Love to travel, yet hate to fly? If you find yourself white knuckling your armrests or gasping for breath whenever your flight takes off, you’re not alone.
Millions of Americans/people have some anxiety over flying, with symptoms ranging from mild concern to paralyzing panic attacks.
How can you learn to cope with your fears?
To begin with, the fear of flying isn’t always about crashing. “In actuality, a large majority of people tend to be claustrophobic, and fear having a panic attack on the plane,” says Dr. David Carbonell, who runs the Anxiety Treatment Center, a private practice in Illinois comprised of a several psychologists specializing in anxiety problems. Other issues that can cause panic on flights include a fear of heights or simply a lack of control. In his book, Panic Attacks Workbook: A Guided Program for Beating the Panic Trick, Dr. Carbonell, who has specialized in anxiety treatment since 1987, describes some of the symptoms of these panic attacks, including heart palpitations, sweating, shaking, shortness of breath and chest pain. Situations such as turbulence and takeoff — or simply hearing inexplicable noises on the aircraft — tend to cause the most anxiety.
All of the doctors we spoke with agree that while terrorism is a relatively common concern, fewer people actually sought treatment for their fear of flying after September 11. “I think it actually acted as an additional excuse for people to not get treatment,” says Dr. Gerald Tarlow, co-founder of the Center for Virtual Reality Therapy, a privately-run institute in Calabasas, California that uses virtual reality computers to simulate experiences for patients to confront their fears and phobias. “If they were afraid of flying previously, what they tended to do is say ‘See, it really is dangerous.’”
At the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland (ASDI), an independent treatment center in Baltimore operating since 1992, Stephanie Thomas explains that those who did develop a phobia of flying after September 11 “already had some kind of anxiety, but 9/11 acted as a catalyst for them to act out on it.”
Of course, there are all sorts of statistics out there to show just how safe flying can be. We’ve all heard that flying is far safer than driving a car. Thomas likes to open her fear of flying courses with the example that, based on statistics, “You’d have to fly every day for 32,000 years before you’re in a fatal crash.”
In fact, statistics compiled by www.planecrashinfo.com state that the odds of being killed on a single flight, out of the top 25 airlines with the best records, are 1 in 6.3 million; for the bottom 25 airlines with the worst records, the odds are 1 in 543,000. But no matter how comforting these numbers may be to some, chances are they are not going to make a big difference to those with a significant fear of flying.
Dr. Carbonell points out that if sufferers don’t know how to cope with their anxiety, their efforts to control it may actually make the situation worse. “They try to pick the best day to fly; they try to pick the safe airline. They do all sorts of things to control their fear, and those efforts make them feel worse, rather than better.”
He also explains how reactions can cause the fear to build upon itself; for example, panicked breathing can lead to hyperventilation, which can cause lightheadedness, dizziness and chest pains. Thomas agrees, “Anxiety is a physiological reaction to perceived danger. Some people like to go on roller coasters for the adrenaline rush. This is the same [type of] situation, but the difference is the interpretation of your reactions. When people try to avoid the fear, it makes it bigger.”
All agree that anxiety is a treatable condition, and use a combination of cognitive and behavioral therapies to deal with the fear of flying. Translation? Learning how to cope with your physiological reactions, and then putting that knowledge to the test on an airplane
Click here to get Breaking News and Latest Updates