aerobat
06-12-2007, 03:26 AM
Our human ancestors were in much greater danger than we--from large predators, the elements, and other competitors--on a daily basis, and those who survived and reproduced over many generations participated in a biological evolutionary process termed ‘natural selection’. What we call ‘the fight or flight response’ or ‘anxiety response’ had genuine survival value, and still does, even though in urban western societies not in a war zone, we live rather unthreatened lives. But we are still hard-wired via evolution—some of us more sensitively than others—to perceive and respond to threat or danger. We automatically respond by producing the chemical adrenaline in our adrenal glands (on the kidneys), which in turn galvanizes our brains and bodies into fighting or running away. The symptoms of this include a chilling of extremities as blood is redirected to the muscles, increased heart and respiratory rates, and release of a simple sugar by the liver to provide energy to the cells. We may experience this response as sweating, shaking, dizziness, tingling in the extremities, and of course cold hands and feet and pounding heart and fast breathing, and a strong sense of dread, and a desire to fight or run.
If the threat is genuine and immediate, we act. The extra energy dissipates as we resolve the situation, either by fighting or running away. But if the threat is not immediate, we are obliged to “hurry up and wait”, and that is a very, very uncomfortable feeling. In the case of flying anxiety, the perceived threat may be weeks or even months away, and every time we think about the trip—especially if we have booked the flight and wrapped other plans around it—we feel trapped. On a physiological level, we are chronically storing unused energy in our muscles, which keeps us constantly on edge, ready to fight or run from a danger that we cannot yet confront. This is the worst part of a fear of flying for many people. It’s not the discomfort one must bear through a few hours aloft in an airplane; it’s the weeks beforehand filled with tension, insomnia, irritability, an inability to concentrate on daily tasks, and a nagging sense of doom, which in turn activates a whole constellation of negative thoughts, images, and beliefs. This is what we term ‘Anticipatory Anxiety’ (AA for short), and it is this which tends to make people cancel flights—for the immediate relief cancelling brings—and then to become grounded, and despair of ever being able to fly again.
We get small relief from airlines’ accident statistics and aviation-related data. There is a sense of “necessary but not sufficient” about these stats and data, and our fear has an uncanny way of turning the tables on our logic. For example, we may read that the chances of any given flight crashing in a prosperous, developed country are one in ten million, but our fear insidiously yammers at us that ours will be the one. We won’t settle for anything less than a hundred-percent guarantee. We attach all sorts of significance to trivial and random data, creating for ourselves a miserable magical world full of flight omens. It matters little that we have no psychic powers otherwise; we are endowed with uncanny prescience about our flight, looking for any excuse to cancel it. We envision media headlines about our flight going down in flames, we envision our friends at our funeral, we cannot confidently plan anything for ourselves beyond that dark day we must get on an airplane. Emotionally, our future is foreclosed to us. Some of us suffer more than others with this, and some are more able to push it aside, but this is the essential psychological burden of AA associated with the fear of flying (FoF for short).
For some of us, the fear is not of crashing but of having a sustained panic attack. And a panic attack can be a truly awful experience—with all these uncomfortable symptoms ratcheted up to an eleven on a scale of ten. It doesn’t help to know intellectually that we cannot physiologically sustain full-blown panic for more than a few minutes; a few minutes are an eternity. On top of the threat of panic is the threat of publicly embarrassing ourselves, or worse.
Anticipatory anxiety is the biggest bogeyman we must face and disempower. In fact, any progress made in reducing AA is a strong potential ally on the flight itself. This is why it is so important to understand enough about the physiology of anxiety to make a commitment to work on the AA, using techniques developed by a variety of anxiety researchers. This is far, far better than just trying to macho it out.
Unlike with other specific phobias, facing the fear of flying involves one big step (boarding a plane). One can systematically approach snakes or spiders and carefully measure one’s dose at slightly more than the last time, but we with FoF have this problem of either being on the ground or in the air, with no shades of grey in between (unless we are taking flying lessons and have a very long runway available). So part of what we must accomplish in tackling our AA is reducing the enormity of that one big step, such that when the time comes to take it, we are ready. We may not know how ready we are. There’s some faith involved—but not blind faith, and there’s some courage involved—but not more than we are capable of. Thus we must start by putting our attention on the AA itself, because our emotions are one thing we can gain some control over, with a triple-whammy combination of knowledge, trickery, and support.
The first piece of knowledge we might embrace—and it will be purely intellectual until it sinks in—is that our FoF is a neurochemical lie—nothing more. It is often helpful to understand how such a deception got foisted on us, and for that we must integrate a good layman’s anxiety education with a review of our personal history with flying and our beliefs about flying. We can definitely stir up some aha!s in this process. Aha!s are a deposit of new, positive beliefs and emotions. They may pop up only briefly, but are never lost. They will pop up again and again, and can begin to build an emotional safety net.
Trickery is what we must learn to employ next. On the flip side, we have been tricked into an irrational anxiety response—that is, an overload of symptoms in the absence of a genuine threat, and, rather than lie on an analyst’s couch for years trying to figure out “why me?” the truly logical thing to do is turn around and outfox the Trickster! There is a large inventory of anxiety-reduction techniques available. It’s “different strokes for different folks”, however, and it takes some exploration to come up with things that promise to help. But current anxiety research is demonstrating that the techniques which permit controlled confrontation—such as ‘paradox’, for example--are more effective than those which focus on suppression—like deep breathing to slow heart rate. Here’s ‘paradox’ in a nutshell: I am feeling very anxious right now. I hate this. But I am going to deliberately try to make my symptoms even worse, so I will hate this even more. OK, anxiety, put it right there (sticks out chin)!! Gimme your best shot!! Heart, pound faster! Clammy palms, get clammier! Sense of doom, get scarier!
Believe it or not, this confrontational strategy often reduces the anxiety. We feel as though we have made it take shame, and that gives us a little more control in the moment. There are many strategies that are effective; paradox is just one. These techniques must be practiced as part of a broader discipline; think of it as a type of martial art designed to change the way we feel about flying. Once we begin to do that, we find that we can also change the ways we imagine and think about flying. And when that starts to happen…and it all starts to work together…whoa doggies!! What’s so rewarding about this process is that, if we do the work, we start to know in our hearts that we are getting ready to fly. It is no illusion. That Big Step becomes smaller.
And finally, there is support. That’s what Taking Flight is all about. We have been doing it wonderfully well for almost four years now, with many, many successes to our credit. Support comes in many forms here—from people fully recovered from FoF or well into their recovery reaching out with a strong hand and a map of the territory…to still-fearful (non-) fliers who are wrestling with the fear at varying levels but compassionately recognizing one another and discovering they/we are not alone—that we will never again feel the despair that goes with isolation and lack of understanding. Everyone here is capable of offering support; it’s not just for the moderators or the old-timers to offer. The simple discovery that one is not alone, that there are no dark secrets in our personal FoF that have not been witnessed by someone else—is itself a powerful ally. Fear thrives on ignorance. We are committed to banishing ignorance.
Where does one go for knowledge and trickery to start turning the tables on the anticipatory anxiety? We at Taking Flight want to provide you as many free resources as possible, so in addition to what we offer directly on the forums, we promote sites which provide valuable help with no fee. While we’ll be beefing up our Resources, Links and Stickies over the next few weeks with all kinds of information about becoming a happier air traveler, we want to invite you to check out these two excellent sites:
www.anxieties.com (http://www.anxieties.com/)
http://www.fearofflyinghelp.com/
So jump right in and get to work. If you have questions, post them. If you have aha!s, post them. Welcome to a mighty internet frontier of human social evolution. You can do this. We can help. And you can help, so that others can do this.
If the threat is genuine and immediate, we act. The extra energy dissipates as we resolve the situation, either by fighting or running away. But if the threat is not immediate, we are obliged to “hurry up and wait”, and that is a very, very uncomfortable feeling. In the case of flying anxiety, the perceived threat may be weeks or even months away, and every time we think about the trip—especially if we have booked the flight and wrapped other plans around it—we feel trapped. On a physiological level, we are chronically storing unused energy in our muscles, which keeps us constantly on edge, ready to fight or run from a danger that we cannot yet confront. This is the worst part of a fear of flying for many people. It’s not the discomfort one must bear through a few hours aloft in an airplane; it’s the weeks beforehand filled with tension, insomnia, irritability, an inability to concentrate on daily tasks, and a nagging sense of doom, which in turn activates a whole constellation of negative thoughts, images, and beliefs. This is what we term ‘Anticipatory Anxiety’ (AA for short), and it is this which tends to make people cancel flights—for the immediate relief cancelling brings—and then to become grounded, and despair of ever being able to fly again.
We get small relief from airlines’ accident statistics and aviation-related data. There is a sense of “necessary but not sufficient” about these stats and data, and our fear has an uncanny way of turning the tables on our logic. For example, we may read that the chances of any given flight crashing in a prosperous, developed country are one in ten million, but our fear insidiously yammers at us that ours will be the one. We won’t settle for anything less than a hundred-percent guarantee. We attach all sorts of significance to trivial and random data, creating for ourselves a miserable magical world full of flight omens. It matters little that we have no psychic powers otherwise; we are endowed with uncanny prescience about our flight, looking for any excuse to cancel it. We envision media headlines about our flight going down in flames, we envision our friends at our funeral, we cannot confidently plan anything for ourselves beyond that dark day we must get on an airplane. Emotionally, our future is foreclosed to us. Some of us suffer more than others with this, and some are more able to push it aside, but this is the essential psychological burden of AA associated with the fear of flying (FoF for short).
For some of us, the fear is not of crashing but of having a sustained panic attack. And a panic attack can be a truly awful experience—with all these uncomfortable symptoms ratcheted up to an eleven on a scale of ten. It doesn’t help to know intellectually that we cannot physiologically sustain full-blown panic for more than a few minutes; a few minutes are an eternity. On top of the threat of panic is the threat of publicly embarrassing ourselves, or worse.
Anticipatory anxiety is the biggest bogeyman we must face and disempower. In fact, any progress made in reducing AA is a strong potential ally on the flight itself. This is why it is so important to understand enough about the physiology of anxiety to make a commitment to work on the AA, using techniques developed by a variety of anxiety researchers. This is far, far better than just trying to macho it out.
Unlike with other specific phobias, facing the fear of flying involves one big step (boarding a plane). One can systematically approach snakes or spiders and carefully measure one’s dose at slightly more than the last time, but we with FoF have this problem of either being on the ground or in the air, with no shades of grey in between (unless we are taking flying lessons and have a very long runway available). So part of what we must accomplish in tackling our AA is reducing the enormity of that one big step, such that when the time comes to take it, we are ready. We may not know how ready we are. There’s some faith involved—but not blind faith, and there’s some courage involved—but not more than we are capable of. Thus we must start by putting our attention on the AA itself, because our emotions are one thing we can gain some control over, with a triple-whammy combination of knowledge, trickery, and support.
The first piece of knowledge we might embrace—and it will be purely intellectual until it sinks in—is that our FoF is a neurochemical lie—nothing more. It is often helpful to understand how such a deception got foisted on us, and for that we must integrate a good layman’s anxiety education with a review of our personal history with flying and our beliefs about flying. We can definitely stir up some aha!s in this process. Aha!s are a deposit of new, positive beliefs and emotions. They may pop up only briefly, but are never lost. They will pop up again and again, and can begin to build an emotional safety net.
Trickery is what we must learn to employ next. On the flip side, we have been tricked into an irrational anxiety response—that is, an overload of symptoms in the absence of a genuine threat, and, rather than lie on an analyst’s couch for years trying to figure out “why me?” the truly logical thing to do is turn around and outfox the Trickster! There is a large inventory of anxiety-reduction techniques available. It’s “different strokes for different folks”, however, and it takes some exploration to come up with things that promise to help. But current anxiety research is demonstrating that the techniques which permit controlled confrontation—such as ‘paradox’, for example--are more effective than those which focus on suppression—like deep breathing to slow heart rate. Here’s ‘paradox’ in a nutshell: I am feeling very anxious right now. I hate this. But I am going to deliberately try to make my symptoms even worse, so I will hate this even more. OK, anxiety, put it right there (sticks out chin)!! Gimme your best shot!! Heart, pound faster! Clammy palms, get clammier! Sense of doom, get scarier!
Believe it or not, this confrontational strategy often reduces the anxiety. We feel as though we have made it take shame, and that gives us a little more control in the moment. There are many strategies that are effective; paradox is just one. These techniques must be practiced as part of a broader discipline; think of it as a type of martial art designed to change the way we feel about flying. Once we begin to do that, we find that we can also change the ways we imagine and think about flying. And when that starts to happen…and it all starts to work together…whoa doggies!! What’s so rewarding about this process is that, if we do the work, we start to know in our hearts that we are getting ready to fly. It is no illusion. That Big Step becomes smaller.
And finally, there is support. That’s what Taking Flight is all about. We have been doing it wonderfully well for almost four years now, with many, many successes to our credit. Support comes in many forms here—from people fully recovered from FoF or well into their recovery reaching out with a strong hand and a map of the territory…to still-fearful (non-) fliers who are wrestling with the fear at varying levels but compassionately recognizing one another and discovering they/we are not alone—that we will never again feel the despair that goes with isolation and lack of understanding. Everyone here is capable of offering support; it’s not just for the moderators or the old-timers to offer. The simple discovery that one is not alone, that there are no dark secrets in our personal FoF that have not been witnessed by someone else—is itself a powerful ally. Fear thrives on ignorance. We are committed to banishing ignorance.
Where does one go for knowledge and trickery to start turning the tables on the anticipatory anxiety? We at Taking Flight want to provide you as many free resources as possible, so in addition to what we offer directly on the forums, we promote sites which provide valuable help with no fee. While we’ll be beefing up our Resources, Links and Stickies over the next few weeks with all kinds of information about becoming a happier air traveler, we want to invite you to check out these two excellent sites:
www.anxieties.com (http://www.anxieties.com/)
http://www.fearofflyinghelp.com/
So jump right in and get to work. If you have questions, post them. If you have aha!s, post them. Welcome to a mighty internet frontier of human social evolution. You can do this. We can help. And you can help, so that others can do this.