Benefits of VR Therapy
Anxiety is one of the most common mental health issues. Anxiety, panic attacks, or fear can interfere with your life, decrease your happiness, and prevent you from doing things that you would like to do.
The good news is that proven, research-tested anxiety treatments can produce life changing results, often within weeks, and usually without needing medication. Cognitive behavioral therapy is the primary treatment for anxiety issues and VR can make this therapy faster and easier.
VR is especially helpful when treating fears and phobias because it provides so many more options for the exposure part of therapy. Exposure is where you practice facing activities and situations that make you anxious while applying the new ways of thinking and acting you have learned in therapy. Using VR for exposure provides the client with compelling experiences that can be controlled and customized by the therapist and repeated quickly.
I have also found VR to be useful in treating a broad range of mental health issues that include anxiety. In some cases, VR experiences have helped these clients gain life-changing insights.
Illustration of a VR Headset adapter with a smartphone and VR environment
My VR therapy clients say things like:
“Overcoming my phobia opened up my life. It freed me. I felt like I got out of jail.”
“I flew and I wasn’t scared. I couldn’t have done it without virtual reality. Thank you!”
“The different visual experience made me feel better. It changed my breathing, changed my thinking. Really pulled me into the moment. It was really powerful."
“I had therapy before, but I never had a breakthrough like this.”
Clients also tell me their families see the change and appreciate their getting treatment for their anxiety. This is why even after 40 years, I still get excited about helping people overcome anxiety issues.
Using VR in Therapy
When VR is used as part of therapy, including teletherapy, the client puts on a VR headset that allows them to experience virtual environments. The therapist does not wear a VR headset. Specialized software for VR therapy allows the therapist to monitor and control what the client is seeing in VR, even if they are in different locations.
Example Therapist Workstation View
There are several types of VR headsets. For teletherapy we generally use a smartphone with an inexpensive holder or adapter (see Preparing for Teletherapy and VR Therapy). Smartphone graphics and sensors provide a very convincing virtual reality experience.
Example VR Headset
For teletherapy, an app provided by the VR therapy software vendor is loaded on your smartphone. Using this app, we exchange a code that ‘pairs’ your client headset with my therapist display at the start of each session.
Inside the VR headset is a computer graphics display that provides slightly different images for each eye so you feel like you are inside a safe three-dimensional, immersive, simulated “virtual” environment. Virtual environments may be used during several parts of therapy including diagnosis, skills training, reward, relaxation, exposure, and relapse prevention.
The most important use of VR is for the ‘exposure’ portion of cognitive behavioral therapy where you learn to face activities or situations that have caused anxiety in the past while practicing new ways of thinking and acting. Using virtual reality for this offers many advantages over the alternatives (such as imagining feared situations or facing them in real life) and enables therapy to progress more quickly.
Evidence from psychology research supports the benefits of using VR as part of therapy for anxiety. For references, see my book Virtual Reality Therapy for Anxiety: A Guide for Therapists (Routledge 2021).