Women Personality and Mental Health

There are many reasons for some people to become afraid of flying, such as strong turbulence during a flight, a panic attack on a plane, continuing media emphasis on “scary flying stories” leads you to become afraid, or maybe a traumatic event that unrelated to flying which shortly before a flight.

Basically there are two kinds of fears people experience about flying: fears of crashing and dying; and claustrophobic fears of being “trapped” in the airplane once the door is shut.
Fearful flyers thus try to feel better by trying to feel “in control” of various aspects of the flight experience. Since the flight is really not under their control, this striving for control makes them more afraid, not less.

A fearful flyer generally needs an entirely new strategy for tackling this problem, because the solutions a fearful flyer usually tries tend to make the fear worse, not better. It’s a case of “the harder I try, the worse it gets”. (If you want to learn more about this paradoxical aspect of anxiety.

In general, this means you need to get better at accepting the role of a passenger. A passenger is a person who presents himself/herself at the gate and turns over the responsiblity of flying to those who are trained and paid to do the job; who makes no effort to control that which he cannot control; and whose only job during the flight is to wait, while allowing himself/herself to be as comfortable as possible. As a passenger, you are literally “baggage that breathes”! As a passenger, you need to know how to accept and work with your emotions and fears, rather than resist them.

Adapted article from Arthur Buchanan, President/CEO of Out of Darkness & Into the Light