Matt Heath: Defeating a fear of needles with the help of a monk

If you are scared of needles, you will look anywhere in the examination room except at the injection, writes Matt Heath. Photo / 123RF

I cured my fear of needles with the help of an ordained Shingon monk, writes Matt Health.

Shinzen Young may not have been with me physically at Mt Eden Labtest last Friday when staff there took my blood sample, but his legend was. Petrified of the jab, I brought to mind Shinzen's experiences with Japan's oldest nature-based religion, Shinto. More specifically, misogi or cold water purification. Together we slayed the evil dragon of skin penetration.

The mother of my children and I have been terrified of injections since childhood. During the pandemic, our three vaccinations felt like firing squad visits. After my most recent blood test, I rang her and yelled, 'I've conquered my fear of needles'. She screamed,
at the mere mention, dropped the phone and ran out of the kitchen.

There are most likely several evolutionary reasons for needle fear. Before modern medicine, letting the outside world into your bloodstream was a bad idea. Then there are mosquitoes. Maybe we equate jabs with those dirty malaria-infected bastards.

Our innate fear could be something to do with snakes or stingrays. Who knows? Today many of the SOHNABT+* community remain needle wusses, while showing bravery in other areas of our lives. For example, the mother of my children can drop into a half pipe, skydive and give birth.

I soil myself at the site of a needle but was happily set on fire in a monkey suit on the 2005 British television show Balls of Steel. It was an easy £1500 until a flying bike smashed my cage, trapping me in an inferno. Escaping it took up all of my allotted burn time. The flames were out of control; the pain was intense, and worst of all, my face mask was covering my eyes. I couldn't find the extinguishing pool and ran straight toward a screaming London studio audience already on edge from the July 7 terror attacks. It took a timely rugby tackle from the stunt co-ordinator to get me into the water before I cooked.

I still have scars from the incident, but like many Kiwis, I would take life as a burning ape over a single needle in the arm—anything but an injection. If giving blood involved rolling up your sleeve and getting punched in the side of the face by a nurse, we'd be in every week. I'd pay for it.

In his life-changing book Four Thousand Hours, Oliver Burkeman outlines Shinzen
Young's experience with pain. The monk to be was assigned a 100-day solo retreat. He was to live in a tiny, unheated ice shack, dousing himself with gallons of bone-chilling melted snow several times a day.

Shinzen describes it as "horrific ... The water freezes the moment it touches the floor, your towel freezes in your hand. You're sliding around barefoot on ice, trying to dry your body with a frozen hand towel."

At first, he recoiled from the pain, but over time realised, the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonising he found them – if his "attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable".

Zoning in entirely on the experience made it better.

Distracting yourself when faced with physical distress seems commonsensical. If you are scared of needles, you will look anywhere in the examination room except at the injection. But just as Jaws is scarier because we hardly see him in the movie, the jab monster grows more powerful if you don't face him.

As Burkeman writes of Shinzen, "The more intensely he held his attention on the experience, the clearer it became that the real problem wasn't the activity but his resistance to experiencing it. When he stopped blocking out those sensations and attended to them instead, the discomfort evaporated'.

And so, in that imposing Mt Eden clinic, determined to conquer my fear, I channelled Shinzen Young and focused my attention entirely on the needle piercing my flesh. Every fibre of me screamed, "look away", but I did not. I held my nerve as the blood flowed,
and another extraction tube was fitted.

When it was over, like magic, my dread of injections disappeared. I had stared that little metal dragon in the eye and told him, 'I see you for what you are monster, and you are nothing but a little prick'.

*The Scared of Hypodermic Needles, Blood Tests and More Community.