Every person has a fear, secret or overt. Someone is afraid of public speeches or bosses to trembling hands, someone is afraid of heights, high speeds or stuffy confined spaces. Phobias are common, but getting rid of them is not easy. Perhaps a visit to a psychiatrist will soon replace the unusual and pleasant treatment … in a dream, scientists say.
Afraid of taking the subway, meeting your boss, or looking down from your fifth-floor balcony? Perhaps, instead of a chair in a psychiatrist's office, a pillow and blanket will soon be enough to treat such phobias. Targeting the brain during sleep will help reduce the effects of scary memories, the researchers say. The “anchor”, which is fixed in the brain as an association with a terrible memory, acts in a dream in the opposite way - as a healing agent.
Phobia is an unpleasant, even excruciating disorder. In fact, this is a common fear, amplified many times over and reaching pathology. Anything can provoke it: insects, mice, stray dogs, confined spaces, driving at high speeds. The feeling of paralyzing, panic horror is accompanied by sweating, heart palpitations, and involuntary tremors of the arms and legs.
Unlike common fear, which can most often be dealt with, the phobia is beyond conscious control. It is useless to persuade a person that field mice are not dangerous, and that one hundred kilometers per hour is not a great speed at all. According to rough estimates of doctors, more than ten million people worldwide suffer from various phobias. But since many of them do not seek help, preferring to endure or avoid situations that are frightening for them, the true number of people suffering from uncontrollable fear is probably more.
Doctors say that most obsessive fears appear in late adolescence or adolescence after a traumatic situation has arisen, but can also appear in mature people. The object of a phobia can be the immediate source of trouble - driving at high speed, which led to an accident, a train breakdown in the metro, because of which a person was forced to spend a long time in a stuffy carriage and felt bad; or maybe an unpleasant association, which later became a separate fear. For example, a young man, having quarreled with a girl, on the way home met a stray dog that was behaving aggressively. The unpleasant feelings after the quarrel were superimposed on the fear from the behavior of the animal, which served as the basis for the formation of the phobia.
These days, phobias are most often treated with "exposure therapy," which requires patients to consciously experience their fears repeatedly. The young man from our example would be asked over and over to imagine a stray dog - first in a cage, in another corner of the office, then sitting not far from him, and so on - and describe his feelings during these fantasies. It is believed that when experiencing feelings in a safe environment under the supervision of a specialist, the traumatic response gradually decreases and the fear disappears.
Unfortunately, this treatment is daunting in itself. Many patients experience tremendous stress when trying to imagine themselves in a traumatic situation, and some simply refuse to repeat sessions, preferring to live with their phobia for years. Neurologist Katerina Hauner and her colleagues at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, USA, are working to create a much less painful form of exposure therapy. Their method of treatment is applied to a sleeping patient, and, as the first experiments show, is quite effective!
Previously, it was believed that work with fear can only happen consciously, otherwise it would be impossible to achieve a change in a person's emotional reaction. But Hauner's experiments show that it is not necessary to scare patients in reality.
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To create unpleasant memories, the scientists exposed the volunteers to a small electrical discharge. At the same time, the participants in the experiment looked at photographs of faces, each of which was also accompanied by the scent of lemon or mint. Photos and smells served as “anchors” that were later strongly associated with electric shock. Subsequently, observing these photos and smelling the same smell, the volunteers began to sweat a little in anticipation of the electric shock.
Soon after the first part of the training, the subjects were put to bed right in the laboratory, with electrodes attached to their skulls that read brain waves. During slow wave sleep, when recent memories are played back and amplified, the air around the volunteers was filled with the "scent of fear." Thus, the researchers tried to evoke the memory of the "frightening" face, which was associated with electric shock. As in the waking period, when exposed to the smell, sleepers initially showed increased sweating. However, this reaction gradually decreased, and the most interesting thing is that the decrease in the response to the “terrible” stimulus persisted even after awakening.
When the volunteers woke up, they were no longer so much afraid at the sight of the face, the smell of which they had repeatedly smelled in their sleep. Changes in activity in the amygdala, an area of the brain responsible for emotion and fear, showed that the sleep treatment did not erase the scary memories, but created new, harmless associations with the smell and face in the photo. The longer the participants slept and the more scents they inhaled, the weaker their fear became.
The paradoxical effect, as Katerina Hauner suggests, is that the artificial activation of unpleasant memories during sleep is more like the very exposure therapy than real nightmares that do not cure, but only frighten even more. Repeated experiments are required to determine how long the sleep treatment will last and whether it will be effective in treating real, especially chronic phobias, she said. “This is the newest area of research. I think we should work on improving the experimental design."
Meanwhile, a year ago, specialists from Northwestern University in Illinois (USA) proposed the treatment of phobias with aromatherapy according to a similar scheme. During the study, volunteers were shown images of faces, and each photo was shown to breathe a specific scent, new for each new image. When showing one of the photographs, the participants were subjected to a small electric shock. Scientists assessed the level of fear using devices that register indicators of skin conductivity. After the first stage of the experiment, some of the participants were sent to sleep, while the second was sent to stay awake. During sleep, a smell was spread around the volunteers from the first group, which accompanied the demonstration of one of the photographs and an electric shock. The test was repeated the next day.
It was found that participants who slept after the first phase of the experiment experienced much less discomfort when exposed to the "frightening" image. Moreover, the longer they inhaled the corresponding aroma during sleep, the less their fear turned out to be. Those volunteers who smelled the smell only during wakefulness, on the contrary, reacted to the "dangerous" picture even more the next day. It seems that the method of relieving fear during sleep really turned out to be promising. Scientists hope that the “blanket treatment” will ultimately prove useful in correcting true phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Yana Filimonova