Are you scared of flying? Read this to overcome airplane anxiety

While many are scared of plane malfunctions or crashes, a lot of people are actually anxious about losing control—having a panic attack mid-flight, feeling trapped in an overwhelming situation, or making a scene in front of other passengers. 

Anxious flyers might experience most of their anxiety while they’re on the plane itself, but for some, these worries can start weeks or even months before their flight, intensifying as the departure date approaches.

If you find yourself avoiding air travel or consumed with fear leading up to your flight, Metacognitive Therapy can help you manage your anxieties, so you can get back to living a full life.

The root of flight fear? Uncontrollable worry.

One of the biggest drivers of flight anxiety is worry. People often get caught up in an endless cycle of “what if” thinking: What if I panic and can’t calm down? What if I can’t get on the plane at all? What if something goes wrong mid-flight?

Negative thoughts crop up for most people, but contrary to what most people believe, the negative thoughts are actually not the problem. The problem occurs when you don't know how to stop engaging in worst-case scenario thinking, or when you believe it's helpful to prepare for the worst. This leads to patterns of negative thinking that feel uncontrollable, which increases anxiety and can even lead to avoidance—cancelling flights at the last minute, or deciding not to travel by air at all.

It’s an endless cycle, because the more you worry, the worse the anxiety becomes, and the more likely you are to avoid planes altogether. When you avoid flying altogether, you don't have the opportunity to become less afraid of it, and to discover that you can handle it. This leads the brain to interpret these thoughts as important signals of real danger, reinforcing the fear response. 

If you knew that you could choose not to worry about your upcoming flight, even when you felt nervous, would that make it easier to get on the plane?

Navigating news about flight crashes

A common trigger for people with flight anxiety is media coverage of plane crashes, which we’ve seen more of in the news recently. But statistically, airplane crashes are highly unlikely—they just receive lots of media attention, making them seem more common and likely to happen. The brain has a tendency to overestimate the risk of something dangerous happening to us when it’s exposed to repeated scary news stories. 

In reality, air travel is one of the safest modes of transportation — but knowing that it's safe doesn't necessarily remove the fear of flying, and CBT tactics like positive thinking can become coping strategies that might actually prolong the anxiety.

Dealing with the common pitfalls: Avoidance and hyper-focus

Many people with a fear of flying develop strategies to try to control their anxiety, but these strategies generally backfire. Avoiding and suppressing thoughts about an upcoming flight can lead to stronger intrusive thoughts, and trying to ruminate over, or reason with, each worry creates ongoing engagement with the negative thoughts.

Physical symptoms leading up to the flight, like sleepless nights, body tension, and intrusive thoughts, can make people feel incapable of handling flying altogether. They might interpret their catastrophic thoughts and symptoms as a sign that they won’t be able to cope on the airplane itself if they’re already so anxious beforehand. 

Once on the plane, anxious flyers might become hyper-focused on their bodily sensations, monitoring for signs that their anxiety is getting worse. They feel it’s important to focus on their symptoms so they can control them, but this self-monitoring often leads to more pervasive symptoms and more panic. 

People often fixate on external cues as well, listening intently for every sound and movement the aircraft makes, searching for potential signs of danger. This monitoring keeps anxiety front and centre, and leads to more negative thoughts and images.

Breaking the cycle of anxiety 

Rather than trying to eliminate anxiety altogether, Metacognitive Therapy helps people change their relationship with their thoughts and symptoms. The goal is not to get rid of negative thoughts, it’s to discover that they are fleeting and not necessarily significant, and to stop engaging with them.

One of the first steps is reducing worry leading up to the flight, and helping you discover that you can choose to control how much time you spend on these worry thoughts. Worrying isn't uncontrollable, and it won’t prevent problems or help you prepare better—it just intensifies the fear. Instead of spending weeks worrying about worst-case scenarios, MCT encourages you to leave negative thoughts alone and not engage with them. The key is to acknowledge that nervousness might be present, but it doesn’t have to dictate your actions or experience.

On the day of the flight, your only focus is to get to the plane. You don’t need to feel perfectly calm, you don’t need to eliminate all negative thoughts—you just need to physically get on the plane. Accept that you might feel nervous, and that’s okay. Those thoughts can come and go without you trying to solve or monitor them.

Plan for on-flight activities

If you board the plane with the goal of not having any symptoms or scary thoughts, you're setting yourself up for failure. Symptoms and thoughts are out of our control, but we can control how much we worry about them, and what we choose to pay attention to. Experiment with setting more helpful goals that are possible to attain and don't require you to focus on your anxiety, like 'I want to read a chapter in this book', rather than monitoring thoughts and symptoms. Outward goals enable you to evaluate the flight with doable parameters: 'Did I read that chapter?' rather than, 'How anxious was I?'.

MCT shows you that you can redirect your focus towards an engaging activity that you would generally enjoy, even if you're feeling anxious. For example:

• Read a book or watch a movie: Whenever you catch yourself analyzing airplane noises or checking how you feel, you can choose to return your focus to your book or movie.
• Listen to a podcast or music: You can choose to listen to a playlist or podcast instead of engaging with intrusive thoughts that crop up. 

Distracting yourself isn't the goal. It's to discover that you have control over your focus of attention, and that choosing to shift it can make anxiety more of a background experience during your flight.