Did you know that 4 out of every 5 people diagnosed with agoraphobia are female?

That doesn’t necessarily mean that more women than men actually HAVE agoraphobia, but women are 4 times more likely to be diagnosed.

Researchers have explored some possible explanations for this phenomenon and I just posted an article that discusses them.

To read more about why more women are diagnosed with agoraphobia, look in the articles section of this website under “Causes and Development.”

My article is called “Is Agoraphobia a Women’s Disease?”

In my last post, I wrote about the value of facing your fears out of order instead of creating the tradiitonal a “Fear Heirarchy” and working on overcoming your fears from least to greatest.

Now I am going to pass on another agoraphobia recovery tip from anxiety disorder expert, Dr. Reid Wilson - change the conditions under which you practice desensitization.

If you usually practice in the morning when it is light outside, try practicing at night after dark.

If you usually plan your practice sessions far in advance, try practicing spontaneously.

Try practicing in both cold and warm weather. Practice with people sometimes, and at other times, alone.

You get the idea, the more you mix up your desensitization practice, the more your practice will model real life, and the more likely you will be to prepare yourself for unexpected challenges that come your way.

Desensitization therapy for agoraphobia may be more effective if it is not so systematic - or so an article I just read by Dr. Reid Wilson suggests.

Dr. Wilson is a professor at the University of North Carolina and an internationally recognized specialist in the treatment of panic and anxiety disorders. His book, “Don’t Panic,” helped me tremendously in my own recovery from agoraphobia.

In a recent article called “How to Keep the Fear from Returning,” Dr. Wilson challenges a traditional assumption of systematic desensitization, which is considered to be the most research-proven treatment for agoraphobia today.

The traditional systematic desensitization method is to face your fears in sequential order, from least to greatest. The logic is that you will gain confidence for overcoming larger fears by first conquering smaller ones.

Dr. Wilson suggests that you try just the opposite, to face feared situations randomly. Instead of working all the way through a lesser fear before working on a greater one, work on all of your fears at the same time. Choose randomly which fear you will face on a given day.

Dr. Wilson says that doing “random and variable practice” will send yourself the message that you are capable of handling a variety of situations and “add into memory a larger number of cues” to associate with positive learning. In other words, if you mix up the order in which you face different fears, you will better generalize your success to different situations.

Many of you have already read and commented on the July edition of the Agoraphobia Report - “Beat Agoraphobia with Your Eyes Closed.”

In no way do I intend the title to make light of the hard work it can take to recover from agoraphobia. Believe me, I know what it takes from personal experience.

The purpose of the newsletter was to explain how powerful visualization can be in your recovery from agoraphobia and why it is important to reprogram both sides of the brain (left AND right).

So many self-help programs emphasize changing your thinking (left side), but to make a complete recovery from agoraphobia, it’s important to change the pictures in your mind (right side), too. This month’s newsletter has some basic instructions to help get you started.

If you haven’t already, sign up for the Agoraphobia Report to read why and how to change the pictures in your mind.