Fear of Flying

You Can Fly

OK, you’ll need a plane-and a pilot will help but you can fly anywhere in the world and find it just as tedious and boring as everyone else.

It’s never worth trying to rationalise your way out of your fears listening to people with sentiments along the lines of, “the pilot wants to get down in one piece too” or “it’s the safest mode of transport.” Such sentiments mean nothing to someone who fears flying-they already know it’s irrational.

If you try to stay calm you’ll simply measure your uptightness. Trying to think positively will produce a state of mental Wimbledon, going backwards and forwards between each positive thought and its opposite.

However, you can learn to simply “stay in the moment” and discover that the thing you feared most was the fear.

Why do normally sane people panic about flying?

I’m not sure they do. If you need to be reading this then you’ll know you can get pretty terrified sitting, drinking coffee in your kitchen waiting for the transport to the airport to arrive - and stay fairly terrified as you visit the loo for the fifth time. The fear becomes pretty much disconnected from the actuality of sitting in a relatively comfy chair, albeit at 20,000 feet.

You become absorbed in how dreadful you feel and by so doing - fuel it.

When you try to stay calm, you simply tune in to how uptight you feel - it won’t work. Alcohol can, for some, have a relaxing effect but for many people it makes the situation worse when they check and find they feel just as bad as they did three drinks ago.

So How Can Hypnotherapy Help?

Remember, you have no control over what you think-and what you think pretty much determines what you feel. However…….. you can change your response to those catastrophic thoughts and feelings. How? By learning to stay in the moment and switching your attention to what or who's in front of you.

If you continue to try to suppress and control your fears - you’ll fail.

All your fears are based in the future. Not necessarily about crashing, though that has to be somewhere in the background driving the whole thing. It’s more along the lines, “If it feels this bad now, how bad am I going to feel in five, ten fifty minutes……..?” It will probably take no more than two sessions to equip you with the skills to remain chilled out and enjoy your holiday from beginning to end.

It’s not rocket science. It’s about staying in the moment

Remember, real stuff in real time is never difficult to cope with.

Real emergencies or dangers you cope with fine, simply because they grab100% of your attention.

In an airport lounge, you can be annoyed and uncomfortable but the only thing to fear is being bored rigid. Don’t read this piece as if it’s saying, just tell yourself you’re OK- clearly not, you're frightened, but the moment you’re in will be OK - so that's the place to stay.

This applies whether you’re in your kitchen, the airport lounge, taking off or cruising at 20,000 feet.

You can’t remain frightened whilst acknowledging that the moment you’re in is OK.