new Weekender Bag It’s fun is not it Summer vacationBut when you see the planes on the tarmac at the airport, flying anxiety can get the better of you. When you board a plane and see how huge it is, anxiety-filled thoughts start to pop up, like, “Are these planes really safe?” and “How much turbulence will there be?”
These are valid questions, but we know that anxiety, if left unchecked, can lead to full-blown panic attacks. If you’re worried about becoming a meme on social media, you might panic even more. But… flying I want to reassure you.
Why do some people experience anxiety while flying?
Do you remember where you were heading when your fear of flying first reared its ugly head? My first memory is my first plane trip to Texas. Up until that point, my family had always traveled by car, but the 10+ hour drive was starting to take a toll on everyone in the family. My heart was racing as I waited for the plane to take off, because I was all too familiar with the car accidents I had driven past in the past. If a car could crash, what about a plane? I won’t go into the details, but one of the flight attendants stood beside me and helped me count to 10 several times until I calmed down.
For those wondering where flying anxiety comes from, Captain Van says it usually happens for two reasons: “We have two systems that try to satisfy our wants and needs while keeping us safe at the same time. One, let’s call it System A, is based on words. We can consciously manipulate it. If it were the only system we had, we’d be able to control our anxiety by thinking logically about how safe the flight is.”
As a child, I would often try to make my anxieties disappear with words, but it seems I needed a bit more reassurance. “System B is experience-based, so it operates outside of consciousness,” says Captain Bang. “When an experience occurs, System B assigns a code to the experience. Positive experiences are assigned a positive code, and negative experiences are assigned a negative code,” he explains.
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After System B assigns those codes, things get interesting: “The next time that experience is likely to occur, your amygdala reads that code. Positive codes evoke good feelings; negative codes evoke bad feelings. The emotion you feel when your amygdala reads that code determines whether you go ahead with the experience or turn it down,” says Captain Vann.
According to Captain Bang, another explanation comes directly from neuroscientists: “The neural mechanisms underlying emotional valence lie at the interface of perception and action, integrating input from the external environment with past experiences to guide an organism’s behavior. Depending on the positive or negative valence assigned to an environmental stimulus, the organism will either approach or avoid the source of the stimuli.” (via National Library of Medicine).
It’s like putting your hand on a hot stove that you’ve never done before: you may not feel any pain right away, but eventually the pain will come and you tell yourself you’ll never do that again. Every nerve pathway and nerve ending knows what will happen if you do, and you want to avoid feeling it.
What does this have to do with flying anxiety?
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Our anxiety tries to do all it can to protect us from perceived threats. Now imagine you are in a situation over which you have no control, such as being on an airplane. You know you are a passenger on an airplane, but you are not piloting the plane and cannot direct the flight path.
“With a traumatic experience, we have no control, so the things we can’t control are assigned a negative code. With a traumatic experience, we can’t escape, so the things we can’t escape are also assigned a negative code. As we go through life and have traumatic experiences, the negative codes that we assign to the things we can’t control and the things we can’t escape become more and more negative,” says Captain Vann.
He says that if enough stress hormones are released, they can trigger panic even in the safest of places: “For example, you might panic while riding in an elevator, having an MRI scan, or boarding a plane,” he explains.
Breaking this down we get:
- Our system A knows that the flight is safe enough.
- The reason why flying doesn’t feel safe is because of System B. To make it feel safe, System B needs to be updated.
How can you adapt when things feel scary?
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While anxious thoughts can make it feel like things will never change, Captain Vann knows that’s not true. He emphasizes that even imagined experiences or memories can “refresh” System B – tricking the brain into thinking that everything is really okay. “That’s what we do in the SOAR program, with strengthening exercises: we apply positive experiences to situations that System B would view as negative,” he says.
While System B may assign a negative code, not all negative emotions are the result of something traumatic. “Some negative codes result from vicarious experiencing. For example, if you hear about a horrific experience on an airplane on the news and you imagine how those people were feeling, vicarious experiencing will assign a negative valence code to the flight,” says Captain Vann.
He believes people need to monitor how much attention they pay to the news to avoid making fear-based decisions, and there’s no point obsessing over one story about bad turbulence, since a one-off experience reported in the media is not representative of the entire flying experience. Trip.comThere are about 100,000 flights per day, which means that the flight you may have heard about was literally one of 100,000 that day. The flight is usually easy, carefree, and unremarkable.
How can you feel safe during turbulence?
Turbulence is real and it’s not going away, but that doesn’t mean you should put off flying. “Severe turbulence is extremely rare. In my 30 years of flying, I’ve only experienced 30 seconds of severe turbulence,” said Captain Van, who added that the chances of encountering severe turbulence are so low that there’s no need to worry.
If you still have concerns, Federal Aviation Administration Number of injuries caused by turbulence in recent years:
- How many passengers were injured by turbulence in the United States last year? 3.
- How many passengers were injured due to turbulence in the US in 2022? Four
- How many passengers were injured due to turbulence in the US in 2021? 1.
- How many passengers were injured due to turbulence in the US in 2020? 0.
With this in mind, Captain Vann wants us to ask ourselves an important question: “How much time should we spend thinking about turbulence-related injuries? How much time should the media devote to turbulence-related injuries?”
He knows the media reports that turbulence is getting worse due to factors such as climate change, but he also wants people to understand that the chances of them personally being injured by turbulence are low.
How can we be sure that we don’t have to worry about turbulence?
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Captain Van said, “The valence code associated with turbulence should shift from negative to positive. This is SOAR Strengthening Exercises To update System B, you replace the negative codes you get from your friend’s face, voice, and touch with positive codes.”
This speaks to a grounding technique I learned in therapy: While it’s easy to focus on the potential negative outcomes, we can shift our perspective by noticing what we can see, touch, smell, and hear. Reframing our mindset can help shape our experience and give us a better flight overall.
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