Is Your Fear of Flying Getting Worse?

Flying Can Be Daunting

Source: Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash

Are you planning a plane trip? Getting that feeling in the pit of your stomach? Checking the weather reports with trepidation? Considering cancelling?

If you have become more concerned about flying these days, you are not alone.

It’s called anticipatory anxiety, and there are plenty of reasons why yours might be ticking up these days.

Social media clips about violence on flights, predictions of increased turbulence, issues with Boeing Max planes, plus the recent crashes in Alaska, South Korea, and DC have made even marginally comfortable fliers reconsider flights and reach for the Xanax before boarding.

We get anxious, despite the fact that—by every measure—flying is still the safest way to get from A to B. We all know this, and most of us recognize that our fear is enormously out of proportion to the risk involved.

Still, knowing that flying is safe, and knowing that our fear is way out of proportion to the danger, don't go far in keeping our anxiety at bay. Every bad possibility feels likely, despite what we know about statistics.

Now—and this might be a surprise to some—most people who describe themselves as afraid of flying are not primarily afraid that the plane will crash. They are afraid of what might happen to them while they are trapped in the plane; and there are a wide variety of “what ifs?”

We see “fear of flying” as a misnomer. Much better to call it “fears of flying,” because the experience of flying creates a perfect environment for a host of fears.

Most commonly, fearful fliers refer to themselves—inaccurately—as “claustrophobic.” In fact, their fears are triggered by odd, unpleasant, and frightening sensations, and the worry that they will panic with no means of retreating to a “safe” place. They create a scenario in their minds that the panic will be unbearable, never-ending, embarrassing, drive them crazy, or cause a medical emergency.

A second large group of people can’t shake their thoughts about a frightening or disastrous experience. They might have heard about it, read about it, imagined it, or previously experienced it, and think to themselves, “I couldn’t handle it if something like that happened to me.”

These imagined frightening experiences can involve the possibility of crashing, but there are a variety of situations including turbulence, fights that might break out on the flight, air-sickness, a germ-filled environment, allergic reactions, loss of contact with family or friends, a feeling of being too high up in the sky, or losing control and doing or saying something humiliating.

An internal dialogue starts in which you try to talk to yourself rationally. This escalating conversation between your “what if?” (worry voice) and your efforts to calm yourself (false comfort) only increases your anxiety.

Here are some typical internal dialogues:

• Worry Voice: What if I can’t tolerate the panic and go crazy?

• False Comfort: You just have to hold on, no one goes crazy from anxiety.

• Worry Voice: Well, what if I freak out and do something crazy? I could grab a stranger in fear, or yank open the emergency door, I have had those thoughts.

• False Comfort: Just stop thinking about this: you can read your book.

Or,

• Worried Voice: What if this turbulence brings the plane down?

• False Comfort: Turbulence is just bumpy air, it won’t hurt the plane.

• Worry Voice: Oh, yeah, I read about some that damaged the plane, and people were hurt. You know it really could happen.

• False Comfort: You just have to trust the pilot’s skills and the people who inspect the planes.

• Worried Voice: How do I do that?

Notice that no matter what false comfort says to try to calm your worries, worry voice always comes with yet another concern. This is why we call this false comfort.

This internal dialogue, also called anxious rumination, fires up your alarm system—your fight, flight, or freeze reaction—triggered by your amygdala. Your amygdala is there to protect you, but is subject to numerous false alarms. Even thoughts and imagination can set off an alarm that is delicately set. Your brain and body are reacting as if you are in genuine danger, the same way that horror movies get your heart pumping while you sit safely in the dark.

But this feeling is anxiety, not danger. It’s often hard to realize that anxiety indicates discomfort, not danger. It is not a predictor, a signal, or a warning, even though it feels like it.

Your particular trigger starts the rumination, followed by the (false) alarm signal of the amygdala, resulting in the altered state of consciousness that we call anxious awareness, with two very distinct characteristics.

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The first is thought-action fusion, the inability to accurately distinguish between thinking about something and actual reality. So just thinking about the possibility of losing control in an airplane—or imagining the plane falling from the sky—makes it seem more likely to happen. The thought seems more likely to be true.

Second, the feeling of how risky or dangerous something is has two factors—the stakes and the odds. Getting hit by a falling meteorite has disastrous stakes, but the odds are so remote that most of us don’t think about it.

But anxious awareness produces an inability to factor in the odds of an event happening, focusing only on the stakes. On an airplane, the disastrous stakes feel so real that people often find themselves immersed in their imagination, stuck in the anxiety channel and ignore the actual odds.

And here is where anticipatory anxiety thrives, where the expectation of distress pushes you towards avoidance, and the anxiety you experience before going on the plane makes you reconsider the flight you are booking.

To repeat: anticipatory anxiety seems to predict danger and feels like a warning not to proceed. If you avoid the flight, your anxiety will go away, but then you miss the vacation, the conference, or the family visit. That feels terrible.

A willingness to stay in the present moment and attend to your senses—your common sense, your current reality, even your harmless anxious sensations, and not your imagination—is the first step towards a more comfortable flight. Refraining from those ruminations and internal false comfort dialogues is important. Redirecting your attention is different from yelling at yourself to stop thinking. It is more gentle and effective to let the anxiety channel stay on, while watching or listening to something real in the present moment.

We have found that anticipatory anxiety increases with indecision, and decreases with a firm decision to proceed. Commitment is the antidote to avoidance. Recovery from your fears of flying starts with a commitment to fly and a gentle change in your relationship with those fears.