Everyone has fears and either keeps them private or talks about them openly. Some people get trembles and shaky hands at the fear of public speaking, others are afraid of heights, high speeds, or stuffy confined spaces.
Irrational fears are a common thing, but finding a way to overcome phobias is not so simple. Soon, it may become possible to replace psychoanalysis sessions with an unusual and pleasant treatment… during our sleep, scientists say.
Are you afraid to ride the subway, to meet with your own boss, or look down from the balcony on the fifth floor? Perhaps, pillows and blankets will be just as efficient for overcoming phobias as a chair in the office of a psychiatrist. Targeting brain activity during sleep can help mitigate the effects of fear-inducing memories, researchers claim.
An “anchor”, entrenched in the brain as an association with a fearful memory, acts in the opposite way, as a healing agent during sleep.
What are phobias and where do they come from?
Phobia is an unpleasant, even painful disorder. In fact, this is a normal fear amplified many times and that reaches a pathological state. It can be provoked by anything: insects, mice, stray dogs, confined spaces, driving at high speeds. The feeling of paralyzing and panic fear is accompanied by sweating, heart palpitations, and involuntary trembling of hands and feet.
In contrast to the normal fear, which often can be managed, phobias cannot be controlled by consciousness. Attempts to try to persuade a person that the field mice are not dangerous and that driving at a hundred miles per hour is not a great speed are worthless.
It is estimated by physicians that various phobias affect more than ten million people worldwide. But since many people do not seek help, preferring to endure or avoid frightening 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 puberty or early adulthood after a traumatic situation has occurred, but many phobias affect adults as well.
The nature of a phobia can lie in the direct source of experienced troubles, driving at high speed, which led to an accident, train crash in the subway, when the person had to spend long hours in a stuffy car and felt bad, or maybe related to an unpleasant association, which later rooted in as a distinct fear.
For example, a young man after having a quarrel with his girlfriend and returning home ran into a stray aggressive dog. Unpleasant feelings after the argument were superimposed onto the fright of animal behavior, which served as a source to form a phobia.
How are phobias treated?
Today, phobias are often treated with “exposure therapy”, which involves re-living conscious experiences when patients are affected by fears. A young man in our example would be offered to imagine the stray dog again and again, first in a cage, then in another corner of the room, then somewhere in close proximity to him, and so on.
The person would have to describe their feelings during these imaginary experiences. It is known that while being in a safe environment under the supervision of a mental health professional, a traumatic response is gradually reduced, and the fear disappears.
Unfortunately, this treatment by itself is frightening. Many patients experience a lot of stress when they try to imagine themselves in a traumatic situation, and some simply refuse to repeat sessions, preferring to live with their phobias for years.
Possible to overcome phobias during sleep?
Neurologist Katrina Hauner and her colleagues from Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago (USA) are working on a less traumatic way to administer therapy by exposure. Their treatment approach is applied to a sleeping patient, and as the initial experiments indicate, it is quite effective!
It was previously believed that working with fears can only be done consciously; otherwise, it would be impossible to alter the emotional reaction of a person. But Hauner’s experiments show that it is not always necessary to “scare” patients while they are awake.
To create unpleasant memories, the scientists delivered to volunteers small electrical discharges. Simultaneously, the subjects were examining photographs of faces, each accompanied by the scent of lemon or mint.
Images and smells were “anchors”, which later strongly associated with the electric shock. Later, looking at these pictures and experiencing the same smell, the volunteers in anticipation of electric shock began sweating.
Shortly after the first stage of this training session, the subjects were told to go to sleep right in the lab, with electrodes still placed on their heads, and which were recording brain waves. In the phase of rapid eye movement (REM) when recent memories are reproduced and amplified, the air around volunteers was filled with the “scent of fear”.
This way, the researchers tried to trigger the memory of the “frightening ” face, which was associated with an electric shock. Just as during wakefulness, when exposed to the smell, sleeping patients showed signs of sweating at first.
Gradually, however, this response weakened, but the most interesting fact was that the decline in reaction to the “fear-filled” stimulus persisted after awakening.
After waking up, volunteers did not experience as much fear at the sight of the face, the accompanying smell of which they were repeatedly exposed to in their sleep.
Changes in the activity of the amygdala, the region of the brain controlling emotions and fears, showed that the treatment during sleep did not erase fearful memories, but created new, innocuous associations accompanying smells and faces in the photos. The longer study participants slept, and the more smells they were exposed to, the weaker their fear became.
This paradoxical effect, as suggested by Katrina Hauner, is due to the fact that artificial activation of unpleasant memories during sleep is more similar to that same exposure therapy than to real nightmares that do not cure, but only frighten patients even more.
According to her, repeated experiments are needed to find out how lasting the effect of treatment in sleep is, and whether it can be used to treat common, and especially chronic forms of phobias.
“This is a very unexplored field of research. In my opinion, we should focus our work on creating a more refined experimental design”.
Aromatherapy as a way to overcome phobias
Meanwhile, about a year ago, experts from Northwestern University in Illinois suggested an aromatherapy treatment of phobias in a similar way.
During the study, the volunteers were shown pictures of faces, and the demonstration of each photo was accompanied by exposure to a certain smell, a new one for each new face image. During the demonstration of one of the face photos, the participants were subjected to small electric shocks.
Researchers evaluated the extent of fear using instruments that recorded the values of skin conductivity. After the first stage of this experiment, one group of participants was told to go to sleep, while the second group was asked to stay awake.
During the sleep, the first group of volunteers was exposed to a smell, which was used in showing one of the pictures and electric shock. The experiment was repeated the next day.
It was found that those participants, who went to sleep after the first stage of the experiment, experienced much less discomfort during the demonstration of “intimidating” images. And the longer they stayed exposed to a certain smell during their sleep, the less pronounced their fear became.
The volunteers who were exposed to the smell only during waking hours, on the contrary, reacted the next day to the “dreadful” image being intimidated even more.
It seems that the method of reducing fear during sleep is indeed promising. Scientists hope that eventually, the “treatment under the blanket” can be used to overcome phobias and mental disorders that stem from traumatic experiences.
