There are 680 species of spider in the UK. Only a handful are ever seen in your house. None of them want anything to do with you. This is worth repeating, because the part of your brain responsible for fear is not interested in nuance and will need telling several times. (We'll get to my brain specifically in a moment.)
From late spring through early summer, British spiders are reaching adulthood. The ones you spot in hedgerows, long grass and woodland edges right now are at their most visible, their most active, and, if you can get past the initial flinch, their most extraordinary. This is the best time of year to look properly.
"Studies have estimated that the world's spiders collectively eat more insects annually than the entire human race consumes in food. Every spider in your garden is doing quiet, unpaid pest control around the clock."
What spiders actually do
They eat insects. Vast quantities of insects. A single garden spider can consume thousands of flies, mosquitoes, aphids and midges in a season. Remove spiders from an ecosystem and the insect population explodes within weeks.
They also pollinate. Less efficiently than bees, but it happens. They aerate soil. Their webs catch dew and contribute to local moisture. They are, in the driest possible ecological terms, load-bearing.
The six species you're most likely to meet
Why your brain hates them
Arachnophobia affects roughly one in three women and one in five men to some degree, making it one of the most common specific phobias in the world. (So if you're reading this under a blanket with the light on, we are BFF's.) The current thinking is that it's a combination of three things.
Evolutionary priming. Humans evolved in environments where some spiders were genuinely dangerous. The brain developed a fast-response threat detection system that erred heavily on the side of caution. Better to flinch at a harmless spider a thousand times than to ignore a venomous one once. That system is still running in a country where no spider poses any meaningful threat to a healthy adult, and it hasn't had the memo. (The memo was sent. It was not opened.)
Disgust sensitivity. Spiders trigger the same neural pathways as contamination threats. The fast movement, the unpredictability, the multiple legs. The brain files them under wrong rather than dangerous, which is a harder category to reason your way out of.
Cultural transmission. Children who grow up around adults who react to spiders with fear learn to fear them. The phobia is partly inherited and partly downloaded. Which means it can, to some extent, be undownloaded.
A close-up of the common house spider. Not an image I want to be retouching on a large monitor with no lights on. Never again.
A personal note, from someone who has genuinely slept in a different house, in a different postcode.
I should be honest here. I wrote everything above about evolutionary priming and ecological load-bearing and the extraordinary underwater spider with the full knowledge that if one runs across my bedroom floor after dark, I will, hysterically, consider my options. And those options may include the sleeping in the spare room after sellotaping every crack and crevice, weighing up the pros and cons of moving to the Arctic, or in at least one documented case, leaving the building entirely to sleep somewhere else. I was hoping in the sky. This is why Australia isn't on my to-do list.
I can trace it back, as these things often can be traced, to a specific moment. I was in my cot. A spider landed in it. My mother was talking to a neighbour and didn't rush to intervene. I have no idea if the spider was large or small, dangerous or benign. My infant brain did not wait around to find out. It made a filing decision that has proven remarkably resistant to revision ever since.
Years later a friend called Steve, who was genuinely trying to help, owned a Chilean Rose-Kneed tarantula as a pet. One evening, somewhere between the second and third drink, he announced that we should go back to his house and he would get me to hold it. I considered this proposal carefully and concluded that the correct response was to keep buying rounds until the tarantula plan quietly "dissolved". It took some commitment on my part. Steve was a big drinker. But I got there, and we did eventually go back to his house, where we both passed out without incident and the tarantula was never mentioned again. I consider this one of my more creative solutions to a problem.
And back to the other story, the irony is that my mother, a gardener, had no particular issue with spiders at all. Frogs and toads, on the other hand, she couldn't bear. Which I find completely baffling, because frogs and toads are wonderful and I will go slightly out of my way to find one. (A frog sitting on a stone in the rain is one of the great sights in British nature.) The fear instinct is not rational, it is not consistent across families, and it does not respond well to being told to just get over it.
So if you're reading this from a different room to the one a spider is currently occupying, I understand completely. We're working on it. Together, apparently, at arm's length.
What you can actually do about it
- Start with a photo of a spider. A small one. On a screen. From across the room if necessary. Nothing bad will happen.
- Move to a more detailed photo. Then a video. Let the fear response fire and notice that it subsides. That subsiding is the point.
- Find a spider in a sealed container. A jam jar. Across the room. Stay with it until the initial response quietens.
- Move closer over time. Not in one session. Over days or weeks. The brain files each non-catastrophic exposure as evidence against the threat assessment.
- The goal is not to hold a tarantula. The goal is to share a room with a ceiling spider without it ruining the evening. Aim low. That's fine. Aim low. (I'm sure it's fine.)
There's also a cognitive reframe that genuinely helps some people. Spiders are not interested in you. You are enormous, warm, loud and completely inedible from a spider's perspective. The spider in your bathroom is not waiting for you. It got lost looking for insects and it is, in all likelihood, considerably more alarmed than you are. (This is comforting until it moves. Then I'm afraid I will definitely win the "most alarmed" prize.)
One thing to do this June
Find a garden spider web in the morning when the dew is still on it. Don't touch it. Just look at it. Count the radial threads. Notice the spiral. It took about an hour to build and it's stronger by weight than steel.
Then see how you feel about the architect. (From here. We'll stay here.)
The Quieter Field Notes go out on the first of every month. Each edition covers what's worth noticing outside that month. If this was useful, the newsletter is better. Sign up at quieter.life.