Learning Experience Paper How could someone become afraid of heights? Acrophobia is simply a fear of heights (Holden, 1995). Being afraid of heights is common and sometimes appropriate feeling. The phobia kicks in when you feel afraid in a safe environment such as the inside of a skyscraper. Acrophobia is treated with graded exposure therapy (Holden, 1995). Fear is an emotion produced by the brain to avoid a potentially bad situation or anxiety caused by the presence of danger. Fear caused by a threatening object or situation will typically result in increased body tension, heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate.
These symptoms tend to produce different behavioral patterns in people. Those two things are what you could call my two greatest fears. Winston Churchill once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. ” This famous saying shows that fear affects people as much as they let it affect them. The way I deal with my fears is to try to overcome them or not let them get to me. Many people have a fear of failure and it affects them in various ways. My fear of failure, in a way, has helped me through a lot of my problems.
I have recognized this fear that I experience and the only way to prevent this feeling is to do everything I can to accomplish what I need to do. My way of coping with failure is really easy; I just work hard enough to do well. This technique I use helps me from experiencing my fear of failure. My fear of being alone doesn’t exist when I am alone in a dark place, but it does exist when I am in new surroundings. I hate the feeling of not having someone there to talk to or laugh with. Fear only goes as far as you let it go.
You have two options for coping with your fear: you can avoid the fear or you can overcome it. If you learn to face your fears without letting them get to you, there is nothing that will scare you away from achieving your dreams. I found an article that proved to me that animals can also be afraid of something. I read an article about an owl named Troy (Muse, 2010). Troy fell out of his nest in a tree. Gareth was walking his dog found him lying on the ground. Gareth took him under his wing. He took care of Troy for about six weeks.
The consisted of hand feeding and nursing back to health because of the long fall out of the tree. Gareth took Troy to Hawk Conservancy Trust (Muse, 2010). Troy was too tame to go back to the wild. The conservancy was trying to use Troy to as a part of the flying demonstration team. They figured out that Troy was afraid of heights. Troy would not fly higher than Gareth, which was 5’6. Troy would not even climb a tree unless Gareth was in it and even then he would not climb out of it unless he was carried (Muse, 2010). This story proves that humans are not the only ones who can have acrophobia.
The owl clearly showed symptoms that affected him when he was in danger of failing or panic attacks when reaching heights. Acrophobia can also become an irrational obsession, so bad it becomes too frightening to use an escalator in a shopping mall. It can become a dangerous phobia. Virtual therapy for phobias is very effective and searches for the root of the phobia (Holden, 1995). Psychotherapists used to worry about patients who created their own realities. Virtual elevators were created to desensitize people afraid of heights.
Exposure therapy is used to gradually expose people to the thing they fear (Holden, 1995). The exposure was done in a lab using a display to project to people and manipulated with head and hand movements. The video may look like a cartoon but once you put the helmet on that becomes a reality. The main drawback to exposure therapy is that it can only be applied to physical situations and can’t address complex interpersonal fears as virtual reality can’t yet create plausible humans (Holden, 1995). The virtual work was called intriguing, more real than mental imagery but more controllable than reality.