What is aerophobia?
The fear of flying, otherwise known as aerophobia, is a very common phobia that creates extreme feelings of anxiety around air travel. A fear of flying can affect anyone, resulting in severe emotional and physical responses, such as panic attacks. This can lead to missed holidays for as many as 1 in 10 of the UK population, even though the facts show us air travel is one of the safest forms of transport.
For most individuals with a fear of flying, take-offs or landings and during turbulence tend to be when fear has the biggest impact, creating anxiety and feelings of dread. For some, simply thinking about going on a flight can prevent them from booking trips that include flights.
Around 1 in 10 people suffer from aerophobia
More than 3.5 billion people fly on commercial aircraft annually
A fear of flying is totally treatable
What causes it?
Fear of flying is a learned behaviour that is part of the way we protect ourselves. We don’t have to have had a bad experience on a flight for a phobia to form.
Many people develop a flying phobia after several years of being a happy traveller. This is commonly attributed to a build-up of background levels of general anxiety. Other fears and phobias, such as claustrophobia and fear of heights, can also contribute. We can even pick up a fear of flying from watching a plane crash on TV or watching a friend or family member struggling with their fear of flying, leading us to learn that behaviour.
The part of the brain with the most significant influence over how we protect ourselves has a limited ability to reason a proper outcome and can only negatively forecast outcomes. It will focus on how to avoid situations and keep reflecting on what behaviours previously helped in a similar situation, like panic, sweating, heart palpitations and shortness of breath. The feeling of lack of control escalates this, making it harder to feel calm.
What are the symptoms & effects?
A flying phobia can be very challenging for individuals, as well as their wider circle of friends and family, which can put even more pressure on the sufferer.
Symptoms of aerophobia include:
Hyperventilating
This can affect people both physiologically and psychologically. Rapid and shallow breathing reduces the carbon dioxide levels in our blood, which can give us sensations like suffocation, shortness of breath, chest pain, and lightheadedness. This intensifies anxiety, creating a challenging cycle of heightened distress. The fear of insufficient air exacerbates the existing stress and fear.
To overcome this we need to encourage deliberate, deep diaphragmatic breathing. This not only restores a balanced respiratory rate but also alleviates the distressing effects, promoting a sense of control.
Heart palpitations
A flying phobia heightens the fight or flight response, increasing the heart rate. While experiencing heart palpitations can be frightening, typically they are not a major concern, but recognising and addressing these palpitations is essential. Understanding your triggers will allow you to manage any anxiety, with palpitations subsiding as anxiety diminishes.
Shortness of breath
With sudden anxiety, the fight-or-flight response triggers discomfort. You might feel as though you are short of breath and gasp for air, breathing shallowly and maintaining a faster breathing pace, while struggling to slow it down. You might even feel like you’re choking.
Dizziness
Rapid and deep breathing is common when experiencing anxiety. It reduces the blood’s carbon dioxide levels, causing dizziness, lightheadedness and the potential for fainting. Anxiety and dizziness may intensify in certain fear-inducing situations, such as when you are in the crowds at the airport or during take-off and landings.
Sweating
When someone is anxious about flying or even the thought of it, adrenaline is released into the bloodstream and readies the body for the flight, fight, or freeze reaction. This often results in symptoms like sweating. Anxiety and sweating are closely linked. If you think you are excessively sweating, you may feel embarrassed and even avoid shaking hands due to sweaty palms.
Brain fog
Brain fog may lead to a sense of diminished mental sharpness and numbness. This can feel as though it takes more effort for you to deal with the many things around a trip, remembering things like your tickets, passports or even where you parked the car. Anxiety created by worries and concerns about travelling dominates mental resources, demanding extra energy to focus on tasks that are unrelated to anxious thoughts. The persistent intrusion can impede your concentration and clear thinking and this will impact your ability to rationalise what is really happening.
Catastrophic thinking
A fear of flying often goes hand in hand with catastrophic thinking. Catastrophising is the tendency to obsess over the worst possible outcome and perceive it as highly likely, even when a situation is deemed highly safe. Elevated stress levels can increase your chances of succumbing to catastrophic thinking and this magnifies the perceived severity of any potential outcomes.
Panic attacks
Panic attacks heighten the body’s normal reaction to danger, stress or excitement. You may experience a racing heartbeat, dizziness, temperature fluctuations, sweating, trembling, nausea, chest or abdominal pain, breathing difficulties, and a feeling of detachment (dissociation). The disruption that panic attacks cause can’t be underestimated as they can make you concerned about losing control, fainting, experiencing a heart attack, or dying. These effects can be so frightening that avoiding any situation that could lead to another becomes the driver in decision making.
Frequent panic attacks can be part of panic disorder. This can significantly disrupt daily life, leading to missed work and avoiding situations that trigger panic attacks, especially during holidays or work travel.
How can it be managed?
Breathing
The 7-11 breathing technique has been a great help to people who suffer from high levels of anxiety and is particularly good at helping you feel calmer. The change in your breathing, exhaling for longer than you inhale, stimulates what is known as the Parasympathetic Nervous System. While the Sympathetic Nervous System triggers the fight, flight, and freeze part of the brain, by breathing in for 7 seconds and out for 11 you stimulate the opposite part of the nervous system, helping to reduce anxiety.
Positive Reframing
Positive reframing is as simple as changing the narrative in your thoughts: that little inner voice that is telling you how disastrous it all is. Reframing the narrative into a positive story with a happy expected experience will show the mind that there is an alternative. If we can do this often enough, we can give the mind enough positive outcomes to relax and feel more positive about flying.
Education
Understanding more about flying and the safety statistics can help our brain to make a proper assessment of the situation and reduce the likelihood of an extreme anxiety response.
Exposure Therapy
This is not for everyone but it has been to have levels of success. With exposure therapy you would slowly start exposing yourself to the aspects you feel fearful about. You might visit an airport and simply sit in the busy arrivals lounge, then slowly build up your confidence until you are able to take a short flight.
Medication
People who need to fly but have fears around it that cause anxiety will often opt for medication. Sedation medications like Diazepam (Valium) or Alprazolam (Xanax) are the most common pharmaceuticals used.
Hypnotherapy
With hypnotherapy for fear of flying, the hypnotherapist will aim to change the template used to create the fear response when thinking about flying. The change will stop the emotional responses, meaning the mind can intellectually consider how it would choose to react. This change would enable every flight to be viewed from that intellectual part of the brain and stay in control and rational.
How can hypnotherapy help?
Understanding how your fear of flying affects you now and how you want to be in the future will start to give you hope and the expectation of eliminating this fear response. We do this by explaining how the brain works, how phobias are created in the mind, and what we can do about it.
Our hypnotherapy for fear of flying uses tried and tested techniques that effectively change the template created in the brain’s limbic region. This removes the emotional responses that are usually evoked and lead to physical reactions.
We then install new, positive behaviours and habits to make a permanent change, enabling you to enjoy the trips you choose without the concern that anxiety and fear will spoil everything. Numerous clients, particularly those who have suffered for many years, find this approach both miraculous and liberating.
We recommend that you book a consultation well in advance of your planned trip. The process used in solution focused hypnotherapy is based on 4 weekly sessions. Once these sessions are complete you will be able to enjoy all the benefits of flying without your previous
Our Fear Of Flying Phobia Specialists
Benn Baker-Pollard
Sittingbourne
Carmen Harrington
Market Harborough
Caroline Prout
Thrapston
Chris Johannes
Spalding
Claire Noyelle
Maidstone East
Dawn Ibbetson
Chelmsford
Gary Johannes
Peterborough
Jill Whitehouse
Newcastle upon Tyne
Keeley Smith
Southend-on-Sea
Kerry Seymour
Weston-super-Mare
Peter Ely
Islington
Victoria Anderson
Sunderland
Why Choose Inspired To Change
Our solution focused hypnotherapists empower you to better understand your brain, helping to guide you towards solutions and achieve the outcomes you want. We have a team of fully trained hypnotherapists, giving you the choice of who to work with and how you want to work with them. Solution focused hypnotherapy is just as effective in-person or online in the comfort of your own home, so you can find the ideal therapist to help you reach your goals.
Every one of our hypnotherapists is recognised by governing bodies like the National Council for Hypnotherapy, the UK’s leading not-for-profit hypnotherapy professional association. They have all trained with Clifton Practice Hypnotherapy Training, one of the leading hypnotherapy schools in the UK.
