Acrophobia  is an extreme or irrational fear of heights, especially when one is not particularly high up. It belongs to a category of specific phobias, called space and motion discomfort that share both similar etiology and options for treatment.

Most people experience a degree of natural fear when exposed to heights, known as the fear of falling. On the other hand, those who have little fear of such exposure are said to have a head for heights. 

Here’s some of what you can do to help overcome a fear of heights.

1) One step at a time, please

There is a technique used by some psychologists called ‘flooding’. The idea is that if you confront your fear head on, in one fell swoop, then your fear system will be so overpowered that when you calm down, the fear will be gone.

Way back when, kids who feared water used to be thrown in at the deep end of a pool. I’m not saying this never works, but in my experience of clearing up the psychological mess of people who’ve survived this ‘technique’, it can often deepen the trauma if it doesn’t work (and it often doesn’t).

So I’m suggesting you only do what you’re comfortable doing – one step at a time. Practice visiting one level of a building, then eventually the next, and so on, until, bit by bit, you become accustomed to getting higher.

Set small challenges for yourself: “Okay, today I’m just going to walk across that low bridge over the stream and see how that feels…and next week I’ll have a look at going up a notch by seeing how it feels to walk halfway up that office block in town…”

2) Lower the fear as you get higher

Fear, terror, and anxiety feel like they just ‘happen to us’. We don’t describe, say, panic as something we ‘do’, but as something that ‘attacks’ us. But there are things you can do even when you are up high (or about to be) to quickly calm down and thereby take control.

• Breathe yourself back down to calm: When people are scared, they either forget to breathe (for short periods of time, obviously) or they just breathe quickly in but forget to breathe out. To lower panic, pause your breathing for 5 seconds, then take a big breath in and exhale slowly. Ensure you breathe out for slightly longer than you breathe in, as this will rapidly start to calm you right down.
• Scale the fear in numbers: Because your ‘thinking brain’ tends to be ‘swamped’ by the emotional brain when you feel fearful, you can actually diminish the fear by forcing your thinking brain to work – thus diluting the anxiety. The easiest way to do this is through scaling the level of fear.

Think: “If absolute terror is 10 and total calm is 1, where am I right now on that scale?” You might decide you’re at an 8. Now, as you start to extend your exhalations, notice how those numbers go down as you feel calmer.

3) Forget the past

Well, don’t actually forget the past, but learn to feel relaxed about old high up situations. For months after my first bungee jump, I could ‘get the fear back’ simply by remembering that time. If you also find that you can feel fearful just by recalling previous times you were anxious up high, then you’ll need to start to feel relaxed when you recall those old fearful times so as to ‘unhook’ the fearfulness from the memory. This is often the first step to overcoming fear of heights.

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