Why Mindfulness & Meditation Might not be the answer for Phobias
In the last 20+ years there has been an explosion of interest, both in and out of the therapy world, in mindfulness and meditation as a therapeutic technique. Mindfulness based therapy has become wildly popular among many of my colleagues. I have used these techniques myself to assist people with becoming more present and less fearful and focused on the future. Anxiety in general is all about the future.

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Why Mindfulness & Meditation Might not be the answer for Phobias
In the last 20+ years there has been an explosion of interest, both in and out of the therapy world, in mindfulness and meditation as a therapeutic technique. Mindfulness-based therapy has become wildly popular among many of my colleagues. I have used these techniques myself to assist people with becoming more present and less fearful and focused on the future. Anxiety in general is all about the future. It is about anticipating and then fearing something that hasn’t happened yet. So mindfulness techniques can be a very powerful way to counteract fear of something in the future by reminding sufferers that the anxiety they feel is something that they are projecting and reacting to is not happening in the present. Anxiety is a prediction of something that has not yet happened and may not happen in the future. It is a type of fortune telling. Mindfulness brings us back more fully into the present and reminds us how bad we are about predicting the future.

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The difficulty in applying this to phobias and general and flying phobias specifically is that while a specific phobia like Aviophobia is a fear about something bad that may happen in the future, it is also a reaction to something bad that happened in the past. It is a memory of a past ‘bad’ experience that is connected and generalized to a fear about a future similar bad or even worse experience with that thing or situation. Simply relying on mindfulness or meditation alone, without doing something else, risks exacerbating the phobia because what is present is a powerful neurological and unconscious association of a thing or experience with a bad reaction to it. In this regard, having someone become mindful of the thing or experience they fear might intensify or heighten their sensitivity to it. This is likely the reason for some research shows adverse effects of mindfulness and meditation on mental health as follows:
Psychological Distress: A 2022 study involving 953 regular meditators in the US found that over 10% of participants experienced adverse effects, such as anxiety, depression, and psychotic or delusional symptoms. These effects were significant enough to impact their daily lives for at least a month.
Dissociation and Depersonalization: Some individuals report feeling disconnected from reality or experiencing episodes of dissociation and depersonalization, where the world feels “unreal”.
Trauma Re-experiencing: Meditation can sometimes lead to the re-experiencing of traumatic events, which can be distressing and counterproductive for individuals with a history of trauma. Too Much Mindfulness Can Worsen Your Mental Health. The study found that out of a group of 96 women who had participated in one of 3 types of 8-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, over half of them reported at least one meditation-related adverse effect, which ranged from perceptual hypersensitivity to nightmares to re-experiencing trauma. Over one third of them reported negative effects on their daily functioning. Among the most serious and common side effects reported were:
- Dysregulated arousal (energy problems; disrupted sleep/wake cycles)
- Anxiety
- Signs of dissociation
- Emotional blunting (feeling emotionless)
- Flashbacks
- Compromised executive dysfunction (problems making decisions, memory lapses, cognitive impairments, etc.)
- Social withdrawal
- Perceptual hypersensitivity
Moreover, negative effects have been documented in Buddhist texts that are hundreds of years old.
In my view, there is nothing wrong with the use of mindfulness techniques as a post-therapy supplement to other proven methods for resolving phobia and PTSD. Once the brain has been rewired, these techniques can help solidify the changes by fostering awareness of and comfort with their newly reset positive association to what is no longer a feared situation or experience. But for those with a phobia of specific things or situations, simply teaching someone to become more aware of the present can worsen the situation since there is an association of a past experience with something in the present.
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