Fears, frights and phobias

[Ashley]

It's February which naturally means for some reason I'm thinking about fears 🤷‍♂️

What fears or phobias do you have? Have you had any in the past that you've tried to overcome? 

I'm not great with flying (yes I travelled the world two years ago). Take off and landing always get me a bit on edge so now I try and listen to My Dad Wrote a Porno to have something silly and light-hearted to distract me and not look out the window. But if there's turbulence during the flight it sets me off again, although I try and watch the cabin crew in that case. They're more used to what is normal so they act as my barometer.

Related, I'm also not great with heights. I'm better if I can control it and approach it gingerly, get accustomed to it etc but there's just something about it that makes me uneasy and my legs all wobbly.

[Glen-i]

Needles. Oh dear lord, just the thought of a needle going into skin makes me feel ill.
I dread moments in life when I have to get a shot.

[Ashley]

26 minutes ago, Glen-i said:

Needles. Oh dear lord, just the thought of a needle going into skin makes me feel ill.
I dread moments in life when I have to get a shot.

Covid must have been rough for you! 

I had to get several in my toes when I was younger. Anything since then has felt like nothing. 

[Glen-i]

1 minute ago, Ashley said:

Covid must have been rough for you! 

Like you wouldn't believe! Still got the jab though, better then the alternative.

[drahkon]

43 minutes ago, Glen-i said:

Needles. Oh dear lord, just the thought of a needle going into skin makes me feel ill.
I dread moments in life when I have to get a shot.

Very happy that I can deal with needles easily. I donate blood plasma every week and that would be a nightmare if I was afraid of needles

I'm afraid of heights. It's not crippling but I notice it quite a bit. I was on the Dom Tower of Utrecht a few weeks ago:

112 metres.
Looking into the distance was fine, but looking down...phew, I got very anxious.

Also don't like tight spaces. Not sure if it's a phobia but even the thought being in one makes my heart race.

[Cube]

I'm scared of needles and heights. 

 

Although my heights fear is odd. Standing on mountains and cliffs is fine, it's just man-made ones. Even looking down while behind a window is scary.  The escalator in the science museum in London was terrifying.

[Julius]

Going to jump aboard the fear of heights train @Ashley @drahkon and @Cube are on, but throughout my life it's manifested itself in different ways to the point I think it ties into the idea of overcoming it a good bit. 

Look, forever and always, glass floors in tall buildings/structures/elevators (the sick bastards who design elevators like this have an ass-whooping waiting for them in hell I swear), total no-go for me -- I'm fairly sure? It's been a good while since I've been put in that position. And the stupidly big gaps you can look through between steps on some steep stairways, oof. 

Up until I was in my latter years of high school, though, it was horrible. Rock climbing, abseiling, Big Swing rides - hell, most types of rides involving heights - and big slides, you name it, put me in most situations and I just couldn't stand the idea of heights, maybe even more so if there were moving parts to whatever was going. Made things like the Pioneer Centre and PGL an absolute nightmare for me in primary school. 

But then, sometime towards the end of high school, that changed a good bit? I was big on architecture, and so if scaling a tall tower which might otherwise set off the fear before interested me enough, then the fear of heights just melted away. Similarly, we went on a trip to a rock climbing centre as part of DofE in my final year and I found out that I could climb to the top of a rock climbing wall without giving my fear of heights a second thought, whereas my friends who were adamant that they had a fear of heights just couldn't. 

Looking back, I think I put the changes down to a combination of gaining confidence at the time and going through enough things which were waaaaaaaay more stressful in high school/my personal life to the point I just didn't care enough to give it a second thought, might not be the healthiest way to overcome a fear, but hey, I think it mostly worked. Maybe that's something I look to push myself on and test some point this year? 

These days, I think it mainly manifests when looking straight down from a great height and that feeling of vertigo kicks on which brings on the fear and anxiety. As a quick aside, The Last of Us Part II probably has my favourite depiction of said feeling in any media, just because of how accurately it conveys the distorting feeling of vertigo a fear of heights can bring on to non-height-fearing people. 

Edited 2 hours ago by Julius

[Ashley]

20 minutes ago, Julius said:

Look, forever and always, glass floors in tall buildings/structures/elevators (the sick bastards who design elevators like this have an ass-whooping waiting for them in hell I swear), total no-go for me -- I'm fairly sure? It's been a good while since I've been put in that position. And the stupidly big gaps you can look through between steps on some steep stairways, oof. 

When I was in the sky tree in Tokyo as you're waiting for the lift back down there's a small glass-bottomed bit but because you're in a queue there's no not going over it and then some teens started jumping on it. If we spoke the same language I probably would have told them to stop. 

Years ago I took my younger cousins and stepbrother to the swimming pool we went to as a kid and there's a slide up a rickety spiral staircase. As a kid I never thought about it but as an adult on it I didn't feel particularly safe and then they started jumping up and down and I did the terrible "the man will tell you off" thing. As someone that worked in retail I hated that, but in that moment I just had to get them to stop for my own sake 😅

35 minutes ago, Cube said:

Although my heights fear is odd. Standing on mountains and cliffs is fine, it's just man-made ones. Even looking down while behind a window is scary.  The escalator in the science museum in London was terrifying.

I seem to recall I don't mind that one because at least there's a distraction but when I flew from Milan airport last month there was a long escalator up to the departures with nothing either side and I had that "what if I fell?" feeling. Never good. 

[Jonnas]

Add me to the list of people with height fears. It's better now than when I was younger, but my stomach still feels uneasy whenever I look at heights from up. Also, whenever I play a videogame and I jump off a cliff, I just feel pure dread in my stomach for several seconds.

As for a more rational deep-rooted fear... memory loss. Alzheimer's is probably the most terrifying disease/condition I can think of, and I hope nobody I know ever suffers from it.