"Make good choices. Make. Good. Choices,” I commanded myself before giving in and anxiously wailing, “Makegoodchoices! Makegoodchoices!” I was picking my way slowly across a trail high above the village of Lauterbrunnen in the Swiss Alps. With each syllable, my voice became shriller, and my heightened anxiety quickly transformed my mantra into a plea.
The broad, forested path I had been hiking for nearly three hours had reworked itself into a gravelly trail barely wider than my hips. As I hiked higher, it zigzagged up a near-vertical rock face as snow began to accumulate. Here, the trail became the only flat surface on a 50-degree slope. It looked as if it were a slight wrinkle on an otherwise perfectly steep mountain face and I desperately wanted to turn around and head in the direction I’d come.
I was headed to Rostockhutte, a stone refuge that sits at the center of a cirque of high snowy peaks. I had moved through the first 4 miles quickly, and as I crested the top of the steep section, a curtain of thick clouds pulled itself across the hillside below my feet. But not before I caught a glimpse of the 400-foot cliff that unceremoniously punctuated the abrupt end of the grassy slope I was about to cross.
Nothing would stop me—there were no trees or bushes to grab and no flattened surface to arrest myself before the abyss swallowed me forever. To make matters worse, the wet snow had begun to slide onto the tapering trail, the grassy surface too warm to hold its early-season weight.
I paused for a moment and reassured myself that I was, indeed, in control and choosing to move forward, albeit slowly. I was using my breath to ease the effects of the vertigo I battled and the churn of lunch in my stomach. I was focused on my feet and was deliberate in their placement. I used my hiking pole as an anchor, burying it in the knee-deep snow that held tight to the uphill side of the narrow trail. Still, my steps did not come easily; they had to be earned.
Logically, I knew I wouldn’t fall from my perch. But falling wasn’t what concerned me—I was terrified I would jump.
AS EARLY AS HIGH SCHOOL, I can remember experiencing a desire to jump when I was high above the ground. I battled it when I climbed the rope to the rafters in gym class. At the top, I vacillated between downclimbing, the rope slowing my descent as it slipped through my hands and feet, or releasing my grip, leaning back and plummeting to the wood floor below. Once, while hiking with my father to the summit of Catamount Mountain in New York’s Adirondacks, I stopped myself short of happily skipping off the edge of a rock face. The drop wasn’t towering, but the enticing pull was as strong as it was irrational. The craziness that played out within my head was something I’d keep secret for years afterward.
Surprisingly to the unaffected, I’m far from alone in having feelings like this. Estimated to impact almost 50% of the general population, the Call of the Void is a curious psychological phenomenon that manifests in a myriad of ways, including the sudden and fleeting urge to leap from a cliff or an exposed high spot.
The Call, also referred to as the High Place Phenomenon, or HPP, gets its name from the French translation of l’appel du vide. The French used the phrase, thought to be rooted in the existentialist tradition, to illustrate the emotional tension of the human experience: the contradiction between the fascination and fear of self-destruction, between living and dying, between being here one moment and gone the next.
HPP isn’t especially well known, but it has been studied. In 2012, Dr. Jennifer L. Hames led a team of researchers at Florida State University to determine, among other things, if High Place Phenomenon existed and, if so, if it’s related to suicidal thoughts. For her study, An Urge to Jump Affirms the Urge to Live: An Empirical Examination of the High Place Phenomenon, Hames and her team surveyed 431 college students: some admitted to experiencing suicidal thoughts, while others said they didn’t. They then surveyed those two groups to compare the prevalence of HPP in each. There was little correlation between those with suicidal thoughts and those who experienced HPP, so the scientists concluded that the two are unrelated. Instead, they found that it’s associated with a misinterpretation of a safety signal.
For all of us, the amygdala (the area of your brain responsible for identifying and reacting to threats) collaborates with the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain accountable for cognitive function like problem-solving and decision-making) to interpret signals received from the body, the mind, and the environment. The amygdala is faster at perceiving a threat, spitting out a more animalistic fight or flight response, then triggering the slightly slower prefrontal cortex, which steps in to determine if the perceived danger is real before issuing a deliberate and, perhaps, less emotional solution to that threat. If these messages—internal and external—are coded immediately and correctly, they protect us from doing something stupid.
But, according to Hames, when some people find themselves in a situation where they’re high above the ground—such as on an exposed trail, on top of a mountain, or standing at the edge of a cliff—the safety signal gets momentarily garbled and delayed. In some situations, that hold-up in the prefrontal cortex’s rational response means we temporarily miss the message to step back from the edge toward safety. (HPP has also been seen manifesting in other ways, like the urge to drive into oncoming traffic, though that wasn’t part of Hames’ study.)
Hames’s study recognized that individuals more sensitive to the symptoms of anxiety are more likely to experience HPP. Being able to physically feel the body’s response to heights—heart racing, shortness of breath, nausea, knees shaking—are all reactions generated by the amygdala and make sense from an evolutionary perspective. If anxiety, a signal itself, creates a hyperawareness of those internal cues, the prefrontal cortex’s solution momentarily misfires, causing you to mistake the safe zone—well away from the edge—as dangerous, and the ground below as safer. And if the ground below is the safest place to be, the quickest way to get there is to jump.
Rather than being linked to suicide, ultimately, Hames’s study concluded that the urge to jump is really a mandate to live.
Amy Stonestrom, an interior designer who winters in Tucson, Arizona, accepts this explanation, comparing HPP to a vacuum. “It’s a pull against my will,” she said. “It’s really hard to fight, I feel like it will suck me off a cliff.” When she’s in a high spot, she wonders if the fear and sensations she feels will someday take her. But she is clear in her conviction: “I don’t want to jump.”
Connie Chang, a journalist who writes about science, experiences the void viscerally, too. “A fog sort of settles over me, with panic thrumming underneath,” she shared. “I can feel lightheaded, like I'm taking too many shallow breaths and I'm not managing to get sufficient air.” Once she is on a ledge or looking over a cliff, the draw to the edge is magnetic. “I could just take one step and there would be no turning back.”
These thoughts are unwelcome, and once they start, Chang finds it hard to stop them; eventually, it’s her inability to dismiss the compulsion to leap that encourages her to sit down, physically preventing her from moving toward the abyss. According to Hames’s study, Chang briefly misinterprets the signal—her brain is simply catching up to what’s happening in real-time, like some reptilian snafu where the correction still runs in analog.
Allison Salerno, an avid Appalachian Trail section hiker, experiences HPP as well. “I could choose to leap, but I’m not going to.” For her, that's emboldening. She has been chipping away at the AT for the last four years and describes the anxiety she feels as an elevation to her heart rate and breathing and sometimes her throat gets dry. To alleviate these physical reactions, she uses a five-second monologue to coach herself through the exposed parts of the trail: I’m safe, I’m prepared, I’m not going to jump. On a recent trip to Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Salerno was hiking Mount Race—a rugged peak in the Taconic Mountain Range roughly 3 miles north of the Massachusetts-Connecticut border—when she came across a section of the trail known as the Mount Race Ledges. It's a short, rocky area with a dramatic drop that falls away steeply. “I hugged the brush on the uphill slope,” she shared, but as she moved through the last part of the ledges, her self-talk provided the confidence to look at the thing that scared her most— the wide abyss below—and she simply chose to keep her feet planted on the ground.
CLINICALLY, the Call of the Void would be categorized as an intrusive thought. Often strange or troublesome, intrusive thoughts are unplanned and unwanted, and alien to our nature. But they are common, according to Tod Ricker, a psychologist based in central Oregon. “We have them all day long; if they are [harmless], they are productive and helpful,” Ricker said, “and we don’t have any judgment.” When they are more dangerous, like the sudden urge to jump, Ricker said, we think it must mean we are "crazy or sick.” It becomes a narrative with emotional value, and that makes it harder to dismiss.
Dr. Tobias Teismann agrees. Teismann, a psychotherapist and director of an outpatient clinic at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, has frequently encountered patients suffering from HPP. In each case, as he dug deeper, “it always turned out quickly that these patients had no desire to die at all.” These encounters led him to investigate the phenomenon in 2021. “We have now completed three studies on the subject, and it is very clear, it is not an indication of a hidden death wish.”
The Call, Teismann believes, only leads to suffering if we interpret it as threatening—a difference of degrees between being wildly curious and looking over the edge versus acting wildly, and out of character, and giving in to the urge. “If the idea arises that the intrusive thoughts could drive you to act on them,” he said, you can eliminate situations that trigger them, like avoiding high places altogether.
Perhaps this is true for Laura Collier-Blanco, a small business owner in Orange County, California. She has struggled with the anxiety of intrusive thoughts relating to jumping for years. For her, it’s counterintuitive. The intense panic she feels makes it almost impossible to fight the fear that she will undoubtedly fall, leading her to believe leaping is her only relief.
Last year, while backpacking the famed Kalalau Trail on the Napali Coast of Hawaii’s island of Kauai, Collier-Blanco felt the familiar pull at Crawler’s Ledge, an infamous no-fall section of the trail known for steep drops and slippery rocks. “I might as well jump because I was so certain I’d fall,” she shared. Her anxiety was so intense, she rationalized, “It’s right there, and it’s so beautiful. I’m going to die anyway: Why not here?”
Recognizing these thoughts as intrusive, she slowed her pace and used her breath to calm herself as she navigated the short section. While she and her husband had planned to spend two nights at Kalalau Beach, she couldn’t think of anything else but crossing the narrow and exposed Crawler’s Ledge again on their return to the trailhead. She was so consumed by the thought that it took the enjoyment out of the experience, and they hiked out the next morning to get it over with. In her case, her control over her own destiny won out, choosing to find a safe solution for the anxiety and cut her trip short, rather than prolong the wait to fall.
IT’S STRANGE when you consider that this dark spot in our psyche, this reckless impulse to be self-destructive, is normal, even primal. In the mid-1800s, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard examined HPP and the connection between anxiety, the autonomy to choose, and the responsibility that choice holds.
He viewed anxiety as synonymous with freedom. During an episode of HPP, we experience both the fear of falling and the draw of jumping. He concluded that the “dizziness of freedom” is the anxious tug we feel between staying put or jumping of our own free will. It’s the burden of options.
Fourteen years ago I decided to make a three-day loop through the Grand Canyon. We’d chosen to descend the Bright Angel Trail—a wide, casual ribbon that winds its way down to the Colorado River—and then return to the rim via the lesserused Hermit Trail.
On our last day, the roar of the river followed us as we began the grueling, 4,000-foot climb. As we moved higher, the Hermit Trail wound back and forth through a cliff band fortified with limestone that ends at a section known as the Cathedral Stairs. Here, the steepness eases, transforming instead to a grand traverse tucked below the west-facing wall of the South Rim.
Thankful for the now gradual pitch, my eye scanned the canyon’s walls. Rain runnels had formed fanshaped impressions in the cliffs above and below us, a clear indication of the canyon walls' vulnerability to weather. The trail hugged the near-vertical side of a broad bench that hid from view the steep terrain that lurked below, making it impossible to feel threatened. However, rounding a corner, the trail became a washed-out version of itself—a shelf on a vertical wall.
It wasn’t that the trail was too narrow to remain upright. It was that I didn’t trust myself not to jump. Caught in the drama of the moment, with no refuge from myself, I lowered my center of gravity and squirmed my way across the 50-foot section, pack and all.
Assuming the human will to live is strong and intact, is the Call of the Void a result of too much power in choice? Or is it a misinterpretation of our survival instinct? Gary Cox, a British philosopher, opines that the only reason we don’t act on our impulse and leap is because we choose not to. Perhaps the hypothetical moment between feeling the safety of standing still and the sensation of freefall is what cements my will to live. Fortunately, we have the agency to choose what we do.
It is reassuring to know the compelling urge I often feel on a trail at the edge of a cliff is common and possible only because I have free will. To jump is not in my character—or so I think. But perhaps it is and I am just good at making choices that preserve my life. In the Grand Canyon, I was faintly aware that I had a choice—remain on the trail or risk everything I’ve known to be true about myself and jump. My preference was not to become a statistic or a faded memory. But that power to choose is dizzying.
Illustrations by Miranda Harris
