It happened many decades ago that I was was scared with a stunt by my father that scared me and I believe that is why I can’t do heights, at most 3 rungs on a latter. Even movies or TV shows that have good shots makes my stomach roll around. Now I want to and have tried to overcome it on my own. I just saw another posting about a couple with one who enjoys it and another who doesn’t. It occurred to me. Is this a trauma or born (predisposed) with it? I know the term is Acrophobia and is a anxiety disorder but not everyone has it.
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The human body is an amazing machine. We’re bombarded with hundreds of millions of bits and pieces of information, nearly every single second of our lives, and if we didn’t have a way to filter out the unimportant parts . . .
Fortunately, we do have a filter. Our central nervous system is the first responder (in a sense) to this assault of information. If certain information satisfies a predetermined condition, we respond automatically, even before we’ve had time to register the information in our conscious mind. Take fire. If you accidentally grab a hot piece of iron from a fireplace, your body will respond by automatically dropping the hot object.
This kind of reflexive behavior applies in other situations, as well. From an evolutionary point of view, we learned to react strongly to certain threats. Lots of people hate spiders and snakes, for example, and it’s possible that that’s because those critters can be very deadly. Of course, they’re also as far from human (in appearance) as you can get (what with too many legs and no legs at all, respectively). That natural sense of fear likely contributed to many an early person’s survival, thus increasing the chance of passing it along to their children. A fear of heights might be similar, i.e. it’s purely biological, but if it’s not as common a threat, then there’s less opportunity for people *without* this fear to die off.
I think our instinctive fear of heights (for those who have it) is something along these lines: it’s *both* an inherited trait and a natural response to certain stimuli.
Did you know our inner ear is useful for establishing and maintaining balance? It’s filled with a tiny amount of fluid and acts like a biological level. When you hang upside down, the fluid fills on the wrong side of the inner ear canal and makes you dizzy. In some people, it’s the source of “motion sickness,” where a person is highly sensitive to disturbances of the inner ear. This is where seasickness and car sickness come from. It’s also related to heights and some people get exceptionally dizzy when they’re standing in a place that makes them think they’re too high off the ground. (What’s really interesting, is that when a person is unaware of how high up they are, they’re far less likely to have these physiological responses.)
Granted, this is just my theory, based on my personal experiences with motion sickness and a fear of heights. You see, my fear comes from a physiological reaction. I’m not consciously afraid of heights. In fact, I love climbing. I was in the Army National Guard and while I didn’t jump out of planes or helicopters, it’s because I didn’t have the opportunity, not because I didn’t want to. But even if I had, I would have had that physiological fear response. Happens each time I went rock climbing, too, where I would get sweaty palms, a little dizziness or vertigo, and where I could feel this tightening of the muscles around the base of my spine, like something’s poking me with a tiny needle but from the inside.
I think some people are overly sensitive to the physiological sensations involved with heights (and the realization that, should one fall from this height, serious harm might come to them). Some people don’t experience this problem because their bodies aren’t as sensitive to heights. Some people simply don’t have this fear response (or the fear response is minor enough that they can ignore it if they choose) and we might call that a genetic mutation.
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