Everyone has fears and either keeps them private or talks about them openly. Some people develop tremors and tremors in their hands from fear of public speaking, while others are afraid of heights, high speeds, or narrow, stifling spaces.
Irrational fears are common, but finding a way to overcome a phobia is not easy. Scientists say it may soon be possible to replace psychoanalysis sessions with unusual and enjoyable therapy… while we sleep.
Are you afraid to take the subway, meet your boss, or look down from the balcony on the fifth floor? Pillows and blankets may be as effective in overcoming phobias as a chair in a psychiatrist’s office. Targeting brain activity during sleep could help mitigate the effects of fear-inducing memories, researchers said.
The “anchor,” embedded in the brain as an association with a fearful memory, acts oppositely, as a healing agent during sleep.
What is phobia and where does it come from?
A phobia is an annoying, even distressing disorder. This is a natural fear that magnifies several times and reaches a pathological condition. It can be triggered by anything: insects, mice, stray dogs, confined spaces, or driving at high speeds. A feeling of paralysis and fear. Panic is accompanied by sweating, heart palpitations, and involuntary tremors in the hands and feet.
In contrast to natural fear, which can often be controlled, phobia cannot be controlled by awareness. Attempts to convince a person that voles are not dangerous and that driving at a hundred miles per hour is not very fast are worthless.
Doctors estimate that different types of phobias affect more than ten million people around the world. But since many people do not seek help, and prefer to endure or avoid fearful situations, the true number of those suffering from uncontrollable fears is likely to exceed this estimate.
Doctors say that the most obsessive fears appear in late or early adulthood after a traumatic situation, but many phobias affect adults as well.
The nature of the phobia can lie in the direct source of the problems experienced by him, driving at high speed, resulting in an accident, or a train crash in the subway, when a person has to spend long hours in a stuffy car and feels bad, or perhaps it is associated with an unpleasant association, Which later took root as an obvious fear.
For example, after a young man got into a fight with his girlfriend and returned home, he ran into an aggressive stray dog. Unpleasant feelings after a quarrel were superimposed on fear of animal behavior, which served as a source of the formation of phobias.
How is phobia treated?
Today, phobias are often treated through “exposure therapy,” which involves reliving conscious experiences when patients are affected by fears. The young man in our example will be offered to imagine the stray dog over and over again, first in a cage, then in another corner of the room, then somewhere nearby, and so on.
The person must describe his or her feelings during these imaginary experiences. It is known that while in a safe environment under the supervision of a mental health professional, the traumatic response gradually decreases and the fear disappears.
Unfortunately, this treatment in itself is frightening. Many patients experience a lot of stress when they try to imagine themselves in a painful situation, and some simply refuse to repeat the sessions, preferring to live with their phobia for years.
Is it possible to overcome phobia while sleeping?
Neurologist Katrina Honer and her colleagues from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago (USA) are working on a less traumatic method of administering exposure therapy. Their therapeutic approach is applied to a sleeping patient and, as preliminary experiments indicate, it is highly effective!
It was previously believed that dealing with fears could only be done consciously; Otherwise it will be impossible to change the person’s emotional reaction. But Honor’s experiments show that it is not always necessary to “scare” patients awake.
To create unpleasant memories, scientists delivered small electrical discharges to volunteers. At the same time, participants examined images of faces, accompanied by lemon or mint scents.
The images and smells served as “anchors”, which were later strongly associated with the electric shock. Later, upon looking at these images and experiencing the same smell, the volunteers began sweating in anticipation of an electric shock.
Shortly after the first phase of this training session, participants were asked to sleep directly in the laboratory, with electrodes placed on their heads, which were recording their brain waves. In the rapid eye movement (REM) phase when recent memories are being reproduced and amplified, the air around the volunteers was filled with the “smell of fear.”
In this way, the researchers tried to trigger the memory of the “scary” face, which was associated with the electric shock. Just as while awake, when sleeping patients are exposed to the smell, they initially show signs of sweating.
Gradually, however, this response weakened, but the most interesting fact is that the decrease in reaction to the “fear-filled” stimulus continued after waking up.
After waking up, the volunteers did not feel as much fear at the sight of the face and the accompanying smell that they had been repeatedly exposed to during their sleep.
Changes in activity of the amygdala, the area of the brain that controls emotions and fears, showed that sleep therapy did not erase frightening memories, but rather created new, harmless associations with smells and faces in pictures. The longer the study participants slept, and the more odors they were exposed to, the weaker their fear became.
This paradoxical effect is due, as Katerina Honer suggests, to the fact that artificial activation of unpleasant memories during sleep is more similar to exposure therapy itself than to real nightmares that have no cure, but frighten patients more.
According to her, repeated experiments are needed to find out how long the effect of sleep therapy lasts, and whether it can be used to treat common forms of phobias, especially chronic ones.
“This is a completely unexplored area of research. In my opinion, we should focus our work on creating a more rigorous experimental design.”
Aromatherapy as a way to overcome phobias
Meanwhile, about a year ago, experts from Northwestern University in Illinois proposed treating aromaphobia in a similar way.
During the study, volunteers were shown pictures of faces, and the presentation of each picture was accompanied by exposure to a specific scent, a new scent for each new face picture. While viewing one of the facial images, participants received small electric shocks.
The researchers assessed the extent of fear using tools that recorded skin conductivity values. After the first phase of this experiment, one group of participants was asked to sleep, while the second group was asked to stay awake.
While sleeping, the first group of volunteers were exposed to a scent used to show an image and an electric shock. The experiment was repeated the next day.
It was found that those participants, who fell asleep after the first phase of the experiment, felt much less discomfort while viewing the “scary” images. The longer they were exposed to a certain smell while they slept, the less pronounced their fear became.
Conversely, volunteers who were only exposed to the scent during waking hours the day after the “horrific” image reacted more fearfully.
It seems that the method of reducing fear during sleep is indeed promising. Scientists hope that eventually, “under-the-blanket therapy” could be used to overcome phobias and mental disorders caused by traumatic experiences.
