Reply To: Your belief system

[The_Hurricane]

Hey, guess what, I don’t think it’s normal either! I do not think we – as physical creatures – evolved to do this. For most of human history, a man approaching a woman in public was dangerous. That’s why we experience cortisol spikes when we do it.

There are a small number of us who do not fear this experience, just as there are a small number of us who do not fear jumping from a plane. Nature wants this distribution of risk aversion and risk taking. Nature wants a small number of risk takers. For the rest of us, this is not natural. We have to train ourselves to do it.

We do not fear heights because of social conditioning. We fear heights because, for most of human history, jumping from heights was deadly. Now, we have airplanes and helicopters and parachutes and wing suits and jet suits. The fear is still there, but we can overcome it with training. The more jumps we make, the easier it will be to make another jump.

Fear is a physical process. You cannot make your fear go away by willing yourself not to fear. That’s not how you get rid of your fear of heights. You do it by gradually exposing yourself to greater and greater heights.

–Lee