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Acrophobia: Fear and Heights

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Acrophobia: Fear and Heights
Acrophobia is an irrational fear of heights or high places. Many people dislike heights, but someone with a clinical case of acrophobia can have intense emotional and physical responses at just the thought of being in a high place. Acrophobia is simply a severe fear of heights. Now being afraid of heights is a common and sometimes appropriate feeling. But the phobia part kicks in when you feel afraid in a safe environment such as inside a skyscraper. Acrophobia is treated with graded exposure therapy. (Horton, 2011) Fear of heights seems to have a simple physiological explanation, and there is a solution to it: Learn to rely more on your ears for balancing. Fear of heights

In this essay I try to analyze my fear of height through self-inspection and document my experiments in trying to overcome this irrational feeling also known as acrophobia.
First of all, make sure to take this text for what it is, namely the naive, non-expert, non-scientific ramblings of someone with no medical training whatsoever, so please don't hold me responsible if you get some false or harmful information here. You might or might not have a similar condition like me, I have no idea, and even if I had, I wouldn't be qualified to give any advice.
So what is fear of heights (acrophobia)? It seems to be one of those things like autostereograms where if you are wondering if you experience it or not, then it's almost certain you don't. I'm pretty sure I have at least a mild form of it as I am afraid when I look down from heights, but it's not so serious that I couldn't look out from my window. I have climbed some decent mountains and my feelings have ranged from general discomfort to complete panic. The alarming thing was to discover that it's been getting worse recently and I have real difficulty climbing to places where I had no trouble years ago, so I decided I had to do something about it. Just to make sure, acrophobia is when you look out from the balcony on the second floor and feel
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