Talk:Casadastraphobia/@comment-33403698-20171018110818/@comment-108.14.227.21-20171023073523

The brain is an interpreting machine. It draws upon synaptic associations to generate adaptations to uncertainty. When the mind is anxious because of chemical reasons, there is no external reason to explain it. The brain is not naturally very good at interpreting its own chemical state. Thus, when the mind has generalized anxiety with no real specific external cause, the brain will try to figure out why. The result is phobic thinking as the brain searches through its synaptic memory through the action of the cingulate gyrus and lands on an 'aha!' moment, such as your dreams of falling. The interpretation is that you're anxious because you might fall into the sky. Thus your generalized anxiety lends itself to a phobia of falling up, and so convinced is your brain that it has adequately explained your anxiety, that the reasoning part is unable to convince it otherwise. That is one of the key survival adaptations of our brain -- once the amygdala has assigned an emotion to a memory, it becomes very difficult to 'unadapt' it. So, the first step in treating phobias is to address generalized anxiety, the root cause of the initial phobic thinking. Once addressed, the second step is exposure therapy -- by exposing the brain to the fear that it has assigned to a memory, it causes the brain to rewrite the memory with the new one, and the new emotion associated with it. When you are exposed to your fear of falling up, say by laying down on the ground and looking up at the sky, or by looking at it with a reference object with great field depth (like a skyscraper or a bridge tower), in the absense of generalized anxiety, your brain will concede that nothing all that threatening is happening, and with multiple exposures, will overwrite the emotion attributed in the first instance. Thus, your phobia can be cured.