Acrophobia: Meaning, Causes, Symptoms And Treatment

Acrophobia means fear of heights. This phobia is part of situation phobias, that is, phobias referring to places, in this case heights, affecting 5% of the population. So that, acrophobia is the irrational and unjustified fear of heights, which can manifest itself in different situations and lead to high levels of anxiety. Acrophobia is a type of specific phobia. This phobia has a high relational component with vertigo.

Difference between acrophobia and vertigo

Acrophobia and vertigo have similarities, however, they are not equivalent. Vertigo arises from a hearing disorder, which regulates balance, producing a subjective sensation of a rotary movement of the surroundings or the sensation that it is oneself that is rotating. On many occasions, it is accompanied by a feeling of dizziness and fainting, loss of balance and nausea. On the other hand, in acrophobia the person may suffer from the sensation of vertigo at a certain time, this being only one of the symptoms that can occur in the disorder.

Acrophobia can appear in late childhood or early adulthood. The causes of the development of height phobia can be produced by a history of direct experiences of the person themselves, by vicarious experiences of observation, information, inheritance or by their own cognitive biases, with psychological pressures or stress also being determining factors. The causes of acrophobia can be:

• Direct experiences – vicarious – observation: result of a traumatic experience in childhood that has developed a negative vision and a component of terror of heights. This traumatic experience does not have to have been experienced by the person, it may have been an observation of a foreign situation or they may have been informed about it.
• Inheritance: Several investigations estimate that there is the possibility of a hereditary factor in the development of acrophobia. However, the fact that there are more members in a family who suffer from this phobic disorder may also be because children from a young age observe the phobic behavior of their parents towards heights, making them understand the danger it entails, causing them to end up suffering from the disorder. Same fear of heights.
• Cognitive biases: The reasoning processes that we establish play a fundamental role in the development of phobias. If the person begins to entertain the idea of ​​danger that heights entail, he may develop an irrational concern about them, giving rise to the phobia.

The symptoms appear when the person is exposed experientially or in their imagination to the feared stimulus, producing a state of anticipatory anxiety when they know that they are going to have to expose themselves to the phobic object. The symptoms of acrophobia are the same or similar to those that occur in other specific phobias, the most characteristic being the following:

• Anxiety – Anticipatory anxiety
• Fear and panic
• Increased heart rate
• Sweating
• Tachycardia
• Feeling dizzy or vertigo
• Stomachache
• Tremors
• Nausea and vomiting
• Chest pain
• Breathing difficulties
• Chills or increased body temperature
• Catastrophic thoughts

The most effective treatment in improving phobias is reproduced in the techniques of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Within this orientation, the most used and validated treatment technique with its effectiveness is gradual exposure to the feared situation, where the person must progressively expose themselves to the stimulus that causes irrational fear. The exposure is structured with a hierarchy of situations from lowest impact to highest impact, that is, you are exposed first to situations that cause the least fear, ending with the one that causes the most. This gradual exposure can be reproduced “in vivo” or in imagination, with exposure to the experientially feared situation being more effective.

Once it has been determined whether the exposure will be experiential or in imagination and the list of hierarchies of feared situations has been drawn up, the person must expose themselves to these. It should be noted that when the patient faces the feared situation, his or her anxiety levels will increase significantly, therefore, it is recommended perform relaxation exercises between exposure from one hierarchy to the next to stabilize anxiety of the person.

In many specific phobias, it is very difficult to control a gradual exposure due to the limitations of the phobia itself, for example, a person who is afraid of airplanes will not be able to expose themselves to them gradually, because once the airplane takes off you can’t get off of it. However, with the advancement of new information and communication technologies (ICTs), it has been possible to reproduce a Virtual Reality treatment (VR) which is proving very effective in the treatment of phobias. In VR the feared object, situation or activity is reproduced, where the person has the sensation of being physically with the stimulus, in addition to allowing interaction with it in real time. This technology allows the person to gradually expose themselves to the phobic stimulus in an environment that provides security and is controlled.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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