A new study has found that practicing mindfulness could help use unlearn many worse and debilitating fears or phobias.
Researchers from various universities found evidence suggesting that mindfulness could help you to unlearn your fear responses, such as phobias that are difficult to overcome once they start affecting you.
The new study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, has suggested that if you start practicing mindfulness, you will find it easier to unlearn your phobias and remain fear-free.
The researchers recruited 26 healthy people who were randomly divided into two groups. One group received a daily mindfulness session for four weeks, while the other group received no such sessions. After four weeks, all the participants had to undergo an experiment related to the fear response for a couple of days.
They found that the participants who underwent mindfulness training did not experience a fear response on viewing the pictures that formed unpleasant associations earlier.
The participants who did not receive mindfulness training experienced fear responses.
Study author Johannes Björkstrand said, “Thanks to the study findings, we can show that mindfulness does not only have an effect on subjective experiences of negative emotions, as has been shown previously but that you can actually see clear effects on autonomic arousal responses, even with a limited amount of training.”
“It is also interesting that the intervention appears to have a specific effect on extinction retention, which is in line with previous brain imaging studies on mindfulness, and also has some implications for how these types of interventions could be used to treat anxiety-related problems in a clinical context, added Björkstrand.
Björkstrand argued that adding mindfulness treatment to current standard treatments could boost its effectiveness. “Our results suggest that if you combine mindfulness training with exposure therapy, maybe you can achieve larger and longer-lasting treatment effects,” he said.
Senior study author Prof. Ulrich Kirk said, “We are currently repeating the experiment with twice the number of participants, and the whole thing is carried out inside an fMRI-scanner equipped with an extra-strong electromagnetic field so that we can measure their brain activity to a high degree of precision throughout all parts of the experiment.” We hope to show that the effect is robust and that we can replicate the current findings, and also say what processes in the brain are involved in producing these effects.”
