2-Hour Therapy Cures Spider Phobia by Rewiring the Brain!!!
Getting up close and personal with a furry
tarantula is probably the very last thing
someone with a spider phobia would opt
for, but the encounter may be the ticket to
busting the brain's resistance to arachnids.
A tried-and-true exposure therapy, this one
lasting just hours, changed activity in the
brain's fear regions just minutes after the
session was complete, researchers found.
"Before treatment, some of these
participants wouldn't walk on grass for
fear of spiders or would stay out of their
home or dorm room for days if they
thought a spider was present," said lead
study author Katherina Hauner,
postdoctoral fellow in neurology at
Northwestern University Feinberg School of
Medicine, in a statement.
After a single therapy session lasting up to
three hours, "they were able to walk right
up and touch or hold a tarantula. And they
could still touch it after six months," Hauner
said.
Spider phobia is a type of anxiety disorder
called specific phobia, which also includes
phobias of blood, needles, snakes, enclosed
places and others. About 9.4 percent of the
U.S. population has experienced a specific
phobia at some point in their lifetime, Hauner said.
Hauner told Live Science she hopes people
who have specific phobias, particularly of
spiders, will realize that successful
treatments are out there, and that their
phobias can take just hours to cure (though
some cases can take a couple weeks to
cure, she noted). "It's still not easy. It involves being motivated to overcome your fear."
No comments:
Post a Comment