I'm anxious flying

What this looks like

You can’t sleep the night before the flight. You check the weather, you read the airline’s safety record, you arrive at the gate exhausted from the days you spent dreading getting there. On the plane, every sound means something and every bump is the start of something worse. You’re either gripping the armrest the whole time or sedated to the point of being someone else.

You may have stopped flying. You may be flying drunk, on a sedative, or both.

What you’ve already tried

• Aviation safety statistics
• Fear-of-flying courses with the wing physics lectures
• Watching turbulence videos to desensitize yourself
• Booking specific seats over the wing or at the front
• Tracking the flight on your phone the entire time
• Alcohol before boarding
• A benzodiazepine before boarding
• Sleeping pills to knock yourself out for the duration
• Avoiding flights and driving instead

The chemicals worked. That’s the new problem.

What kind of anxiety do you experience?

Why the courses and the statistics don’t reach it

You very likely had a bad flight at some point and your nervous system flagged the airplane as a place that almost killed you. You may have grown up with a parent who white-knuckled every flight and absorbed their fear without ever questioning it. You may have lived through a stretch of life when you were already anxious about other things, and the plane became the place where the anxiety landed because the plane is the place you can’t get out of. You may have absorbed the lesson from the news that flying is the disaster you should be ready for.

The chemicals became the new fear. The wing physics lecture didn’t help because you already know the plane won’t fall out of the sky, and your knowing didn’t help the last time you flew.

The fear is being trained by what you do to manage it.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy goes after what you do before you ever reach the gate, where the fear gets loaded over days of weather-checking and dread. We change the routine in the hours before boarding and the routine in the seat, so the chemicals stop being what got you on the plane and the gripping stops being what got you through it. The plane doesn’t have to feel safe for you to fly without dread.

You’ll fly. Sober, awake, and not gripping anything.