Fear of Heights

I don’t know when I started to get an acute fear of heights, but it hit me really hard a few years ago when we took a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge with my wife, daughter, sister-in-law, and her family. Sure the bridge is iconic and lovely — which is probably why it’s one of the most photographed bridges in the world.

Speaking of which…

And really, it’s only walking across the bridge. When I bicycle across, I’m fine because I’m keeping my eyes on what’s ahead of me (usually tourists who often veer into the bike lane, so you gotta take it slow). It’s that walk, though, that gives me the willies. Even for this picture, I had to hang back and snap this photo because, well, I started get a little unsettled.

So, where did all this come from? I have a few guesses, but I think it’s always been there, but only got worse as I got older. When I was a tween/teen I started gymnastics. That’s a lot of flipping, swinging around a metal bar, getting tossed into the air, and generally doing things with your body that involved a lot of danger. I never got a serious injury (just a few minor ones), but the thought of breaking my neck — or any other part of my body — was always in the back of my mind. According to an article in Psychology Today, a fear of heights is related to panic attacks (to my knowledge, I have never had one). But in the article I linked to, there’s this nugget that may explain things:

..[T]wo of the most important predispositions are a tendency to be acutely aware of one’s bodily sensations, and a bias towards interpreting ambiguous bodily sensations as threatening.

So, it’s possible I’m super aware of sensations in my body, and those can sometimes lead to my mind thinking some of those sensations are dangerous.

Now, this brings me to a mini-documentary The New York Times did called “Ten Meter Tower.” Because Americans aren’t metric system kind of folk, ten meters just a little shy of 33 feet. Still can’t picture it? How about climbing to the top of a three-story building, peering over the edge, and thinking “Wow, that’s a long way down. I hope I don’t fall.” Pretty reasonable fear. But what about jumping off a ten meter tower into a deep, fully heat pool below? Sure, it’s scary, but would you be paralyzed with fear? I think I would — like some of the people in this doc.