Why Use A Method from EMDR In Healthy Individuals?

By Dr. Amy Serin, Chief Therapeutic Advisor

 

EMDR Therapy is a gold standard therapy for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Yet most people don’t have PTSD, so why should you consider using a method from EMDR to help with general stress?

The answer lies in understanding how bi-lateral stimulation (BLS) helps the brain recover from stress in real-time in people without PTSD.  In anyone’s brain, the network that integrates sensory information (the salience network), effectively toggles a stress switch up and down based on incoming information from outside and inside your body. This is why you can have a disturbing thought come up automatically and feel stress in the moment when it’s not even happening.  We don’t want to feel stress, but sometimes it’s an automatic reaction to a trigger that we wish we could control.  This happens multiple times a day in people without PTSD- some trigger (a thought, reminder, loud sound, etc.) occurs and the stress switch goes up (also called emotional arousal or hyperarousal if it goes way up). Applying BLS at that moment changes the salience network’s response and the stress switch goes down. Because BLS works so fast, the result of lower stress in response to the trigger also means that trigger won’t create the same stress response in the future! So, it’s effectively changing the brain’s response pattern without you having to do a ton of therapy or cognitive work (which is still needed but is most effective when your stress levels are low to moderate- so using BLS first can get you in the zone where these methods work best).

A recent study (Pape, et al, 2024), compared the effects of BLS in healthy individuals and people with PTSD and found that in the healthy individuals, BLS significantly decreased the emotional arousal (in other words, lowered the stress switch in real time) when people were triggered by a distressing thought.  The study was aimed at looking at the differences between the PTSD group and healthy group to determine if they had different responses to BLS, but the results make the case for using BLS in healthy groups to reduce stress when triggered. The study also used monolateral stimulation as a control (meaning vibrations on only one side of the body). This is important to note because some devices claiming they have technology to lower stress applied to one side of the body may not produce the same effects as when applied to both sides of the body in an alternating rhythm.  This study is just one of many that help make the case for using BLS outside of a clinician’s office for stress reduction at any time.  
Dharma Dr. has improved the BLS that has been used safely and effectively in therapist offices for over 35 years in EMDR therapy. Try it and harness the power of peace of mind whenever and wherever you need it. 

Reference:

Pape, V., Sammer, G., Hanewald, B., Schäflein, E., Rauschenbach, F., & Stingl, M. (2024). Apples and oranges: PTSD patients and healthy individuals are not comparable in their subjective and physiological responding to emotion induction and bilateral stimulation. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1406180.

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