Fasten your seatbelts and fly phobia free

A fear of flying can turn a holiday or a business trip into a nightmare. Your fear of flying can take hold not only during the flight but also in the days and hours leading up to it. For some, it can kick in when you book the flight; for others, when you arrive at the airport.

This fear may have originated from a ‘bad flight’ experience, which is then generalised to each subsequent flight. It may be a fear of handing over control to someone else when you are up in the sky. It may be a jumble of different fears.

Let’s take a closer look at how these anxious feelings and thoughts make up your phobia. And then, most importantly, outline how you can step off the phobia wheel.

How anxious thoughts make up a phobia of flying

This is an important fact to remember with any phobia: Your body, thoughts, and feelings work in harmony; your body believes what your mind is telling it. If your thoughts are anxious, your body will follow suit and act as if there were an imminent threat. 

Each person’s body will react differently when it feels under threat; however, there are some common themes.

Your breathing might become tight or shallow; you might feel your heart thumping; you might sweat or tremble; your hands might feel clammy; you may feel jittery; you may have butterflies in your tummy; you might hyperfocus on every noise or action around you. 

Your body is in a ‘fight or flight’ response mode. No pun intended!

When your body is doing all these anxious things – sweating, trembling, needing to go to the loo, tensing – your mind maintains a state of high red alert. It creates even more anxious thoughts: ‘something terrible is going to happen’, ‘I won’t be able to cope’, ‘I need to escape, get out, leave’.

A vicious circle begins. You believe that you’ll always think like this, that you can’t stop. An unhelpful, destructive habit of thoughts and behaviour connected to flying and airports locks in.

You might feel this is an inevitable state of affairs and just part of ‘who you are’. You’ve accepted you’re helpless and hopeless in the face of this fear. It becomes a belief: I’m a terrible flyer; I can’t fly. I always panic. This is just who I am.

Not only is this wrong, but it is also a very limiting belief. 

Common fears behind fear of flying

Let’s look at three common fears behind a flight phobia.

1. Fear of being unable to leave

You’re afraid of being in a closed space up in the sky for several hours with no means of getting out.

I’m sure we all have a little apprehension before we take a plane. However, for the majority of people, it is a thought that just passes through. You settle down to the entertainment, read your book, listen to music, have a drink or something to eat. You no longer give the thought of being ‘stuck up there in the sky’ any energy or mental ‘fuel’.

For those who have a phobia of flying, however, this thought can translate into constant, intense ‘what if…’ and catastrophic scenarios in your mind. Your body then obediently reacts to the anxious thoughts, as I said above, and tenses, tightens, and trembles.

Your mind is stuck on the phobia wheel and calms down, if at all, with difficulty.

2. Fear of your reaction

You dread how you ‘know’ you will react before and during the flight. In other words, you fear your own reactions to your fear.

The flight doesn’t begin on the day of the flight. It begins way before that. You say to yourself, and often tell other people too, how you ‘know’* what you will be like! You can’t imagine any other scenario. You enter a vicious cycle of reenacting what happened on previous flights and believe the same thing will happen on this next one. 

For example, you 'know' you will start to feel anxious when you get your luggage ready, you know you will feel terrible when you get to the airport; you 'know' you will tremble, shake, and really find it hard not to cry when you are in your seat and you are totally sure you will completely ‘lose it’ if there is any turbulence.

You have gone through this so many times in your mind; you absolutely believe the veracity of your story. Even though – and this is the key point – nothing has actually happened. Your flight is in the future. You are still on the ground!

*I place ‘know’ in inverted commas because nobody ‘knows the future.

Our minds are very creative, and this stressful visualisation works a treat. You believe your upcoming flight will go badly.

Your mind is in the future (upcoming flight) or the past (remembering past flights) and not in the present moment where nothing untoward has happened. You play out all of the negative scenarios of how you won’t be able to cope in your mind. And so guess what happens on the day of the flight? You act out your scenario. The flight goes ‘badly’, and it reinforces your belief that you ‘know’ how you will be on a flight.

3. Fear of not being in control

You hate the idea of not being in control. We are, in effect, handing over our control to the pilot and co-pilot, the crew, the engineers who ensured the safety of the plane, the air traffic controllers, etc.

And again, many of you may give this a brief thought as you settle in your seat; however, for those who have a flight phobia, it can get out of control. The catastrophic scenarios play out again and again in your mind, and your body takes the lead from these thoughts; it believes there is a danger and presses the fight-or-flight button.

Any ‘strange’ noise or announcement is taken to mean an immediate danger. Any ‘fasten your seatbelt' sign is a signal of catastrophe.

Ok, you ask, how can I exit this vicious cycle, calm myself down and take a plane ‘normally’, just as I would a taxi, a bus, a ship or a train?

How can hypnotherapy help with a fear of flying?

Step 1: offering space

When I work with any client, the very simple yet powerful space that a therapy session gives is step one.

For someone with a phobia, the space and time you have to open up about your fear to someone who is there for you, non-judgementally and who listens to you intently is precious.

You are not laughed at or dismissed; you are held. You do not have to rush; you have the time to strip away how you think you ‘should be', what a ‘normal’ person would do. You can lay your feelings, thoughts, behaviours out on the table.

Then you can begin the healing process.

Step 2: finding self-belief

The one main belief any therapist will focus on is (re)introducing you to the absolute overriding power that you can overcome this fear. You, not someone else! 

Confidence is knocked, crushed, trampled upon when you believe your phobia is stronger than your ability to overcome it. A hypnotherapist can help you find your self-belief again, and not only find it, but keep it and cultivate it.

When confidence, belief, and empowerment are back on your agenda, you can face what you believed was a huge, terrifying fear, and move beyond it to serenity.

You’ve been stuck in the mindset of being the passive victim of your fear. The realisation that you are in charge of what your mind thinks about is often revolutionary and freeing.

Step 3: resetting thoughts

Hypnosis lets you reset thoughts. It helps you rid yourself of unnecessary, negative thoughts. You can brush them off, reset, let go, move on.

Hypnotherapy lets you visualise yourself in the phobia-creating situation and gradually feel in control. You learn to use coping strategies. These can be physiological (aware and intentional breathing, aware and intentional muscle relaxation), psychological (flipping negative scenarios and thoughts for helpful, hopeful, happy ones) and behavioural (choosing to do certain things). 

As I wrote earlier, your mind believes the thoughts and situations you give it, and your body reacts accordingly. 

Your mind doesn’t ‘know’ that what you are imagining in a hypnosis session is not ‘really’ happening. This is why hypnosis can be so powerful. When you’re led into hypnosis, you can imagine that instead of tightness, tension, fear, and the sentiment that you’re losing control, you replace these emotions with calm, control and confidence. And you can do this repeatedly until those freeing thoughts and feelings are solidly anchored.

Step 4: personalising support

The hypnotherapist will personalise your coping strategies and hypnotic scenarios around your particular fear and personality.

When you practise your strategies regularly, you may feel the old fear loosening, becoming less threatening, and moving further away. 

Towards the end of the therapy, you can even start to have fun with flying! Recently, a client imagined she was boarding her flight, and a banner was there to welcome her with her name lit up on it. As she sat down in her seat, a marching band started playing in the aisles. 

This kind of fun helps to disintegrate any residual fear as you realise that you can make your mind think anything!

Final thoughts

Clients have often said to me: I should have done this years ago! 

It takes courage and a deep breath to address a fear that you have lived with for many years. This is often what has held them back. Together with a feeling of vulnerability and ‘silliness’.

When you have hypnotherapy and overcome a phobia, you don’t just overcome a phobia, which is already a significant burden lightening in itself. The courage, confidence and skills you learn along the way also splash over into other areas of your life, just like a stone thrown into a pond that sends ripples further and further out.

Everything is energy. When you decide to put energy into overcoming a phobia, you are also giving yourself a huge burst of loving energy.