As well terrified to scale a mountain peak or travel to the top ground of a skyscraper? Will even the sight of a tall ladder make you use in sweat?
The world of virtual reality might offer the perfect prescription for your fear of heights.
In a fresh British study, experts used a virtual truth coach to guide patients through exercises offering safe contact with high places.
"In virtual actuality, people can repeatedly enter simulations of everyday situations that difficulty them and become guided in the very best ways to think, feel and behave," explained research writer Daniel Freeman. He's a professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University.
"The wonder is that the conscious awareness that these are simulations allows people to try things that they would be skeptical of in real life, however the learning leads to major benefits in day-to-day life," Freeman said.
The study participants seemed to agree. One stated that after four virtual truth periods "the difference in my own mental capacity to handle heights was amazing."
Another said, "What I'm noticing is that in day-to-day lifestyle I'm significantly less averse to edges, and methods and heights."
A fear of heights -- also referred to as acrophobia -- is pretty common. In Europe, 1 in 5 people statement having a concern with heights throughout their lifetime, and 1 in 20 are clinically identified as having the condition, relating to Freeman. He said the figures of people with a fear of heights is comparable in the usa.
Dr. Richard Catanzaro, chairman of psychiatry at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, N.Y., said the typical treatment for a fear-based condition is usually cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or CBT-based exposure therapy, which steadily exposes a person to the thing that frightens them.
The problem with these therapies, nevertheless, is that they require a substantial time commitment. They also require a experienced therapist, and in many areas in the usa there just aren't enough therapists, Catanzaro noted.
In the U.K. study, 100 people who were diagnosed with a concern with heights had been recruited. The average period they reported having a fear of heights was about 30 years.
Forty-nine had been randomly chosen for the virtual fact treatment while 51 received standard treatment, which for a lot of people meant no treatment at all.
The virtual reality treatment involved a head-mounted screen and hands controllers, introducing users to computer situations such as for example rescuing a cat from a tree, and playing a xylophone near the edge of a floor. The participants went through as much as six 30-minute classes over fourteen days. (Some people responded quicker than others.)
Forty-seven of those in the virtual reality group completed at least one program. Only two people didn't complete the entire intervention because they found it too difficult.
On a fear of heights test -- the scale works from 16 to 80, with an increased score indicating worse dread -- people who participated in the virtual actuality treatment lowered their scores by an average of around 24 points over the control group by the end of the research, and again at the follow-up a month later.
The findings were published online July 11 in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.
Even with out a real-lifestyle therapist guiding you, Catanzaro said this therapy "sounds pretty safe" for treating a concern with heights.
"Among the shortcomings of the study is normally that they didn't continue to see how people would do in real-world circumstances, but I think the results would probably hold," he said. "Digital reality provides pretty reasonable visuals and sensations. But, you'd need further research to know for sure."
Mark Hayward, from the University of Sussex in England, wrote an accompanying editorial. He said the treatment were well-tolerated in this particular population.
"There is huge potential for a completely automated virtual reality program to improve usage of evidence-based psychological treatments for people struggling with a variety of mental health problems that relate with everyday feared situations," he said.
But Hayward voiced worries about using virtual reality for more technical mental health problems, such as paranoia or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Catanzaro echoed that caveat, explaining that for something similar to PTSD, such therapy could be a problem if there wasn't a therapist show help anyone who has a poor or troubling response.
