As a therapist who works with people on the fear of flying, including understanding the science behind this fear and best practices for working with it, I see a lot of really bad advice online. Being a common fear, it’s not surprising there are many people desperate for answers and for anything that might help. There’s also no shortage of well-intended people who think they have the right answers. These ways of dealing with flight anxiety, unfortunately, often backfire, which I’ll explain in more detail as we progress. Below is some of the worst advice for the fear of flying.
The Bad Advice:
Reminding you how safe it actually is to fly:
Most people who don’t get what really fuels the fear of flying (see my other post on Why your Fear of Flying isn’t really about Flying) think that helping people understand how safe flying is will make them less anxious. In reality, most people afraid of flying already know how statistically safe it is. What’s going on has less to do with facts and more to do with anxiety and one’s relationship to anxiety. It’s usually more about fear of being afraid than fear of aircraft malfunction.
Breathing and Grounding Techniques:
Classic coping techniques like deep breathing and the classic 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise can be helpful for general stress reduction, but they’re unlikely to resolve fear of flying if we’re using them to control or eliminate anxiety. When they become strategies to “fix” the feeling, they reinforce the idea that anxiety is dangerous and must be managed in order to be safe. They can also backfire by making us overly aware of our breathing and bodily sensations — trying to inhale the “right” way, monitor each breath, or calm ourselves on command. That kind of hyperfocus can actually increase lightheadedness or tension and convince the brain something is wrong. Our bodies already know how to breathe and regulate oxygen without our supervision. The more helpful shift is often learning to allow anxiety and let breathing happen naturally, rather than trying to micromanage it.
Track turbulence:
Skim any online support forum for fear of flying and you’ll likely find people suggesting turbulence trackers as a way of easing your mind when it comes to taking to the skies. Unfortunately, this sort of certainty seeking, planning, and needing to know often contributes to the anxious cycle over time, especially when we already know turbulence is safe and understand that the goal is to learn to be more okay with uncertainty over time.
Distract yourself:
While it’s not inherently a bad idea to have things to do while traveling, such as watching a movie, talking to your travel partner, or reading a book, we don’t actually need to do any of these things to stay safe or to feel safe. If the only way to feel relatively okay while flying means needing to stay distracted, you’ll never give yourself true permission to be with the anxiety and to relax. Engaging in this sort of thing is often referred to as relying on “safety behaviors,” a clinical term that refers to things we do to try to control the anxiety itself rather than learning that we can tolerate it without needing to escape, suppress, or manage it away. If the only way you can be okay is with distraction, then your “okayness” is conditional and requires external forms of coping.
Think positive thoughts:
The threat detection system, which I won’t get into in much detail here, is primitive and relies on cues in our environment that are often subconscious to alert us to potential threats. Sometimes our brain, specifically the amygdala, creates threatening associations with certain settings, places, or things even if those things are actually safe. This part of the brain does not respond to language or positive thoughts. It instead learns from and responds to how we respond to the anxiety. If we avoid, distract, or fight, it reinforces to the system that the situation is unsafe. When we instead learn to become less reactive to false alarms by seeing anxiety for what it is (frightening but not unsafe), we not only decrease escalation but also notice fewer anxiety symptoms over time.
Look to the flight attendants for reassurance:
It’s normal to want reassurance when we are afraid. Reassurance can look like scanning the environment to make sure everything is going to be okay. Scanning the environment is equivalent to hyperawareness and scanning for threats. When we scan for threats and seek reassurance, we unintentionally add fuel to the anxious cycle. Although it might seem counterintuitive not to look for reassurance when anxious, we must recognize that any form of reassurance we get will only be short-lived and contributes to the idea that we must know with full certainty that we are safe in order to feel safe.
Make sure conditions are optimal or ideal:
You might hear recommendations to sit in certain parts of the plane, to fly certain parts of the day, or to avoid certain routes or airports. This type of behavior not only narrows your options in life but also gives a false sense of control. Conditions do not need to be controlled, nor do specific conditions need to be avoided when the risk profile of either is essentially the same. If you’re catching the drift of all of this so far, it might be easy to see why needing conditions to be optimal runs counter to the greater goals of flexibility, accepting discomfort, and living a life that is not restricted by what anxiety might dictate.
As I’ve outlined some of this bad advice, I’ve tried to naturally work in the ways it might backfire. As with any kind of anxiety, the way we treat it, if we truly want to get better, is often to act in counterintuitive ways. On the surface, and to the non-clinical layperson, all of this “bad advice” might seem reasonable, but it keeps the focus on reducing anxiety in the moment rather than changing your relationship with it. Progress comes not from eliminating anxiety before you fly, but from learning you can experience it without needing to control it. As you learn to respond to the fear differently, the fear eventually responds differently to you.
See Fear of Flying resources by Joel Schmidt – Licensed Therapist, Fear of Flying Specialist – and his comprehensive “Willing to Fly” workbook.