Cybersickness as Therapeutic Stress Inoculation: Harnessing Adverse Effects for Enhanced Efficacy

Petersen et al. (2024) and Gutierrez-Sanchez et al. (2024) treat cybersickness as a confound. This idea weaponizes it: A "stress inoculation" protocol gradually introduces vestibular disruptions (e.g., subtle frame latency shifts) during low-anxiety exposure phases. By pairing cybersickness with relaxation techniques, patients learn to manage physiological arousal—critical for blood-injury phobia’s vasovagal response (Halouani et al., 2024). This flips Ju’s (2024) "user-friendliness" goal, arguing controlled discomfort accelerates habituation. It could explain Macdonald’s (2024) overexposure success: extreme environments may implicitly train arousal regulation.

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