After one round of treatment, the arachnophobes held the spiders in their bare hands.
Source: A Drug to Cure Fear – The New York Times
A really promising finding for the tons of people out there who suffer from these anxieties. My students know me as someone who is confident in front of them in class (I generally am!), but they hear me tell them stories about my performance anxiety as a musician, and what I’ve done to cope…I do this in part to help them identify and work through their own social phobias.
Apparently there may be a therapeutic use of propranolol (which lots of us musicians use) in that it can help support memory reconsolidation along more benign paths. Many of us who suffer from performance anxiety don’t (even after extensive therapy) have the slightest idea why we react this way…it’s sort of wired, and of course each episode becomes a memory reconsolidation in the wrong direction. Yet the challenge is, as e.g. Sara Solovitch says in her book Playing Scared, that propranolol doesn’t work 100 percent in performance situations…so one may still experience negative re-remembering.
Perhaps the answer lies (as in many things) in baby steps.
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