Hey Sigmund is one of my go to sites for interventions, ideas, and new research in the mental health field. An article that recently caught my eye was called " How to stop frightening experiences from driving anxiety and phobias." It caught my eye in particular, because often we as humans endure ongoing trauma - whether it be domestic violence, community violence, and even a car accident.

Research has found that by possibly giving a victim a simple task to do, such as a phone game like Tetris or Candy Crush, after the trauma can disrupt traumatic experiences from causing ongoing distress. How this works is that the distraction after the trauma basically disrupts the memories from being coded from short term to long term. The distraction causes the memories (sights, sounds, and smells) to be encoded as less fearful/dangerous. While the memory of the event will remain, the emotion connected to the event will be less intrusive.

Alot of our long term fears and phobias are rooted in one single event, so providing a disruption to how that event is encoded could be very helpful in the long term. Of course more research is needed to look at this in a broader sense, but it is relieving to know that something as simple as a game of Candy Crush after a car accident can help us move on from the event with little effect.

Here is a link to the article: http://www.heysigmund.com/frightening-experiences-anxiety-phobia/