Medicine Planet: Conquering Fear of Flying
— -- When Mary Eiff is forced to get on an airplane, the usual stresses of business life takes on a whole new dimension.
The 30-year-old entertainment industry professional is afraid to fly, and like many who suffer from this particular phobia, the fear expresses itself in the most graphic of images: “My fear of flying started with TWA Flight 800 — I was obsessed,” she recounts. “All I recall is the fuselage floating in the Atlantic. My intense fear is being at the bottom of the ocean, in my seatbelt, and I know I’m drowning.”
Mary is not alone. Approximately 10 percent to 25 percent of the population are afraid to fly. One in eight Americans deliberately avoids commercial air travel due to their fear. What many people do not know is that fear of flying is an eminently treatable condition. For most people, a few simple steps will eventually enable them to get on an airplane without getting into a panic. And for those whose fear is more intractable, a variety of new treatments are starting to show promising results.
What Is Fear of Flying
Fear of flying is what is known as a simple phobia; other simple phobias include fear of dogs, spiders and heights. Phobias are a type of anxiety disorder. They are generally provoked by exposure to the feared object or situation, and characterized by avoidance of it. Distressed endurance of a feared situation can also put you in the phobic category.
In many situations, what appears to be fear of flying is actually a somewhat different disorder, and distinguishing correctly between the two is important when considering treatment.
Michael Tompkins, director of Professional Training at the Center for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Oakland, Calif., notes that for some, the real problem underlying their fear of flying is agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is a type of panic disorder that leads to extreme anxiety, excessive fear or even terror of being in a situation where one is not in control and from which one is unable to escape. People who suffer from agoraphobia often go to great extremes to avoid the kinds of people, places or situations that can precipitate their panic attacks.
In Mary’s case, for example, her fear of drowning while trapped in her seatbelt at the bottom of the ocean, as unlikely a scenario as it is, may in fact be the central trigger for her anxiety around flying.
The Treatments
The treatment for phobias is the same as treatments for most anxiety spectrum disorders — exposure to that which is feared. Simply flying a lot will eventually cure many people of their fear of flying, and for others, the phobia will gradually recede on its own.
But that, of course, is easier said than done. “The reason fear of flying is so difficult to treat is that people who are afraid to fly organize their life around not flying, thereby avoiding the very experience that could heal them,” says Lynn Martin, a psychotherapist who specializes in the treatment of anxiety disorders at the University of California San Francisco.
More advanced treatments for fear of flying are based on a psychological model known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT aims to retrain or recondition the irrational thinking patterns and habits that cause the phobic person’s life-crippling anxieties and baseless fears. Based on its results, CBT is considered to be the most effective treatment for many anxiety disorders.
