving the Monster a Face (So It Stops Hiding)

A lot of fears feel huge because they’re so vague. “Something bad will happen.” “I’ll embarrass myself.” “I’ll lose control.” When you draw a phobia, you’re forced to ask:

• What exactly am I afraid is going to happen?
• What does this fear look like if I turn it into a character or a scene?
• Where am I in this picture helpless, powerful, running, hiding, fighting?

Once the fear is on paper, it stops being an invisible cloud and becomes an image you can crumple, redraw, scribble over, or completely reimagine. It’s still your fear, but now it has edges, shape, and boundaries and that can make it feel more manageable.

A Mini Version of Exposure (But on Your Terms)

Many evidence-based phobia treatments use some form of exposure gradually and safely facing the feared thing until the brain learns “okay, maybe this isn’t as deadly as I thought.” Drawing a phobia is like the softest, gentlest level of exposure:

• You control the pace. You can draw slowly, take breaks, or stop.
• You control the intensity. If a realistic spider makes you freeze, you can draw a cartoon spider in boots instead.
• You choose the ending. Maybe the plane lands safely, the monster shrinks, or your character walks away confidently.

That sense of control is huge when your nervous system feels like it’s being hijacked by an overdramatic internal alarm system.

Inside a Bored Panda–Style Phobia Drawing Thread

While each community prompt is slightly different, the “Draw A Phobia” format usually follows a familiar pattern:

1. The prompt: The host asks Pandas to draw a specific fear or any phobia they have (or used to have).
2. The rules: No AI-generated art, no stealing other people’s work, and no being a jerk in the comments.
3. The submissions: Readers upload photos or scans of their drawings with a short caption describing the phobia.
4. The reactions: Other users respond with upvotes, jokes, support, and “OMG I have this exact fear!” comments.

You’ll see everything from stick figures on notebook paper to fully rendered digital illustrations. Skill level isn’t the main point; honesty and relatability are.

Common Drawing Styles You’ll See

• Literal horror: Realistic spiders, shadows, needles, staircases, storms full “movie poster” energy.
• Dark humor: A tiny person being chased by a huge phone screen full of unread emails, for example.
• Symbolic: A cage made of clocks for someone afraid of “wasting time,” or a melting mask for social anxiety.
• Soft and cute: Sometimes people draw their fear as a small, silly creature they’re slowly befriending.

The comment sections often become mini support groups. Someone posts a drawing of a packed subway car; another person replies “same, I always plan three backup routes to avoid trains,” and suddenly nobody feels quite as weird or alone.

How to Draw Your Own Phobia (Even If You Think You Can’t Draw)

Good news: this is not an art school exam. The goal isn’t to impress a gallery; it’s to communicate what your fear feels like. Here’s a simple way to approach it.

Step 1: Name the Fear

Write it down in plain language first:

• “I’m terrified of deep, dark water.”
• “Elevators make me feel trapped.”
• “Public speaking turns my brain into static.”

You can look up the technical phobia name if you enjoy that sort of nerdy detail, but you don’t have to.

Step 2: Choose a Symbol or Scene

Ask yourself: When my fear shows up, what does the scene look like? Maybe it’s:

• You, standing on the edge of a diving board over a black ocean.
• You, pressed against the wall of a crowded elevator.
• You, at a microphone with the audience stretching into infinity.

Start with one clear scene rather than trying to cram every detail into a single drawing.

Step 3: Start With Simple Shapes

Circles for heads, rectangles for buildings, triangles for teeth seriously. Many experienced artists warm up with super simple shapes, messy sketches, and timed doodles. You can refine the drawing later, but first just get the basic idea down without judging it.

Step 4: Exaggerate the Fear

This is where you go full drama:

• Make the spider as big as a car.
• Draw the airplane tiny against ridiculous lightning bolts.
• Turn the audience into shadowy figures with huge white eyes.

Exaggeration helps show what your brain is doing, not what’s actually happening in real life and that difference is important.

Step 5: Add Yourself to the Picture

Draw “you” in the scene. You don’t need a perfect self-portrait; a simple character is enough. Notice:

• Are you tiny compared to your fear, or about the same size?
• Are you running away, frozen, crying, or facing it?
• Is anyone beside you a friend, a pet, a version of you that looks calmer?

Sometimes people like to redraw the scene later with a slightly more powerful version of themselves standing taller, looking more confident, or shrinking the monster a bit.

Step 6: Write a Caption

A short caption can make the drawing even more relatable and grounding, for example:

• “My brain every time I step into an elevator.”
• “Public speaking, according to my anxiety.”
• “What I imagine is under the surface when the lake is actually 6 feet deep.”

The caption reminds you that this is a story your fear tells not a guaranteed prediction of reality.

What You Learn About Yourself by Drawing a Phobia

Beyond the spooky aesthetics, drawing a phobia can reveal a lot about how your mind works:

• Triggers: Do you always draw enclosed spaces? Crowds? Darkness? Needles? You might spot patterns in what sets your anxiety off.
• Beliefs: Maybe your drawings show that deep down, you feel helpless, or like everything is your fault, or that danger is always around the corner.
• Hidden strengths: Sometimes people draw themselves as a small but stubborn character, still moving, still trying. That’s resilience you might not have noticed.
• Common ground: Seeing others draw similar fears helps you realize you’re not the only person whose brain hits the panic button at slightly inconvenient moments.

That sense of shared humanity is part of what makes Bored Panda–style community challenges so comforting. You’re not weird; you’re just human, with a very creative amygdala.

Safety Check: When You Might Want Extra Support

A quick but important note: drawing your phobia can be a helpful tool, but it’s not a replacement for professional help. If your fear is:

• Severely limiting your life,
• Causing panic attacks or intense physical symptoms, or
• Connected to past trauma that feels overwhelming,

then it’s a good idea to talk with a mental health professional. You can even bring your drawings to therapy they’re often a great starting point for conversation.

Extra: Real-Life-Style Experiences From “Draw A Phobia” Challenges

To really see how powerful this idea can be, imagine a few composite stories inspired by what people often share in threads like “Hey Pandas, Draw A Phobia.”

Emma and the Elevator

Emma is a college student who avoids elevators so intensely that she’ll climb eight flights of stairs rather than step into one. When she sits down to draw her phobia, she doesn’t start with mechanical details. Instead, she sketches herself in stick-figure form, tiny in the corner of the page, inside a small square. The elevator walls are covered in words like “trapped,” “stuck,” and “no escape.”

The first version of her drawing looks hopeless until she decides to try again. In the second version, she draws the elevator doors partially open, with light spilling in. Outside, she adds a friend waving and holding a coffee cup, waiting for her. The fear is still there, but the story has changed: she’s not alone anymore, and there is literally a visible way out.

A few weeks later, she still doesn’t love elevators (who does?), but she’s managed to ride one a couple of times. She keeps the drawing in her phone gallery as a reminder that her fear can be loud, but it doesn’t get the final word.

Marco and the Ocean

Marco loves beach vacations but has a deep fear of the open sea. He tries a “Draw A Phobia” prompt and fills his page with a tiny boat on the surface of a vast, black ocean. Underneath, he draws giant, shadowy sea creatures none of them clearly defined, just hinted shapes and eyes.

When he looks at the drawing, he realizes something: he’s not actually afraid of fish or sharks; he’s afraid of the unknown. The monsters in his drawing are blurry because he doesn’t quite know what he thinks is down there his mind just says, “something bad.”

Over time, he redraws the scene a little differently. He adds more detail to the water, includes fish that look more realistic, and softens some of the monsters into ordinary sea animals. The ocean doesn’t magically become safe, but in his mind it shifts from “bottomless void of doom” to “big, unpredictable place that still has rules.” That subtle mental shift makes wading into waist-deep water feel just a bit less terrifying.

Lena, the Microphone, and the Crowd

Lena’s phobia is public speaking. She agrees to participate in an online drawing challenge and sketches a stage with a microphone in the center. In the first version, the crowd is a dark wall of scribbles with glowing eyes. She draws herself as a tiny figure, shaking, with dozens of “what if I mess up?” speech bubbles floating overhead.

A fellow participant comments on her drawing, adding their own: a crowd where half the audience is on their phones, some are yawning, others are just neutral. “This is what audiences actually look like,” they write. Lena laughs and redraws her crowd, making half of them bored, some friendly, some distracted. Suddenly, her fear shifts from “everyone is judging me” to “most people are thinking about lunch.”

When she later has to give a small presentation, she remembers both drawings. Her heart still races, but she imagines the second crowd the imperfect, human one and feels just enough relief to get through her speech without bolting.

Why These Experiences Matter

In each of these examples, drawing a phobia doesn’t completely erase the fear. Instead, it:

• Makes the fear more concrete and less mysterious.
• Opens space for humor, creativity, and reimagining.
• Invites connection with other people who “get it.”
• Gives you something to revisit, update, and build on over time.

That’s the real magic behind challenges like “Hey Pandas, Draw A Phobia.” The drawing is the visible result, but the quiet internal shift the one where you start to see your fear as something you can explore instead of obey is the deeper win.

Final Thoughts: Your Fear, Your Lines, Your Story

The “Hey Pandas, Draw A Phobia (Closed)” thread may no longer accept new submissions, but its core invitation is always open: pick a fear, grab something that makes a mark, and see what happens when you turn your anxiety into art.

You don’t need perfect skills, fancy tools, or a dramatic backstory. All you need is curiosity about your own mind and a willingness to let your fears step into the spotlight for a moment so they stop hijacking the backstage.

One drawing won’t “cure” a phobia but it can be a surprisingly strong first step toward understanding it, laughing at it a little, and, yes, gently shrinking it down to a size you can live with. Whether you post your art online, share it with a friend, or keep it in a sketchbook only you ever see, each line you draw is a small act of courage.

So even though this specific Bored Panda challenge is closed, you can still run your own private version anytime. Your fear already lives rent-free in your head; it might as well help you make some interesting art.

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