Have You Experience The Sudden Urge To Jump From Height?
You’re at the top of the Empire State building, leaning next to the parapet. The night wind blows, ruffling your hair, beckoning and cajoling you on.
You take a peek…
And in your imagination, you leap off. Like Spiderman, you somersault in mid air, spread-eagled. Adrenaline rushes through you as you plummet fast, and then…
But in reality, you’re more likely to be doing this:
If you think this urge to jump is uniquely you, you’ve got company. Many people experience this sudden and inexplicable urge to jump from heights, but do not talk openly about it.
But before we talk about the urge to jump, let’s discuss the fear of heights — the contradictory emotion that keeps us from doing dangerous things.
Fear of Heights
Unsurprisingly, the need to back off from the edge is a universal experience. What’s surprising though, is that this fear isn’t learnt — it’s innate.
Psychologists have observed that infants as young as 6 months (who have had no experience of falling) have a tendency to “back off” from visual cliffs, rather than crawling over the edge. A visual cliff creates an artificial perception of a change in depth, so as to see how infants respond to it.
Since then, various experiments have suggested that the fear of heights is largely innate to us. The “visual cliff effect” confuses our sense of balance, thus causing us to feel panic and fear.
It’s here that our alarm system goes… STOP! Don’t move!!
And we back off the edge.
High Place Phenomenon
Until 2012, there wasn’t a concrete study made about this experience. But a team of psychologists from Florida State University decided to investigate this after realising that some of them had experienced this phenomenon before.
- If you stand on a bridge of a high building, do you feel the urge to jump off?
- When you come across tall structures like skyscrapers, have you thought about what jumping off it feels like?
- Have you thought of jumping out of the window from tall buildings?
And so, they gave it a name — High Place Phenomenon (HPP).
In their study of 431 undergraduate students from Florida State University, the researchers asked them if they had experienced HPP, and other questions relating to their mental health — whether they have a history of depression, high anxiety and other conditions.
Usually not, says the findings.
As it turns out, HPP is commonly experienced among suicide ideators and non-ideators alike. 30% of people have felt like jumping off a building their on, while 53% have imagined what that would feel like. For those with no intentions of suicide, individuals with high anxiety are more likely to experience HPP.
But if we’re not suicidal, why does HPP still happen?
When you near the edge of a cliff, your reflexes kick in, and you step back instinctively. However, your conscious brain, which doesn’t yet understand it, comes up with a rational explanation — you must have wanted to jump.
Another possible explanation is that the urge to jump reflects our urge to live.
As counterintuitive as this sounds, we want to jump to feel alive.
We may be plunging to our deaths, but our mind enjoys this feeling of exhilaration, to be able to “unfreeze” in the face of fear. It’s this same urge that propels us to take roller-coasters, because we like feeling “in the moment” and capable of defying death.
So next time you feel the urge to jump, remember that it’s perfectly common.
Yo! I’m Miao. Can’t believe you scrolled all the way down here… bet you could’ve done a Math question with that time 😎 How about this — want to do Math together? I’m right here!
