Conquering Your Phobia With Virtual Reality Treatments

In moderation, fear is actually a good thing. It's a survival instinct that helps us avoid activities and creatures that can harm us. But sometimes that fear increases out of proportion to the actual danger. While most of us eventually get past our fears -- or at least learn to live with them -- people with phobias are held prisoner by an irrational sense of panic.

Some experts estimate that nearly 80% of people with phobias don't seek treatment because the thought of facing their fear is too overwhelming. But the benefit of treatment for a phobia is well worth it: a life without limitations imposed by fear.

Exposure therapy is the most common method of treatment for phobias. It’s a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy and involves putting yourself into increasingly stressful scenarios involving your particular phobia and overcoming your fear with new learning.

Likewise, if you have a driving phobia, having a therapist take you on the road can be unsafe, as you may panic when driving through a tunnel or merging onto the highway. In these kinds of situations, virtual reality exposure therapy may be preferable to the real thing.

Virtual treatments for phobia. Virtual reality treatments involve computer programs that simulate, for example, sitting on a plane or driving a car. You wear a head-mounted display equipped with video cameras and earphones so that you can receive both visual and audio cues. To increase the sense of realism, some clinics may treat aviophobia (the fear of flying) by having you sit in an airplane seat on top of vibrating platforms to simulate the plane's engines running beneath you.

A study published in Behavior Therapy compared virtual reality exposure therapy with standard exposure therapy in people afraid to fly and found that both treatments resulted in a 76% success rate. The majority of participants in both groups also maintained their success at the 12-month follow-up.