Post plasma donation; I look at phobias a little

Yesterday, I donated plasma. It was my first time, so the process took about two hours. It was all fine at first; I was weighed, pricked and tested. I gave my basic information, answered questions about my medical history and listened to one of the Octapharma employees (don’t know whether she was technically a doctor or not) ramble on about AIDS and HIV for about 15 minutes.
I sat down on one of the wavy U-shaped beds, watching “Don’t Mess with the Zohan.” A larger woman with a lab coat pushed a cart next to my bed. I didn’t catch her name. She quickly set everything up; I didn’t watch cause I didn’t need to see the needle. I saw it anyway. Without my command, and against anything reasonable in me, my legs were moving, popping up and down on the bed like a continuous cold chill. The woman asked if I was cold, actually, and I told her no. She asked if I was nervous, and I told her I’d be fine. I’ve always had an aversion to needles, but I've always chalked it up to the human’s normal, natural tendency to avoid being punctured by sharp things. This horrible feeling taking my legs was something new to me. I looked away as she jabbed it in one of my “good veins.” The prick on my finger had hurt worse.
After she left, I noticed myself actively avoiding the needle in my arm. I continually reasoned that this was nothing; I’d had splinters larger and much more painful than this, and I wasn’t hesitant to walk on a deck or to grab a piece of plywood. With that, I glanced down at the metal prong jutting from my arm. It bulged where it was tunneled under my skin. A liter of red fluid moving out of my body into a spinning, whirring machine next to me. Neo pulling the life-support tubes from his awakened body came to mind. My stomach made a noise I’d never heard before. My head could’ve floated into the sky. I looked away half a second after, focusing on the TV at the Zohan’s fearless antics.
Dictionary.com defines the word phobia as “a persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to a compelling desire to avoid it.” Miranda White, in her essay “Phobia’s and the Brain,”*claims that there not a universal agreement about where phobia’s come from or how they occur. Several theories have come forth, but the only certainty is that it obviously comes from the brain. After my little encounter, I wondered how human evolution lead to the development of such a flaw in our collective psyche. Sure, it’s most of the time healthy to avoid heights, snakes, spiders, and skin-piercing devices. I find it odd, though, that rather than acting in a cool, collective manner in the face of these hurdles, our mind will revert back to animalistic panic, which is most of the time more detrimental to our health than the perceived “threat.” It doesn’t help anyone, especially you, when you scream and flail in an airplane in response to acrophobia. It didn’t help me to become queasy, or to virtually pass out while getting my plasma drawn. These kinds of responses probably just make the entire situation more traumatic, and intensify the fear later on.
Yet our bodies and unconscious minds insist that we behave this way. Rather than work it out in a reasonable way, we sporadically change our behaviors, avoiding the nonexistent threat like the plague. Even as I sit here, I get queasy and shudder a little as I think of the needle in my vein. It must come from some vague wiring in our brains, like emotions or fetishes, that are caused by the vast intricacies that make up the human mind.
*White’s essay can be found here: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro02/web3/mwhite.html