Life Kit - Coping with a fear of flying

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

Whether you're a nervous flyer, you'll do almost anything to avoid flying or you have an actual flying phobia, these tips from psychotherapist Luana Marques can help you overcome a fear of flying.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey everybody, it's Marielle. I have this friend who loves flying. He loves walking around the airport and imagining all the destinations he could get to in a day or half a day's time. He loves looking out the window at takeoff as he's whisked away into the clouds. And then again at landing, watching teeny tiny buildings and trees come into sharp relief through his airplane window. Air travel, he says, is a miracle. That is a beautiful sentiment. But tell it to someone who's afraid of flying. Even thinking about flying in a plane induces fear and panic in many people's bodies.

That's the case for Beck Harlan, LifeKit's digital editor. She will drive 12 hours to avoid getting on a plane. But she has learned that there are ways to get through that fear. On this episode of LifeKit, which first published in July 2022, Beck talks to a psychology professor who shares tools and tips to help you cope when you are afraid of flying. And by the way, even if you're not, this episode is full of great advice on how to handle all of life's uncertainties. I am really, really, really afraid to fly. If you or someone you love feels a similar way, welcome.

I'm glad you're here and we are going to talk about it. Because it can be a lot. There are all these feelings that bubble up when you get that invitation to a wedding or a family reunion or a conference or whatever it is across the country or, heaven forbid, across the ocean. And there's this huge internal battle over whether you can even bring yourself to buy a ticket. I've skipped weddings, vacations, even work opportunities because I was just too afraid to fly. And even after hearing all the statistics about how safe flying actually is, my brain just replays the worst case scenarios. We have the perfect expert here to help us. Luana Marquez is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of the book Almost Anxious. A phobia of fear of of flying, is not rational. You're not seeing

the world through your rational brain. You're usually seeing it through your emotional brain. And at least for my patients, they find that sometimes dismissive, that people don't understand how bad it feels for them, and that data just doesn't go in. While I wish I could say that this episode of Life Kit will cure your fear, it won't. It's something that I'm still working on myself. But hopefully we're going to share some ideas and tactics that you can build on. So let's take a deep breath and see what we can learn. In your professional experience, what is the root cause of this fear of flying?

Is it like a lack of control? Is it claustrophobia? Or is it like all sorts of different root causes could lead to this fear? For most people that have a fear of flying, what happens is their brain says something is wrong. So their limbic system, the emotional part of their brain, kicks on, and they're predicting something is going to go bad. For some people, though, it is what you just mentioned. It's the sense of claustrophobia, that the environment's closing in, and they're going to be stuck, and they can't get out of it. For some people, it's something different. So there isn't a common denominator, except people really fear being on that plane and they'll do anything to not be there.

How do people know or how would someone know if this is an issue, the fear of flying, that for them they might want to seek help? So it really comes down to how much interference, how much is getting in the way of your life and how upsetting it is to you and your loved ones. For example, I've worked with a patient who had a really big fear of flying, but she never had to fly for work. And then she got this big promotion. And the only way she could take the promotion was to actually fly. So she knew at that point, either she took this promotion and, you know, did really well in her career, or she would have to pass because of her fear. Most people tend to know when it's sort of getting in the way of their lives.

If they per se don't, their loved ones don't. I worked with a couple who the husband sort of dragged the wife in saying, listen, we both retired. We agreed that we're going to travel the world, but you're not getting on a plane. And so up to that point, he was okay with him. He traveled a lot for work. But then it started to interfere on their marriage and their plans for retirement. So clinically, really, yes, how much interference, how much distress,

not just to you, but to those around you. And flying is safe. Like statistically, it is safe. It is more dangerous to drive, to ride your bike, ride a motorcycle. But hearing that, like I still don't feel safe when I walk through the terminal and get on the plane and smell that smell and hear those sounds. You're absolutely right, Bec. So from this moment, imagine that you're flying later today. You're having what we call anticipatory anxiety.

And when we have that anticipatory anxiety, the whole body is like, what's going to happen? Something bad is going to happen. And any kind of stimulus that come in, the brain's like, danger, danger. And so by the time you get to that terminal, you are in sort of fight or flight. You are terrified. And when we're there, our brain's like, what's going to happen? So it scans for anything that could be wrong, which then increases just more and more of that fear. Okay.

So anticipatory anxiety, even just the thought of this, is like pushing my brain into that fight or flight mode. That's exactly right. So anticipatory anxiety is a clinical term that we use for anxiety before something we're afraid of. And it's really characterized by what we say to ourselves a lot of times, as well as how we feel in our bodies and our hearts. And so in your example, you're talking about heart pounding. But I bet if I pushed you and we were working working together, you tell me there is a lot of thinking that comes in your mind before a flight. I was working with

a patient last year who said to me the night before, she's laying in bed, her eyes are open, and she's like, the plane is going to crash. What if I can't breathe? What if something happens and my kids get hurt? And the brain just starts to spin and that leads to more anxiety. So, well, this actually brings me to my next question. So if you're feeling anticipatory anxiety, like you say you have a flight coming up next week, what are some things that you can do to kind of prepare and cope with that anxiety? If you are somebody that gets on a plane but tends to, you know, find yourself spinning, there are a couple things you can do. One is really try to shift your perspective. So move away from the anxiety and anticipation to trying to sort of see a broader perspective. You know,

it's safe to fly. And how many flights have I taken before? What was it like? Did I make it through it? Trying to get your brain to understand a little bit. One approach, shifting your perspective. The other one is to do anything you can do to really start to approach this fear. And it does not mean you have to get on a plane. I've worked with lots of patients that we do things like we watch planes take off videos on YouTube. We watch planes landing. We talk about visualize being on that plane. So you can start playing with your brain to approach that fear, but in a situation that you're safe.

And over time, your brain tends to learn that the worst case scenario doesn't happen. What are some ways that you can kind of do exposure therapy for yourself without actually buying a plane ticket and getting on a plane? So exposure therapy, again, is the idea that being exposed to something you're afraid of over and over again calms down your limbic system so it doesn't fire up as fast, so you have less of anxiety. The principle of it is that you need to be exposed to whatever you're afraid of, in this case flying, but not just be exposed to it. You have to do it over and over again. You can watch, for example, YouTube videos of flying, of plane taking off again and again and again. And when that starts to feel like your anxiety is not hitting as high, then you can watch a plane flying

perhaps on turbulence or hear turbulence. You're basically moving up of a ladder of fear. And you only move up when your physiology, your fight or flight, it's not hitting as high. So, you know, the clever things I've done with patients is videos, noise, even movies, going to the airport. In the good old days, I could take patients to the airport, sit there, and we could just say, planes take off. Now, nowadays, there are really good treatment that's also based on virtual reality. And so there are definitely places

that you can put some, you know, glasses on and experience flying without actually having to buy a plane ticket. Wow, I feel like I have some homework to do. I wanted to ask you, do you have any recommendations for things that, okay, so say it's the day of my flight and, you know, while I'm traveling to the airport, while I'm waiting to board, while I'm walking through the terminal, what are some things I can do to kind of bring my anxiety down a little bit? So one of them, which is distraction. What can you do to focus on something else? And by distraction, I wouldn't just mean meaningless distraction.

Anything that could focus your thinking brain. I have patients that are able to read a book as a way to distract. For example, I had a patient that what she did is she got to the airport and she did crossword puzzles to try to focus on something that turns on her thinking brain. The idea behind this is that there is an inverse relationship between our emotional brain and our thinking brain. So when we're really, really anxious, we can't think straight. And when we really focus on thinking, like doing a math problem, our emotional brain calms down.

So you could distract by focusing your thinking brain. If you practice mindfulness and meditation, it's a time to sort of drop an anchor and stay as present as possible. The other approaches are a lot more clinical, which is really challenging your thoughts and trying to sort of arrive at alternative thoughts. But those approaches are often used in combination with some clinical care. Okay, I want to go back to some of the coping mechanisms that we talked about. So say that I've gotten on the plane, and the flight is going well, and then we hit turbulence,

like my heart is beating out of my chest my palms are sweating my jaw is clenched um what can i do kind of in that moment of basically like my fears manifested so let me tell you first what not to do okay because it's usually where all my patients go and so i don't know if you go there, Beck, but usually what people do, they're trying to sort of like stop the experience. Your whole body is on fight or flight. You're describing heart pounding again. I bet, you know, for some people, they sweat, they tremble, they start to hyperventilate. And so one of the tricks in that moment is to start even just labeling it. Wow, my body feels like it's face-to-face with a lion. Oh my gosh, I'm really scared.

And really start to sort of bring back the idea that your body's having, in that case, even a normal response. A lot of people in turbulence are going to have a very similar response. It's just that if you have a fear of flying, that response is like exponentially higher. And so what we want to do is to teach your brain, okay, like so far I'm safe. This is turbulence. My body is responding the way it should. But what I want to encourage most people to do is not to make it worse by saying, oh my God, the plane's going to crash. Oh my God, something bad's going to happen. Once you go

there, then you're basically throwing wood on the fire and you're getting more and more anxious. Okay. So let me see if I got this right. So I'm in turbulence. My body's doing all the physiological things that a body in fear does. And what I don't want to do is try to like, swim upstream and fight against those really, really strong reactions, but instead to say, oh, I'm feeling really nervous, I'm sweating, my heart is pounding, but I'm safe. And not letting my brain go into like, oh, we're going to crash. That is exactly right. And actually, for a lot of my patients, being able to just call it what it is starts to bring the sense of like, okay, I do have some control here. My body's not out of control.

I'll have to try that sometime. We'll see. It is not easy. I'm not suggesting by any stretch it's easy because you are on fight or flight. But it's worth a try. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so hard not to let your thoughts go there.

Go to every sad news story that you've read, every tragic incident. And actually, I kind of wanted to go like a little maybe philosophical or deeper with you and ask this question. Like statistically, we know that flying is safe and it has gotten safer and safer every year. At the same time, like we live in the world and accidents happen. And I think that every time I hear about a flight tragedy, it brings back those voices that say, I told you this wasn't safe. And, you know, like for the people who died, it wasn't. So how do you reconcile like that small chance, you know, that reality with the fact that like statistically, this is a safe activity. So really what you're talking about, Bec, I think is the idea of uncertainty, right?

Because the reality statistics is population level and on average it is safe. But I'd never say to a patient that they can't die in a plane crash because people do die in a plane crash. And so the question is, can you handle the uncertainty? That's one. But I'd never say to a patient that they can't die in a plane crash because people do die in a plane crash. And so the question is, can you handle the uncertainty? That's one. Can you sit with it? And the best you can, trust it the same way, as we talked earlier, you trust crossing the street or driving a motorcycle. You are dealing with uncertainty that on average, it's safe, but not always.

Right. That's one piece. The second piece, which is if you want to go deeper and perhaps a little more interesting is, why is your brain holding on to every piece of information that suggests it's going to be a problem and dismissing all of the flights that took off that day that wasn't a problem? So for you back, you'll feel the world says planes are dangerous. So every

time you see a news article and says a plane crashed, you go, yep, see, dangerous. But if you start to scan the news for like how many planes took off today, how many landed safe, what did it look like? Now you have to work really hard to make sense of that. And the brain doesn't like it. And so that's why when you're sitting on the plane, your brain goes, but a plane crashed and I know it, this could crash. And it's just confirming what we know, which is a method of conformatory bias.

You just get stuck. These are really, yeah, some really good points. You're kind of tearing down my argument that I've made in my head. Okay, I wanted to ask you about medication. You know, a lot of times, if you're afraid of flying, people like kind of joke about like, oh, like, you know, have have a drink at the bar before or like, get some wine on the plane. And so like, obviously, there's self medication. And then there's also, you know,

a lot of people take medications for fear of flying. And I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. So often what you hear is people taking fast active things like Xanax or Valium. And there's nothing wrong with those medications per se. And I've had patients that had to take it to even do the exposure therapy we talked about because their fear is so much. The problem with those medications is that, you know, it teaches us from a scientific perspective that they are doing the opposite of what I want somebody to learn. I want your brain to learn that flying is safe overall, not always, but overall. Those medications pretty quickly take down your anxiety.

And so it feels then that the only way to travel and to fly is with those medications. So although they can be helpful short term, long term, they tend to get people more stuck is one problem. And you started with self-medication with alcohol. The problem with alcohol is even though it can help momentarily, it has a bit of a rebound effect that people get more anxious after. So any patient of mine that drank a lot on a plane, yeah, they can get through the flight, but the next day, not only

they have a bad hangover, they have a bad anxiety hangover, which is perhaps even worse for them. It makes them feel a little more jittery, having more trouble even thinking about it again. So my recommendation is stay away from self-medication. If you really can't get on a plane without medication, then look for a psychiatrist and try to think of a medication that's not just short-term, but something that could help you bring your baseline anxiety down, which will help with that anticipatory anxiety that we talked about. You mentioned a psychiatrist. Is this something that someone could also go to their primary care doctor about?

Absolutely. Nowadays, primary care doctors are definitely well-educated and able to help with this kind of medication. Well, let me ask you this. So I know like flying isn't something that most people need to do super regularly. And there are definitely ways to avoid it. I've tried them all. If you've driven to Florida for a wedding, you know what I mean. You know, you could zoom into that conference across the country. So why is dealing with this fear of flying good? Like, what can it give you? So anything that you're going to address in life, to me, is a matter of why do you want to address it. And the why is really your values.

What do you care about in life the most? And are you living your life in line with those values? Are you in alignment? So, for example, if you, like the patient I mentioned about, she really cared about her career and being successful is a value that mattered to her. So if she did not deal with this fear of flight, she would be in constant sense of stress because she knew she would have done something that would take her away from being successful in her career. So I often ask my patient, you know, it's not something you have to do, then why for you? What is the driver? What is the thing that you really care about that would help you face something that's pretty uncomfortable?

So, okay, I know that every patient is different, but in your experience, is the fear of flying something that people can move on from? Absolutely. I've seen many, many patients across the world are actually being able to overcome it. You do have to allow yourself to be comfortably uncomfortable because you're going to have to approach your fear instead of avoiding it. But definitely there is really good clinical care for it and you definitely can overcome it. Can you say a little bit more about that phrase, comfortably uncomfortable? Sure.

When I think about anything that we do, especially when it comes to overcoming fears, if we're completely comfortable, we are home and we're never tackling it. If we're completely uncomfortable, we're sitting in that plane having a heart attack, at least it feels like that to my patients, and it feels really bad. And so when I think about approaching a fear, I say to my patients, I want you to think about being comfortably uncomfortable. You're out of your comfort zone, but you're going towards something that matters. So instead of just having anxiety, you are capitalizing on that anxiety to propel you towards something that matters. But by definition, you're going to be a little uncomfortable. So I

think about it being comfortably uncomfortable. Baby steps. Baby steps, absolutely. This has been incredible. Thank you so much, Dr. Luana, for taking the time to help us take those baby steps. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. For more Life Kit, check out our other episodes. We have one on making the most of your travel plans

and another on how to travel with a group. You can find those at npr.org slash life kit. And if you love Life Kit and want even more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash life kit newsletter. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Mansi Karana. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our visual producer is Kaz Pantoni. Our digital editors are Malika Gareeb and Claire Marie Schneider.

Megan Cain is the supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Audrey Nguyen, Margaret Serino, and Thomas Liu. Engineering support comes from Joshua Newell. I'm Mary El-Segara. Thanks for listening.