Tips for Anxious Travelers
If you're like me, you love domestic and international travel but hate flying. I don't know about you, but everytime I get on a plane, I'm nervous and sometimes even terrified of turbulence or hitting a bird or gliding in some unknown snowstorm or something. Nevertheless I still book my tickets and trust that I will make it safely back on the ground! I have tried many different ways to calm my nerves about flying so I want to share my tips to hopefully help others!
Firstly, A lot of the information i’ve gathered has come from several different sources but one of the main I found helpful was the “Fear of Flying Workbook: Overcome Your Anticipatory Anxiety and Develop Skills for Flying with Confidence” by David Carbonell.
Some of my key takeaways from this workbook were:
(paraphrasing science so bear with me) When an activating event triggers the amygdala in our brain, it then sends a signal to our prefrontal cortex saying that we should be scared. It does this because our amygdala is designed to protect us and keep us safe, but the issue with that, is in a situation like flying where it is a falsely perceived fear; our prefrontal cortex can’t send a signal back to our amygdala telling us that we are fine. So the real trick is with understanding why we are afraid and how to not alarm our amygdala.
Breathing is a huge part of managing fear. I used to wait until I was panicking in the moment and try deep breathing, but in my experience and after doing more researching on breathing; our brain is the best when we average about 6 breaths per minute. So working on taking deeper breaths the whole day before flying has shown to help with managing my triggers when flying later on.
Our brains are powerful, but not as powerful as we think they are. I used to freak out when I started to think about the plane crashing and that I was putting it out in the universe to happen. Well, the opposite of actually embracing the fact that no matter what I think, it is not going to effect the outcome of this flight. It seems silly, but that definitely helped me!
A few action items that helped me when flying:
Writing down everything! Write down everything you are thinking and feeling, no matter how crazy it feels.
Listening to music and mouthing the words to the song while smiling. You will more than likely look crazy while doing this, but smiling sends signals to your brain everything is a’okay.
Chewing gum, I read somewhere a long time ago that when you’re eating its harder for our brains to process fear and it has helped me stay calm as well!
In the book, it doesn’t suggest using anxiety medication but I spoke with my doctor about trying it, and the kind I have helps with the physical effects of anxiety like elevated heart rate, sweating, all the things and it has helped me sooooo much. The goal is to work through the other steps to not have to use this anymore but for a start it has been a great tool for learning how to manage my fear.
Other tricks you can try that didn’t help me but might help you!
Meditation
Reading
EFT Tapping Method
