fearofdriving

Can driving simulators help overcome driving phobia?

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 18:15:30 GMT

A new phobia treatment centre has opened in Spain ( Burmin Institute ) which uses virtual reality simulators to treat a range of phobias and anxiety states. The treatment – called virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) – is based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) whereby gradual exposure to the feared situation in a controlled virtual world is intended to reduce or extinguish the fear responses.

Over the years there has also been research into the efficacy of virtual reality treatments on driving phobia. For example the study by The University of Manchester ( Science Daily ).

These studies show some benefit although it can be a slow process – often taking 12 sessions over 3 months – and a costly one (creating and running the advanced simulators is expensive).

Far better then to use the greatest virtual reality simulator know to man: the human brain. Everyone’s got one and access is quick and free. But using it correctly is the trick. In fact, it’s the misuse of this wonderful simulator – the human imagination – that creates so many problems in the first place.

That’s why we can terrify ourselves with nightmares and phobics can scare themselves just by thinking about their phobic trigger. A driving phobic just has to think about a future journey and the imagination will kick in and create a disaster movie of it in their head. The brain struggles to distinguishing between reality and this near-perfect simulation and starts to trigger basic survival responses and can tip them into panic even before they get anywhere near a car.

So what we do in the MindSpa Phobia Clinic when treating the fear of driving and other phobias is to utilise the power of this virtual reality simulator using a variety of tools which rely strongly on directed visualisations to decondition the phobic patterns and responses and install calm ones for future. This can all be done in a very safe and controlled way and very quickly – typically in one or two sessions.

Life in the slow lane?

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 19:45:51 GMT

When enough is enough

With driving phobias, not only does the driving itself become physically and emotionally exhausting, but huge amounts of time and mental energy are used in planning and then driving alternative routes or else using public transport.

This is life in the slow lane.

Avoidance and manipulation take effort too.

All this starts to put pressure on work, social and family life. No longer being able to drive to work, go to the shops, visit family and friends, take the children out on trips and holidays or just drop them off at school and parties has a huge impact on day-to-day living.

Add in the embarrassment and self-doubt (“What’s wrong with me?”) to the loss of freedom, independence and spontaneity, and driving phobia becomes a real limit on living.

Amazingly though, many sufferers will accommodate driving phobia in their lives for years and even decades, believing that they are alone and no one will understand their fear of driving or be able to help. Some will be lucky enough to have opportunities not to drive at all: perhaps their partner does it all, or they live in a metropolis with congested roads and good public transport or have a private driver.

Most drivers though will get to a point – maybe because of a particularly uncomfortable incident or a change in personal circumstances – when they think “enough is enough” and do something about it. And get professional help to overcome their fear of driving.

How do people manage with a driving phobia?

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 19:19:50 GMT

People develop very similar strategies to cope with their fear of driving

Most people with a fear of driving will try and hide their anxiety and distress because they think there’s something wrong with them or they’re going mad or becoming a nervous wreck. Very rarely will they tell anyone beyond their partner or immediate family. Even then, they are unlikely to disclose the full extent of their fear.

So safety and avoidance strategies are used by the sufferer to reduce their anxiety and exposure and to conceal and accommodate their panic and embarrassment. These strategies will include:

Planning and driving alternative routes to avoid particular types of roads (like multi-lane roads, freeways and motorways). Drivers become experts on finding and driving back road routes (they love their Sat-Navs) and can even convince themselves that the bigger roads are always jammed so “it’s quicker this way”.

Using public transport like buses and trains which adds hours to their journeys.

Driving at times when the roads are clear to avoid traffic. Typically this will involve leaving for work at unsociable hours (like 5am) and returning late in the evening. It makes for a very long working day with a stressful drive home at the end.

Relying on partners or friends to drive instead or take over en route.

Making excuses to avoid driving with friends and colleagues, or giving people lifts, who might notice their anxiety: “I’m going a different way” or “I’ll meet you there”.

Manipulating people and situations to avoid having to drive.

Finding other “reasons” to turn things down like jobs, promotions, social invitations and vacations that would involve driving

Fear, as they say, is the mother of invention. But all these strategies in themselves can be quite stressful and take up time and energy to plan and execute. Then, as so often in life, what seems like a solution turns into a problem. At this point, most people acknowledge they need help to overcome their fear of driving and get professional treatment.

What is the name for a fear or phobia of driving?

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 18:26:35 GMT

Well it's not drive-o-phobia

The clinical scientific name for a phobia of driving is vehophobia .

Vehophobia is specifically an intense and irrational fear of driving a vehicle . It can manifest in various ways, such as fear of losing control, fear of accidents, fear of being trapped or fear of driving on certain roads or in specific situations.

Vehophobia is distinct from amaxophobia which is defined as the fear or phobia of being a passenger in a vehicle (rather than driving or controlling it). It is characterized by an intense and irrational fear or anxiety associated with being in a car, bus, train, plane or any other mode of transportation.

And vehophobia is not the same thing as hodophobia which is a more general fear of traveling .

We have often treated people with a driving phobia that then spreads a little into the fear of being a passenger in a car (amaxophobia). If someone only has amaxophobia it’s usually the case that they have never driven and so have not learned how to control a car and can’t understand just how much control drivers actually have. This is what frightens them.

It's important to remember that vehophobia, amaxophobia and hodophobia are all very treatable phobias with the right help.

Mark's story about overcoming driving phobia

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 11:25:21 GMT

From driving anxiety to driving calm

After 45 years of being a very confident and competent driver, having driven 000's of miles both in the UK and abroad, I found myself, over recent years, becoming increasingly anxious about driving on motorways and dual carriageways.

At first, I tried to ignore the anxiety, I would find myself trying to breathe deeply through the situation I was facing, situations such as feeling lightheaded or dizzy and getting sweaty palms. In extreme circumstances I would feel that I was not in control of the car, almost as if I was riding on the car not driving it inside and I felt as if the car would topple over, or veer, or worst case fear, I might black out.

Of course, none of those fears materialised into reality, but the feeling that they might just wouldn't go away. This increased my anxiety about driving so much that I began to find excuses not to drive. I didn't feel that I could share my feelings with anyone else, not even my nearest and dearest. I felt a failure, especially as my friends and family had always recognised me as one of the best and most competent drivers they knew. How could I tell anyone that this fear and anxiety, slowly getting worse over time was beginning to take over my life.

One day, I was on the M40 heading out of London on my own. My anxiety reached an all-time peak when I couldn't go from one junction to another and my speed was painfully slow that I knew I was a risk to other road users. At that point, I knew I had to take some action otherwise, I might never drive again.

I got home (via B roads) and broke down in tears to my wife as I explained this anxiety and fear of driving that had got worse and worse over the years and that I needed help.

I searched online and eventually found the Mindspa Phobia Clinic and the details of their driving anxiety therapy. When I read about the symptoms and their claim to cure such anxiety, I felt that there was some hope - and that I wasn't the only person to suffer in silence with the condition.

I had an initial consultation with Guy and two subsequent online sessions. Shortly after the two sessions, I drove from the Midlands to the Lakes and back for a weeks holiday, something that I thought I would never be able to do again. I now drive on motorways with much more confidence and only occasional bouts of anxiety, but I'm so much better than I was before I found Mindspa.

I'm not fearful of the thought of making a motorway journey and I thank Guy for kind of giving me my life back. I used to love driving as a young man and I feel I'm getting back to that space once again.

I totally recommend Guy and Mindspa Phobia clinic to anyone with any kind of driving anxieties - Their therapies do work.

Mark L

What are the most common triggers for driving phobia?

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 17:31:40 GMT

Driving phobias start for very similar reasons (usually raised background stress levels leading to panic) but because the initial set-up event will happen in different situations for different people, driving phobia becomes linked to different things for different people.

The most common trigger situations for driving phobia are:

Driving on wide open roads like multi-lane highways (most common)
Motorways or multi-lane highways with no hard shoulder or emergency lane
Fast busy roads (so having to drive at speed)
Bridges & flyovers
Overtaking (especially large or long vehicles)
Being tail-gated
Being boxed in by heavy traffic
Being close to particular vehicles (usually large or high-sided ones)
Aggressive drivers
Hills (or even slight inclines up or down)
High, mountainous roads
Tunnels
Particular routes (especially unfamiliar roads)
Bends (can be left or right or both)
Cambers (usually adverse)
Complicated junctions
Restrictive roadworks
Traffic lights
Night driving
Poor weather conditions

Driving phobias often start on multi-lane highways and spread to dual carriageways, then to smaller roads restricting the routes, speed and distances that can be travelled.

Driving Phobia Case Study: The Psychiatrist

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

A psychiatrist who had driven very happily for many years developed a driving phobia when her grandmother became very ill.

Her grandmother was in a care home an hour’s drive away and the only times the psychiatrist could visit her was before she went to work each day. So she would get up early, drive out to see her grandmother and then drive on to work.

This became very stressful because not only was she stressed by her grandmother being unwell, she was getting up very early each day and this was exhausting her. Added to that her visits were always very upsetting with her grandmother always begging her not to leave her there.

One day, after a visit to her grandmother she experienced a moment of mild panic when driving to the office. This was the beginning of her driving phobia. It was brought on by physical and emotional stress.

Not wanting to self-medicate with drugs (few doctors we see take their own medicine), she came to the MindSpa Phobia Clinic for help and was so surprised by the result that she is now studying the techniques we use in the clinic because all her training had led her to believe that change could not happen so quickly.

Making sense of driving phobia

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

The most frustrating thing about a driving phobia – indeed about any phobia – is that it doesn’t seem to make sense.

Part of you knows that you are probably a good, competent driver and that nothing else has changed. You have the driving experience and the skills. The roads and traffic are still the same. But no matter what you tell yourself – or others tell you (if you’ve had the courage to tell anyone about your driving phobia) – all the logic and reason doesn’t make any difference because the irrational unconscious mind kicks in and says “No, feel frightened, feel scared”.

So a fear of driving will often start to affect self-confidence and self-esteem. “Why me? Why can’t I change this?”.

Probably even more frustrating, willpower doesn’t seem to change a fear of driving either. Other things in life respond to willpower and effort: you apply some willpower and they change. But the driving phobia doesn’t. Well, again, that’s because it’s a different part of your mind that’s been driving the fear. Willpower is a function of your conscious mind and has little effect on your powerful unconscious, especially when it’s talking “survival”.

But a driving phobia does make some sense at an unconscious level. The unconscious mind is trying to protect you from what it began to imagine were life-threatening driving situations. It attached all kinds of uncomfortable feelings to those situations to try and make it so uncomfortable you wouldn’t even go there, so by its own “logic” you would stay safe and survive.

So any effective driving phobia treatment needs to work with the creative unconscious mind that created the fear to start with. And that is exactly what our program does: it uses a range of powerful psychological tools to decondition the fear responses and install some calm patterns for future so you can drive in comfort and feel in control again.

If driving phobia was all to do with logic and reason then you wouldn’t have a driving phobia and you wouldn’t need our program .

Lucy Atkins tries a quick cure for glossophobia

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Lucy Atkins writing in The Telegraph, Saturday 1 November 2008

“I could probably cure just about any phobia in five minutes” says Guy Baglow, psychologist and founder of the Phobia Clinic. As I lie back in his comfy Harley Street offices, it would be an understatement to say that I feel cynical. Still, my glossophobia — fear of public speaking — is the most common problem Baglow treats. It’s estimated that as many as 75 per cent of us suffer from it, hence the old joke that the average person at a funeral would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy.

Currently, Baglow’s schedule is packed with nervy City bankers riding out the credit crunch. “They’re terrified that if they can’t present themselves brilliantly they’ll be out,” he says.

A phobia can develop over several years or strike suddenly. “It can happen to anyone,” says Baglow. His clients tend to be high-octane career people, hobbled by their fear of public speaking. One was a police chief, who, although confident when dealing with terrorists, had a paralysing dread of making a presentation.

Then there was the top Texan salesman who was used to presenting material to hundreds but who froze on day one of a new job in front of only 20 people. His confidence plummeted and, like me, he ended up on Baglow’s couch.

My own presentational nadir came 18 months ago when, at short notice, I had to introduce a famous writer to 300 people at a literary festival. The sea of faces triggered a powerful physical reaction: my limbs shook, my mouth dried up and my mind went blank. I was just about able to speak, waveringly, but feared that I might collapse at any moment. I have since, through dread, turned down interesting speaking and interviewing opportunities. “People go to enormous efforts to avoid what scares them,” says Baglow. “This can seriously hamper careers.”

Sometimes the cause is deep-rooted. One City bigwig developed a sweaty back, neck and shoulders when giving speeches. During his treatment, it emerged that, in childhood, his father would stand over him threateningly as he recited his times tables.

Baglow’s technique, known as the “fast phobia cure”, breaks these negative psychological associations and replaces them with new, calm and positive ones.

I close my eyes, put on headphones and let Baglow’s hypnotic voice take me back to that awful literary event. I run through it in my head as if watching a black-and-white movie. We fast-forward my “movie”, then rewind it at high speed, several times. This “deconditioning” exercise removes negative emotions (there is no time to feel them), creating a sense of control. I then envisage a confident “future self’ before an admiring audience, and “fast-forward rewind” this scenario a few times. At the end of the two-hour session I feel weirdly confident: I could almost rush straight to Speakers’ Corner and let rip.

“No one needs to live with a phobia,” says Baglow. He claims to have cured many phobias — about anything from tomatoes to sharks and, memorably, male strippers — in a couple of sessions. There is no need for Freudian analysis, tears or tearing out of hair, he says.

Whether I am cured remains to be seen. But one client, a quaking banker with a public-speaking phobia, has just enrolled on a stand-up comedy course. There is hope for us all.

Crisps, keyboards, pens – how do you treat an unusual phobia?

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 15:35:15 GMT

When you are plagued by unusual fears, people’s reactions can be the hardest thing to bear. One writer with a phobia of jewellery explores what can be done

Chris Evans, The Guardian, 12 June 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jun/12/how-do-you-treat-an-unusual-phobia ?

If a friend confided in you they had a fear of door handles or toenail clippings, would you laugh or sympathise? The instinctive reaction might be the former, but we can all get phobias of absolutely anything, and some can be debilitating. I have lived with my own fear of jewellery for as long as I can remember. If you were to place a metallic necklace or earring into my hands, it would send a shiver through my body, I’d feel instantly sick, have to throw the object away and wash my hands. The response from family, friends and colleagues has only ever been amusement or bemusement. I can live a normal life, despite consternation from some for not wearing a wedding ring, and have never got to the root cause.

Phobias are described as an overwhelming and debilitating fear of something. They are more pronounced than just fears alone. A dislike of rats, for example, is pretty common. But if it extends to musophobia (a fear of mice or rats), then it can be life-changing. “One person called our helpline who was so scared of rats they couldn’t even say the word ‘rat’ itself,” explains Trilby Breckman, a development manager at the charity organisation Triumph Over Phobia (TOP UK) . “It was stopping her going out for fear of seeing one.”

Breckman cites similar stories, including a teenager with a phobia of crisps who struggled at social occasions. Another woman had a phobia of bananas, which caused problems at work and meant she couldn’t go to the supermarket without panicking. But it was other people’s reactions that caused the most discomfort. Breckman says that when a close relative found out, “she posted a photo on Instagram of herself with a banana milkshake captioned: ‘Look what I’m having!’ Ahead of a family holiday, she sent another saying: ‘I’ve already bought my bikini,’ and it had bananas on it.” Unfortunately, these kinds of responses, particularly on social media, can be quite common. The internet can be a useful tool, such as with phobia forums where phobics can share their stories and experiences – but, equally, it opens up a world of unhelpful reactions.

The problem with phobias is that they often don’t make sense. Outsiders question why the sufferer is afraid of birdseed, camels, red paint or jewellery. I’ve been asked so many times: “How can you be afraid of jewellery? Followed by, “It’s not going to hurt you.” But they don’t realise it’s a different part of the brain, the subconscious, where we have patterns and responses around spiders or whatever the phobia might be, which are triggered and make us feel uncomfortable.

Delving beneath the surface to reveal the deeper – and potentially darker – causes can be a disturbing but ultimately rewarding journey. The “ fast phobia cure ” is one common treatment method that targets the traumatic episode or experience that caused the phobia. It involves getting the phobic to reimagine the incident, but from a different perspective. “It’s like watching a film in the cinema, so they’re not inside the experience, but looking at it from a detached point of view,” explains Guy Baglow, the director of Mindspa Phobia Clinic . “The problem with phobias is that the person can keep replaying the scary memory in their mind, that is how it is sustained. By getting them to replay the memory in a disassociated way, the emotional response doesn’t trigger. You can then get them to replay the film again and change a few things. Rapidly it will then just become a normal memory reclassified as non-threatening.”

Baglow cites an interesting case of a woman who had a fear of spiders that stemmed from the second world war. “When she was a little girl, there was an air raid and she and her mum ran to the shelter in the garden. A loud bomb exploded nearby, she was absolutely terrified and screamed, and it was at that point that a spider dropped down in front of her face,” says Baglow. “Of course, the spider then became associated with that fear. So things that are in that emotional snapshot can also trigger the same response. It’s called pattern matching. We used fast phobia therapy to change how that memory was experienced and removed the phobic trigger.”

Another common treatment method is exposure therapy, part of the cognitive behavioural therapy approach. “We can recreate the panic sensation and symptoms people feel through exercises in the sessions, such as hyperventilation, which encourage them to breathe very quickly,” explains Linda Thorden, a cognitive behavioural therapist and clinical psychologist. “On some occasions, people with certain phobias, such as agoraphobia, think they are going to die when they have a panic attack. We try to demonstrate to them that they are not going to. We would then gradually encourage them to tackle the phobia itself through exposure and desensitisation.”

TOP UK holds weekly self-help groups, often run by former phobics. “There’s no secret tablet,” says Breckman. “People have to work at it. We had one guy who came to us for six weeks and never said a word. He just sat there. Then eventually he managed to say: ‘I’ve got a social phobia,’ and ran out of the room. But he came back the following week and within a year he was running the group himself.”

Some phobias can even be life-threatening – such as a fear of needles. “This can be a real problem if someone has cancer or high blood pressure and needs injections,” says Nicky Lidbetter, chief executive of Anxiety UK . “Over the years, hundreds of people have contacted us with very serious conditions, but not been able to access treatment because of their anxiety. They can’t cope with hospitals or medical procedures. So, actually, their phobia becomes bigger than the cancer, diabetes or high blood pressure that needs treating.”

Similarly, emetophobia – a fear of being sick – can negatively affect people’s lives. One phobic (who wishes not to be named) says: “I couldn’t have children because I was terrified I might get morning sickness during the pregnancy.” Lidbetter mentions others who heavily restrict their diets or retreat from society altogether when there is a sickness bug around.

“Emetophobia can be very disabling. It often develops into obsessive compulsive-type symptoms as well, in terms of cleaning and checking, and trying to avoid any risk of contamination,” says David Veale, a consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS trust and a specialist in emetophobia. As for the cause of the condition, Lidbetter and Veale explain it could be from a bad experience of being sick as a child or seeing a parent being violently sick.

Other treatment methods include hypnotherapy, mindfulness and flooding: a full-immersion behavioural therapy in which the patient has to endure the phobic object for a prolonged period (eg a room full of spiders) until they eventually calm down. There have also been new developments in virtual-reality therapy. “We are testing VR for emetophobia,” explains Veale. “It’s essentially putting the goggles on and seeing yourself vomit. It sounds nasty, but it’s about experiencing the triggers – the smells, sounds and sights.” However, some remain sceptical. “It’s a nice idea, but I think they’re getting too excited by their own technology,” argues Baglow. “We don’t need virtual reality because the brain is the best virtual-reality generator we have. Indeed, that is why we can get so frightened because our minds can create all sorts of disaster movies and ‘what if’ scenarios.”

Overall, the more that can be done to raise awareness, the better. “We need to get to a stage where everyone can openly talk about their phobia problems without being ridiculed or judged,” says Lidbetter. As for me, I’ve been convinced to try therapy, but am still deciding which path to take.

The Fast Phobia Cure *

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The Fast Phobia Cure (also known as the Rewind Technique or, in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), as “The Visual-Kinaesthetic Dissociation Technique”) is an advanced tool to decondition phobias and trauma (such as PTSD). Its efficacy has been assessed in many academic papers such as the work by Gray & Liotta. It’s safe, gentle and without the drugs, scare tactics, psychological archaeology and exposure used by the older and less effective phobia treatments.

The Fast Phobia Cure* is now widely accepted as the most reliable and effective treatment for all kinds of phobias, even long-standing and severe ones. It’s probably the single most reliable and effective tool in psychotherapy today and is being used more and more as a front-line treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder including trauma caused by accidents, assaults, war and witnessing critical incidents.

If you have ever seen someone being almost instantly released from their phobia on TV and thought “Wow, how did they do that?” you can bet the therapist used The Fast Phobia Cure.

So how does it work?

A phobia is driven by a pattern-matching process whereby the unconscious mind creates “fear templates” around “dangerous” things or situations to try and keep you safe from the imagined threat in future. It then broadly matches these patterns to more and more situations as a phobia develops.

What Fast Phobia Cure does, in a very creative way, is interfere with those patterns – it subtly changes the templates by changing the way we experience the memories – so when the unconscious mind tries to match the patterns, they don’t match anymore and the anxiety is no longer triggered. The templates (memories) will still be there, they will just feel different. The emotional tag will be gone. The phobia just won’t work anymore.

This can all be done very quickly because the brain learns very fast. It learned to be phobic very fast. Teaching it how not to be phobic can be, and is necessarily, equally fast. It does not take long-term treatment. The mind can then start to generalise outwards, but this time in a very positive way, as it begins to associate more and more situations with feelings of calm and control.

One of the great things about The Fast Phobia Cure is that it is non-intrusive: the therapist doesn’t need to know the precise details of the traumatic memories or phobic encounters because the sufferer brings their content (their experiences) to the process.

The methodology of the Fast Phobia Cure was first developed by Richard Bandler, one of the founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) – the new science of excellence and personal change. It is so effective at detraumatising memories that it is being used more and more as a front-line treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder including trauma caused by accidents, assaults, war and witnessing critical incidents.

Fear or Phobia?

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Phobias are not the same as normal fear responses.

It is normal, for example, to experience some fear when on a precipice or in the presence of a snake. But not to be terrified at the thought of a high place or snake. It is the overwhelming terror that distinguishes a phobia. And the consistent and compulsive avoidance of the thing or situation.

If you have a phobia you will be able to induce some of the common fear responses – shortness of breath, sweating, dizziness, nausea, increased heart-rate, flushing, shaking – just by thinking about the trigger.

You are likely to have only one phobia. You may have other fears, but probably only one phobia. People generally seem to have the capacity for one proper phobia.

Types of Phobia

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 17:32:17 GMT

Our clients bring with them some very interesting examples of phobias. These phobias fall into two types:

Specific or Simple phobias

These are phobias linked to a specific object or situation. Examples are spiders, snakes, bees, worms, frogs, birds, dogs, cats, hedgehogs, goldfish, sharks, vomiting, driving, flying clowns, balloons, thunder, needles, blood, dentists, beards, buttons, velvet, feathers, lifts and marbles.

Specific phobias can also be generalised – for example to all slimy green reptiles rather than just frogs. This seems to happen when the original traumatic event can’t be recalled.

Non-specific phobias

These phobias produce a more general anxiety or terror linked to social or performance situations and are often accompanied by panic attacks. Agoraphobia (open spaces), claustrophobia (confined spaces) and social phobia (public speaking, being the centre of attention) are non-specific phobias.

Phobia Names

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 17:26:17 GMT

Most people know the technical, scientific name for their phobia. This may give them some comfort: it has a name so they know they are not the first person in the world to have the phobia. But whatever the phobia, someone else has it whether or not it has been given a Greek/Latin name.

And knowing its name probably hasn’t helped them deal with it. In fact, just the opposite: we know that some phobics experience anxiety at the mention of the scientific name. A person with a phobia of long words won’t be helped by knowing they have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

So we rarely use these names in our clinics and we haven’t listed them here.

The Science of Phobias

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 10:36:49 GMT

There are two parts to your mind – one that thinks, and one that feels. The thinking part is the conscious, rational mind that you are using now as you read this.

The feeling part is the unconscious, emotional mind. It takes care of automatic tasks like regulating the heart, controlling pain and managing our instincts.

It’s the unconscious mind that is programmed to act instinctively in times of danger. It reacts very fast – making you run or fight – rather than allowing your thinking mind to philosophise while you are attacked by a tiger. This has great survival value.

The unconscious mind is also a very fast learner. The same emergency route that can bypass the rational mind in times of danger can also stamp strong emotional experiences (traumatic ones) in the unconscious mind. This makes evolutionary sense – it ensures that we have vivid imprints of the things that threaten us.

And just like we have two minds, so we have two memory systems: one for the facts and one for the emotions that may or may not go with those facts.

Sometimes, when a person experiences a very traumatic event, the highly emotional memory of the event becomes trapped – locked in the emotional brain. In an area called the amygdala – the emotional storehouse. There is no chance for the rational mind to process it and save it as an ordinary, non-threatening memory in factual storage (in the hippocampus). Like the memory of what you did last Sunday.

Instead, the emotional brain holds onto this unprocessed reaction pattern because it thinks it needs it for survival. And it will trigger it whenever you encounter a situation or object that is anything like the original trauma. It doesn’t have to be a precise match.

This is pure survival again. You only need to see part of a tiger through the bushes for the fear reaction to kick in again – for the “fight or flight” response to trigger – you don’t have to wait until you see the whole tiger or identify it exactly as the tiger that attacked you before. In fact, it probably only has to be something orange and black moving through the bushes. This is why the pattern matching process is necessarily approximate, or sloppy. You err on the side of safety. You don’t have to have all the details to know if something is dangerous.

This is the basis of a phobia: a fear response attached to something that was present in the original trauma. The response is terror, shaking, sweating, heart pounding etc. And because of the sloppy pattern-matching it can be stuck to literally anything – animal, mineral or vegetable. It may not even be glued to the thing that caused the trauma. So, a child attacked in a pram by a dog may develop a phobia of prams rather than of dogs.

It is because phobias are created in this way, by our natural psycho-neurology, that they are so common. It’s the way we are wired. Approximately 10% of people have a phobia. And it’s precisely because they are created by the unconscious mind that they seem so irrational. Of course they are – the rational thinking brain hasn’t had a chance to go to work on them.

Many traditional phobia treatments, including drugs, attempt to deal with the phobia by calming things down after this response pattern has triggered. They treat the symptoms, not the cause.

To treat the cause, this trapped traumatic memory has to be turned into, and saved as, an ordinary unemotional memory of a past event. The emotional tag, the terror response, needs to be unstuck from that object or situation.

This is exactly what the Fast Phobia Cure* does. It allows you to review the traumatic event or memory from a calm and dissociated, or disconnected, state. Your rational mind can then do its work in turning the memory into an ordinary, neutral, non-threatening one. And store it in factual memory where it should have been to start with. This happens very quickly. The mind learns fast. It learned the fear response quickly and it learns the neutral response just as quickly. And when that happens your phobia is gone. You are free.

Can driving simulators help overcome driving phobia?

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Over the years there has also been research into the efficacy of virtual reality treatments on driving phobia. For example the study by The University of Manchester ( Science Daily ).

These studies show some benefit although it can be a slow process – often taking 12 sessions over 3 months – and a costly one (creating and running the advanced simulators is expensive).

The misery of weird phobias

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Having a fear of buttons may sound hilarious, but in reality it can be debilitating. Patients need to be taken more seriously, by both the media and doctors, say experts

Serena Bergman in The Guardian, 5 December 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/05/the-misery-of-weird-phobias-in-the-office-there...

Andy, a 32-year-old IT consultant, is used to people laughing at him when he tries to explain his crippling fear of buttons, specifically those on shirts and jackets.

“I’ve worked in corporate environments, full of people in suits, and there are buttons everywhere you look. This situation is to me what other people may feel being locked in a burning building, or drowning and not be able to swim to the surface,” he says, his voice audibly shaking at the mere thought of rooms full of shirt buttons.

Andy’s condition is called koumpounophobia. It is not as common as some phobias – but still affects around one in every 75,000 people. Sufferers report losing contact with family and friends because they are unable to attend weddings and funerals, or abandoning their careers and doing jobs that allow for remote working or casual clothing.

Phobias are irrational fears which are classified as either simple – of a particular object, such as in Andy’s case – or complex, when they pertain to a circumstance or situation. Because of the ridicule sufferers are often met with, people tend to suffer in silence and phobias go untreated. “I thought I’d be laughed out of a GP’s office,” says Andy. “I knew this was a real thing, but didn’t know how to explain it without feeling like an idiot.”

Another reason many people don’t seek help is because of what the treatment entails. The NHS offers cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to people with phobias, which includes “exposure” to the object of the fear. A person develops a phobia when their brain has learned to respond to certain non-dangerous situations (such as seeing a small spider) with a “fight-or-flight” response, which causes symptoms that include panic attacks, palpitations, hysterical crying, and the urge to run. Exposure can work because if patients slowly learn to respond to seeing, say, a spider in a calm way – eventually even holding one in their hands – they can essentially “rewire” their brains. But the thought of facing a phobia in such a way can, understandably, be terrifying.

Around 10 million people in the UK suffer from phobias, yet research into causes and treatments is incredibly limited compared with other mental health conditions. Nicky Lidbetter, chief executive of Anxiety UK, has herself suffered from phobias and is a keen supporter of CBT treatment, but argues it needs to be improved and that further research is crucial.

“I remember when anxiety used to be bundled in with depression, despite being a very different condition. We worked hard to raise the profile of anxiety as a separate disorder that could be just as crippling. This is what we need to do with phobias,” she says. “Because they often seem comical and irrational, the media doesn’t take them seriously and I think this mentality has seeped into the medical world, which is why there’s so little funding and research.”

Amy is a 25-year-old marketing manager based in Leeds. She says: “I knew that if I told a doctor I was scared of heights they’d make me go on a rollercoaster or something. Just seeing a long flight of stairs was making my heart race. I’d start to shake, and couldn’t stop myself from running away.” Amy eventually sought help when she and her boyfriend were looking to move in together and it became too limiting to find a ground-floor or basement flat.

Her treatment involved various exercises, such going up in a lift every day and getting off one floor higher each week. She is now able to manage her phobia, although it hasn’t disappeared.

CBT and exposure therapy has been proven effective in a lot of cases, but some experts disagree with the way it is applied across-the-board to all patients. Guy Baglow is the director of Mindspa Phobia Clinic in Harley Street, London . “CBT is about correcting thinking patterns, and it works really well for a lot of conditions, but I don’t think it’s effective in treating phobias,” he says. “We deal with a lot of clients who have had exposure therapy, and it has actually reinforced the patterns we want to break. CBT tackles the conscious mind, trying to teach us to reason against our phobias, but most people know their phobias are irrational to begin with, so this doesn’t feel helpful.”

Despite being overwhelmed at the prospect of exposure, Andy did eventually see his GP, who referred him to a counsellor. “She was really friendly but I had to wait a month for a half-hour phone consultation, and then all I was going to have was one 45-minute session every two weeks. By this point I was too terrified to leave the house.”

Even at home, Andy was in a constant state of alert. TV and movies were impossible, in case a close-up of a button appeared onscreen. He needed urgent help. “I moved back in with my parents and spent hundreds of pounds on intensive private therapy, but after a couple of sessions they tried to make me look at some pictures of shirts, and I started panicking. I couldn’t get the image out of my head for weeks and it made me constantly terrified. I couldn’t go back.”

More recently, though, life has become a little easier, and he recently bought his first ever pair of button-fly jeans. “I’m so lucky to have had the support system I do, because without my family I really think I might have considered taking my own life,” he says. “Looking back, it’s so tragic to realise that while my friends were joking about my weird little quirk and playing pranks on me, on the inside I was battling my own brain every minute of every day. It was so exhausting and stressful, I can’t imagine anyone would find it funny if they knew what it was really like.”

Names have been changed.

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Crisps, keyboards, pens – how do you treat an unusual phobia?