Understanding Fear of Heights

Fear of heights can involve a terror of being on high and, especially in an exposed situation such as on a ladder or fire escape. It may or may not be accompanied by vertigo (a reeling sensation or dizziness when one looks down.)

Fear of heights can be, at best, very inconvenient as when it prevents you travelling in glass-walled lifts (elevators), taking part in many different forms of sport, or accompanying your children to fun fairs or theme parks.

What to do about fear of heights?

In my own experience fear of heights can often respond to the NLP Fast Phobia Cure but this method is not as effective as traditional methods such as systematic desensitisation – which, happily, can be done as a Self Help approach.

In practise I have found that a couple of ‘live’ sessions in a place of fear such as high rise car park or the High Ropes course worked fine. Here I would teach the person to calm themselves through physically letting go and managing their breathing, then approach the trigger point for their fear, then retreat and calm themselves, and then back again.

This would take between 20 and 40 minutes per session but one or two were generally enough.