ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Digital Mental Health
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Approaches in Psychosocial and Mental HealthView all 22 articles
Exploring AI-personalized visualization of the safe place in virtual reality versus imagination of the safe place for stress, burnout, and relaxation in psychotherapists: A case series
Provisionally accepted
- University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
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Objectives: Psychotherapists face substantial occupational stress and emotional demands placing them at risk of burnout, yet interventions aimed at enhancing their well-being remain understudied. This case series explored the effectiveness of a brief relaxation intervention comparing the traditional safe place imagination exercise with a virtual reality (VR) adaptation. The VR adaptation comprised a personalized visualization of the safe place by artificial intelligence (AI). The exploratory research questions investigated howif both interventions would increase influence relaxation, and if burnout and stress would decrease over the course of the study and whetherwith VR would yielding superior different effects effects than imaginationboth times. Further, the roles of imagery ability and presence were explored. Methods: Five psychotherapists from an outpatient setting participated in a six-week, within-subject study that used an alternating treatments design (ABCABC) which was created via a participatory approach where participants actively engaged in the planning of the study. Imagination- (B) and VR-based (C) relaxation interventions alternated weekly with baseline weeks (A) in between. The VR environments were tailored to participants' preferences through generative AI. Results: Relaxation significantly consistently increased in both conditions based on self-report and physiological (skin conductance levels) measures. Burnout and stress did not significantly decrease over time and VR did not yield significantly greater effects on all outcomes. Imagery ability was not associated with greater relaxation, whereas presence showed a positive correlation in one VR session. Conclusion: These findings suggest that brief imagination and VR interventions can enhance relaxation in psychotherapists. The lack of significant differences between conditions suggests that VR does not inherently outperform traditional methods, especially with participants already familiar with imagination exercises.
Keywords: virtual reality, Imagination, Relaxation, burnout, psychotherapists, Workplace interventions
Received: 14 Jul 2025; Accepted: 04 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wollweber, Pfannerstill and Probst. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Franziska Pfannerstill, franziska.pfannerstill@plus.ac.at
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