Fear Of Elevators
Fear of elevators is the typical textbook case of a phobia, right after spiders. There are many jokes about people with elevator phobias – but if you actually have one, you already know that it’s not a joking matter.
People with a fear of elevators often suffer from both claustrophobia and acrophobia. Claustrophobia means that one feels anxiety when being in a confined space. Acrophobia means that one is afraid of heights.
There are many ways to overcome this fear, but some are faster than others. Behavioral therapy can be effective, but it might take many months for the effects to set in, and costs thousands of dollars. It’s a tried and tested way that works for many people if they are willing to do the training that’s involved.
Click Here To Stop Your Fear Of Elevators
And in fact, your motivation levels are probably high. For some people, this can be a serious problem in their life. I know of cases where highly qualified experts take on low-paying jobs because they can’t work in a high-rise office building.
Fear is an important psychological mechanism in our lives to protect us from danger. However, if you are afraid of elevators in general, this fear is out-of-control. Instead of preventing you from engaging in a dangerous activity, it’s preventing you from making the most out of your life.
Basically, behavioral therapy makes use of something that is called desensitization, or exposure therapy. In the case of someone with the fear of elevators, it means that a therapist would make you ride an elevator.
If actually getting into an elevator isn’t possible because that cause intense panic, then a therapist might instead make you imagine riding in an elevator, or even just watching a movie of other people riding an elevator, or play a computer simulation in which you control a character that rides in an elevator.
Then, the therapist will give you instructions to perform certain mental exercises that can help you to calm down and counter your fear of elevators.
As previously mentioned, this method helps many people to overcome their elevator phobia, but they are quiet cost- and time-intensive.
Hypnosis is a great way to overcome your elevator fear because it basically creates a much more powerful “virtual reality”. With hypnosis, you can directly control your subconscious mind – which is were fantasy and imagination reside.
Neurologists found that the subconscious mind does not distinguish between imagined and real experiences. So when you have the imagined experience of riding calmly in an elevator, your subconscious mind actually takes this as “the status quo” and concludes that it is not necessary to be afraid in elevators.
It depends on the vividness of this imagined experience how many repetitions are necessary to overcome the fear. Hypnosis creates an extremely vivid experience in your (subconscious) mind. What’s more, since the hypnosis session is quiet short it doesn’t take up a lot of time. And since it’s a hypnosis recording, you can re-play it whenever you feel the need to do so.
