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Writer's pictureMark Robert

How Childhood Experiences Program Your Fear of Heights

The fear of heights, or acrophobia, is deeply rooted in human evolution. It's one of those survival mechanisms we carry from our ancestors.


Thousands of years ago this primal fear was designed to keep us safe from falling out of trees or off cliffs. Of course, we all need to have a base level fear of heights otherwise we would all just walk off the top of buildings without a care in the world!


But sometimes our brain goes into overdrive and tries to protect us too much. The fear of heights can be so inhibiting with work and at home. You may not be able to work in high-rise buildings, go up the stairs onto an aircraft preventing you from going abroad on holiday, going up in an elevator, enjoy sports such as skiing.


This overzealous fear of heights would have likely to be programmed in between the ages of being born to 4 years old, and would have been caused by an initial event.

This event could be anything from being swung too high on a plane or feeling uneasy about being on the upper deck of a double-decker bus.





The young developing mind would have locked in the association of feeling scared or uneasy with the notion of height. It creates a shortcut, what I call a ‘autofill’. Similar to when you go to pay for shopping online, your device remembers the card details or delivery address and autofill this in for you. Your brain does the same thing, it creates an ’autofill’ for a similar occurrence.


Of course, this autofill was programmed by a young child’s perspective but stays programmed in as an adult.  But as an adult it no longer serves us and is not needed!

With hypnotherapy you can simply delete that ‘autofill’ so it no longer runs. In the same way that delete the autofill details on your device of an old bank card that you no longer use. Think of it as re-programming your brain.


It sounds simple, and it really is! A life long fear can be gone just like that.


For more information and book a session in, please click here

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