How can i get rid of my fear of flying in an airplane?
17 June 2010
9 Comments
Natalie asked:
We are going to california tomarrow and i kind of have a fear of flying. How can i get rid of it? pls help thanks((:
We are going to california tomarrow and i kind of have a fear of flying. How can i get rid of it? pls help thanks((:
more people are killed from donkey attacks on average than die in plane crashes annually.
I think we all know what you should be afraid of.
just finally realise what benefits and beauties travelling by plane has.
Just simply realize that air travel is the safest means of getting around nowadays. look at the statistics of safety…google it and you will see you have a far likelihood of getting hurt/maimed/killed while in a car.
Knowledge helps. Look at it this way. In the last 20 years over 3 BILLION people have been safely transported by the major airlines. That’s a number you can’t really even grasp except in a very abstract way. It would take 40 years for you to count to a billion if you counted by ones 24 hours a day. It’s a big number. By comparison, only a few thousand people have been killed or injured in an aircraft accident. Statistically, you have a better chance of winning a major lottery jackpot, being struck by lightning, or slipping in the tub and getting a fatal concussion. FACT. You also have 600 times greater chance of being killed in an auto accident on your way to the airport. That’s what you should really worry about. About 35,000 to 40,000 people are killed annually on US highways every single year. That’s the equivalent of about 100 per day. This would be like a Boeing 757 crashing every other day and killing everybody aboard, year round. In addition, airline pilots are the most highly trained, retrained and sctutinized work force in the world, bar none. The media tends to exaggerate everything all out of proportion to reality when it comes to airplane accidents. Even an emergency landing with no problems hits the news big time, yet all the people killed in cars every day get virtually no news coverage. Lose the fear. It’s totally irrational. Relax and have fun.
You get rid of your fear of flying in an airplane by flying in an airplane. Everyone’s scared their first time. And their second, third and fourth time. Not so much the fifth time.
You can distract yourself when you’re in the air by reading a book or a magazine.
It is human nature to fear things we don’t understand. Most people are afraid of snakes despite the fact that most snakes are harmless.
I can tell you all day long that you have nothing to fear about taking that flight but that wont help.
I recommend getting a portable DVD player and a few movies and watching them during the flight. Just try not to think about it, all you will do is wind yourself up unnecessarily.
Wish you had more time. A lot of people have actually gone to the local Cessna/Beachcraft/Piper dealer, and taken introductory lessons. Knowledge helps! It’s a lot safer than driving.
With fear of flying, unless you understand what is going on, you have no chance to remedy it. Medication is not effective. It actually makes things worse. Research on that is at
Hypnotism is “hit or miss”. It can’t be relied on. Courses by pilots offer statistics on how safe flying. Great. But planes so sometimes crash. How does a person deal with the fear that your flight could be the statistic? Cognitive therapy – particularly that developed for fear of flying by Australian Claire Weekes – works for people whose feelings develop slowly, but not for those whose feelings develop too rapidly – or too intensely – for the the mind to remain clear enough to use the cognitive “tools”. What is needed is an automatic way to control feelings.
We are born with half of the emotion regulation system in place, the half that revs us up. The half that calms us down does not exist at birth. By eighteen months a part of the brain develops that can let the child calm itself. The child memorizes the steps caregivers use to provide calming. If the steps are highly effective, the child can calm itself independently using the steps memorized.
Obviously, caregivers – regardless of how much they care – vary in their ability to tune in the child and assure the child effectively. As a result, few of us get an optimal ability to calm ourselves.
During teenage years, we tend to think bad things only happen to others. This youthful optimism gets us by for a few years without excessive anxiety. But as we mature, we realize something can happen to us. We then turn to strategies to keep anxiety when dealing with uncertainty under control. The strategies typically involve control and escape.
Control: when control of anxiety is not naturally available, we depend on control of situations to avoid anxiety. When driving a car, we believe we can make everything work out alright. Though driving is not as safe as flying, we feel safer because the wheel is in our own, not someone else’s, hands.
Escape: if there is a car accident, there may be a chance of surviving. If a plane, people mistakenly believe that if something goes wrong they are doomed. In a plane, if something goes wrong, backup systems are used. Backup systems make flying safer than driving. But these systems are in the cockpit where they seem theoretical. Though backup systems provide greater safety in a plane than is available in a car, the systems are not as real to a passenger as a steering wheel is in the hands of a driver.
Since the backup systems are not concrete enough to make passengers feel safe, many try to escape psychologically by keeping their thoughts elsewhere throughout the flight. If, due to turbulence, the person cannot keep the flight out of mind, there is no way to keep feelings under control.
The feelings that develop when flying are caused by stress hormones, mainly adrenalin and cortisol. They rev you up. When you think “what if”, you get a “hit” of these stress hormones from each such thought. The build up of stress hormones produces claustrophobia, high anxiety or even panic.
As both an airline captain and licensed therapist, I’ve worked for thirty years to develop more advanced ways to deal with flight anxiety. I’ve developed a way to prevent the release of adrenalin and cortisol by causing the release of oxytocin. Oxytocin shuts down the amygdala, the part of the brain that triggers the release of the hormones that cause fear.
We cause the release of oxytocin by linking each thing that happens on a flight, and each thing you worry about, to the memory of a moment that causes oxytocin to be released. Once the links are established between an oxytocin-producing moment and troublesome moments of flight, high anxiety and panic are automatically controlled. This is an advanced way of controlling the feelings, and it was not possible to do this until research using brain scan technology showed us how the brain works.
The way I understand the cause and cure of flight anxiety is posted in a 18 minute video at
You should have sought professional help many weeks ago. It’s a little too late now, unless of course reading these answers calmed all of your fears.
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