 If that seven seconds of audio kind of freaked you out, then this podcast episode is for you. This week on The Anxious Truth, we're talking about anxiety centered around flying or being stuck on an aircraft. Hello everybody, welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is podcast episode number 221, recorded in August of 2022. I am Drew Linsalata, creator and host of The Anxious Truth. This is the podcast that centers around all things, anxiety, anxiety disorders and recovery. If you are new to the podcast or the YouTube channel just stumbled in today, welcome. I'm glad that you're here. I hope you find this material useful. If you are a returning listener or viewer, thank you. Welcome back, I appreciate your continued support and attention. Today we're gonna talk about anxiety centered around flying. Now before we get into the meat and potatoes here, and before I do my little preamble, I just wanna differentiate here. Many, many, many people have a fear of flying. That has nothing to do with having panic attacks or being a gorophobic or having OCD. We all are aware that many people in the general population have a fear of flying. That's a common phobia. So that's a slightly different thing. We're not necessarily talking about that today. So if you don't have panic attacks, you don't have an anxiety disorder, you're just trying to figure out your fear of flying. You may not necessarily find this podcast episode terribly helpful. You're welcome to hang around. It's gonna be a relatively short one. But we're really talking about fear of flying in the context of recovery from an anxiety disorder. So it's not I have a fear of flying. This episode really is centered upon, I am afraid to get on a flight because of my anxiety. Two different things, right? Before we get into that, just a quick reminder, you know what I'm gonna say, the anxious truth is more than just this podcast episode. There are 200 somewhat other completely free podcast episodes. There's a ton of free social media content. There is a newsletter slash podcast that comes out four mornings every week called The Anxious Morning. And there are currently three books, An Anxiety, Anxiety Disorders and Recovery that I have written that are being read and I hope are helpful to tens of, literally tens of thousand people around the world. You can find all of those resources on my website at theanxiestruth.com. So go check it out and avail yourself of what is there. If you are following my content and you like it and I'm helping you and you would like to help me keep it free of advertising and sponsorships, which is a goal of mine, all the ways that you can help do that, you can find at theanxiestruth.com slash support. That is never required, but always appreciated. And no matter what form your support comes in, be it monetary, merchandise or just tuning in and giving a thumbs up on a video. I appreciate you guys, thank you very much. So let's get into today's episode. Like I said, it's not gonna be terribly long. We're not gonna talk about the fear of flying. We're gonna talk about being afraid to get on a plane because of your anxiety situation. Now, both of those things could be true. I know for me, I was in anxiety recovery but also was a fearful flyer. Always have been, it's right in my whole life. So you can be dealing with both of those things and we'll touch on that a little bit, but I just wanted to be clear that this isn't necessarily a podcast episode about specifically addressing the fear of flying as most of us know that. So what is the big difference? What's the big issue here? There's two issues. You could be afraid to get on a plane because you're afraid that the plane might crash, right? Like we gotta speak honestly about this stuff. We're not gonna sugarcoat stuff. You might be afraid of that. I was afraid of that because I was a fearful flyer. I still am to a certain extent. I don't really enjoy it that much. So you might be afraid of that. Some people say that they don't like it because they're not in control of the plane. There's a bunch of things that go into fear of flying. You don't know what's gonna happen. There's a lot of unexpected stuff and we're gonna talk about that in a little bit because I had to deal with some of that. But I'm really talking about that situation where you are dealing with panic attacks or intrusive thoughts or raging health anxiety or you're agoraphobic and are having a hard time just getting more than a few miles from your house. And now suddenly you find yourself in a situation where you might have to take a flight. You might have to sit in an aircraft for an hour or six hours or 12 hours if you're flying somewhere around the world. That happens all the time. People in our community get confronted with this and that's why I get asked about it. So I think we need to look at what that really means. Most of the time, this all comes back to the idea that I will be in a situation where I may have sensations or I may experience thoughts that disturb me and make me anxious or I may have catastrophic thoughts that something bad is going to happen to me and I will not be able to handle them and I will have to do something and take some sort of evasive action to get away from that experience, that internal experience of the sensations in my own body or the thoughts in my own mind or the catastrophic predictions in my own mind. I will somehow have to find a way to escape from that internal experience. And if in fact you are sitting on an aircraft, we're all aware of the fact that if you are 35,000 feet in the air and you are halfway between New York and San Francisco, there's nowhere to go. You can't just decide to escape from that. That's, there's no practical way for you to do that. So that's not news. Everybody who's ever been on a plane knows that. When you're waiting in the airport, because the airport is part of this too. It's not just the aircraft. For many, many people, it's the idea that you have to stand in a very crowded airport. There might be a lot of people, especially if you're traveling during, traveling during one of the busy times of year, you know, around the holiday season, Thanksgiving in the US very busy travel time. So you have to go through, you may have to go far from home to get to an airport and then go even further from home to go to your destination. You may have to wait on security lines where a lot of people are around you. Then you're gonna get, you have to sit and wait at the gate in the terminal. Then you're gonna have to get on that aircraft, which is this small little cramped space that you can't necessarily run around in. And all of these things amount to I'm trapped, I'm trapped, I'm trapped, I'm trapped. So the single biggest fear that we can boil a lot of this down to is, I'm going to be trapped. I can't run out of the security line. I mean, I guess you could, but especially if the line is full of people, it's really difficult. And then everybody's looking at you and your family is there or your coworkers or whoever you're traveling with and you're trapped. And then you're trapped waiting at the gate and then you're trapped on the aircraft and then you're trapped in the air on the aircraft and then you're trapped waiting to get off the aircraft. So, you know, it's a constant situation where a flight represents sort of the ultimate trapped situation. And a lot of people who are dealing with the problem is that we're always addressing together have a hard time being trapped at a drive-through. They would never go through the drive-through at Starbucks or McDonald's, for instance, because they might get trapped, only if I know I'm the only car. If I'm the only car, then I'll go through, but even then maybe I won't because what if something goes wrong and the bank teller has to get their manager or the Starbucks runs out of whatever and they have to go into the storage room and get an ingredient and they'll have to wait for five minutes. So, many people in the situations that we're addressing here will refuse to be trapped even in those situations. Some people don't want to be trapped at red lights when they're driving. So, an agoraphobic, for instance, who's working on that or somebody with panic disorder who's working on, say, driving anxiety will be terrified to have to sit at a red light that might only last for 60 seconds or 90 seconds. That seems like forever to be trapped and I can't run, I can't escape, especially if there are cars all around me. Well, we could take that fear and just transplant it into the giant security line at the airport with your family around you all ready to go on vacation or holiday, whatever you call it, or your coworkers all ready to go on this business trip with you. You're trapped and then you're trapped waiting and then you're trapped in the aircraft. All of these things are situations where you think you may experience these things, these thoughts, these sensations, these catastrophic predictions, the symptoms of anxiety and you won't be able to handle it and somehow rather that is dangerous and you must escape from that but you are in the ultimate situation in a metal tube 35,000 feet in the air with hours to go before you can get off where you cannot get off. So that's the primary driver here, right? We always have to pay attention to that, that really you are afraid that when I get on this aircraft I might have a panic attack on the aircraft. You might, I might start to, all the crazy thoughts might start to go through my head about how something is wrong and this is not right and it's dangerous and I have to get out of here and how am I gonna do this? A lot of times it's a very meta kind of process because you might be afraid of the panic attack itself or you might be dealing with specific obsessions which would feel compulsory. You can't maybe do your compulsions while you're in an aircraft, you're forced to just sit there. So there's a lot of reasons why you wouldn't wanna sit in that aircraft, right? I get that. All of them are there's an elevated level of fear and uncertainty and discomfort that you think you can't handle. So the meta part of that always comes back to how the self-referencing thing of this will happen and the thing is a thing that I can't handle as opposed to well there might be a fire on the plane and that seems pretty dangerous, sure. This is I have to be able to escape from myself because I can't handle myself. I can't handle that state of distress. I cannot handle being afraid. I can't handle this. I have to get up and run. Somebody has to save me. I have to do special things and you can't. Like so all of your safety and escape behaviors are taken away from you. Your ability to perform physical compulsions especially if that's your problem gets taken away from you in that context. There's the fear of embarrassment that comes along with that also. If I panic on the plane, this is a very common thing too. What if I panic on the plane and I lose control? So in that situation where you're stuck on the aircraft for several hours on the flight, a lot of people will play that scenario in their head. Well, since I'm stuck and I can't handle it, it will build to a fever pitch. I will not be able to handle it and I will somehow lose control because it will be so much and I can't run away from it that I will somehow lose control. I will have some sort of break with sanity. I will lose touch with reality. I'll have a psychotic break. I'll start screaming. I'll start crying. I'll want to throw myself on the ground. So that's a very common feared outcome. Like it will be so much. I won't be able to handle it and not only can I not escape, but I will lose control because I can't escape. So that really is where, that's what it comes down to here. In this, I'm afraid to fly because of my anxiety, not just I'm afraid to fly. I'm afraid to fly because of my anxiety. And really, truly, the $100,000 question here is, well, what do I do about that Drew? Thanks for explaining it, but what the hell do I do about that? And what I tell people all the time, which sounds like a bit of a flippant thing to say, but if you want to get better at flying, then you just have to get better at being anxious and afraid and uncomfortable. Like if you're terrified that you will panic in an aircraft, then the best thing that you could do would be practice panicking everywhere else. Because in the end, it's not special, right? The aircraft isn't special. It just represents what you think is a challenge that will be too big because you're unwilling to accept the fact that you can tolerate or handle these internal experiences. So what you're gonna wanna do to address that is not sit and wait and dread the flight that you know you have to take in six months. How am I ever gonna do it? Well, you have six months or three months or two months or something. You have time where you could start to start to form that new relationship with anxiety that we talk about all the time in the podcast to learn that I don't have to be afraid of it. Like it's uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong. It's super uncomfortable and I don't wanna do it. And it's really terrifying and all those things, but I know that I can handle it. So I don't have to go to I'm going to snap and I'm gonna lose control. I have to throw myself on the floor and scream and yell. You learn that that's not true. None of those things have ever been true. So there's no magic bullet here for like, well, I'm completely homebound or whatever the case may be. I'm really struggling. I'm very early in my recovery or I haven't even started yet and I have to fly in three days. Well, unfortunately, I don't have a magic bullet there other than to understand that, yeah, it will be very challenging for you and you have to hang on to the fact that I can handle this challenge. Even though I'm convinced that I can't and I've done everything I can to not be challenged for however long, I can do it. But there's no magic answer here till I have a flight to take in a week. I'm in the thick of it. I'm panicking every day. I'm terrified of my own thoughts. I'm just on the edge of what I feel snapping all the time. How do I get on the plane? Well, there's no magic to that. I can't tell you like, well, here's the thing that you can do. I mean, you can medicate yourself. People do do that. I'll address that really quickly for people who are really, really struggling. I understand that a lot of people don't want to take medication. You do not want to take a benzo. You don't want to do any of that stuff. If the difference is I have no choice. I have to get on this three hour flight. You know, I can't not do it for whatever reason but I'm still stuck in a two mile radius from my house or my anxiety is at such a point where my life is still full of restrictions. It's perfectly okay in that instance, like people who get sedated to go to the dentist, for instance, maybe you have to use the medication. It's out there. It's not all evil all the time. So if you're between a rock and a hard place, it is not failure to say, well, okay, I'm gonna have to take a Xanax or whatever it is. You're gonna have to work with your doctor on that, of course, I cannot prescribe, you know, medication to you nor tell you to take it. But I can tell you that it is an option. If you find that you are backed up against the wall, you have no choice in the situation. There's not a crime, that's not a failure in doing that. It's a one time use with a purpose. That's very different than like, well, I'm gonna start taking it every day when I feel like I need it and then more and more and more. It's not it at all. If you need to take a Xanax to get on a plane so you can fly to your cousin's wedding and then another one to get home, no one's gonna judge you for that. I certainly wouldn't. It's perfectly fine to do that. But just keep in mind that you are operating under the assumption that this would be a horrific, unhandlable experience that you have to be able to escape from and avoid and I can't on a plane and that's wrong. So really, there's not a whole lot of difference between anxiety on a flight versus anxiety being home alone or anxiety on the highway or anxiety at school or in the shopping center or anything. They're all the same. It's all the same thing. You know, one of my popular podcast episodes was called All Your Fears Are One Fear. Just that a flight or being on an aircraft on an extended flight seems super special because it's the ultimate place where you are trapped. Like the rubber will hit the road there. You will have to navigate and I understand that. So I can acknowledge that for sure. If you do go through the drive-through at McDonald's and there's three cars in front of you and it's super slow, I mean, I guess if it really, if you really wind up on fire, you could drive over the curb and leave. If you go to the movies and you find a halfway through the movie that you just can't tolerate it anymore and you wanna run, you can run. But you do not have an out in a plane. You are trapped. So we can acknowledge that for sure, but it doesn't mean that trapped still means a disaster, even though you insist that it does. So that's really the crux of flying anxiety. And if you have the opportunity, don't sit and wait and wring your hands over how you're gonna handle this. Start practicing being anxious. So all the usual rules apply here. So let me relay some of my own experience. I would say that by the time I had to start flying again after my recovery, I had no reason to. And I do understand, we can also acknowledge in this episode that flying is not a thing you can practice. You can't practice that. It's not practical to, you can't almost fly. You're either flying or you're not flying. And even if you can fly, how many times can you get in a plane to practice that? It's not an easy thing to practice. We can't do graduated exposure for flying. But, but I had been years into my recovery. And I would have told you I was fully recovered. And then when I had to start flying again, because my life just required it, I was super nervous. I was really afraid because even for me, and I would have told you at that point, I was completely 100% fully recovered. But even I had doubts about that. I'm flying by myself. I'm gonna be in an airport 1,000 miles from home for the first time in years and years and years. I'm gonna be trapped on an aircraft. How do I know that I really am recovered? How do I know that I can really handle it? So I had doubts too. But I had done so much recovery work, so much practice, so much, I've had such a new relationship with anxiety and fear and panic and all those things that I had some anxious thoughts when I was waiting to board that first flight. I had some anxious, when the door closed on the aircraft, my anxiety level was rising. It was absolutely rising. But all the practice that I had in the car, on the highway, out in public, at family events, at social functions, all of those things helped me there. Oh, that's right. I just do this when this happens. And I float through it using the Claire Weeks. I surrendered to this. And that's exactly what I had to do on the way to the airport, in the airport, and then especially when the doors closed on that aircraft. And I was nervous, 100% nervous. But I just had to remember, oh, on a plane I do the same things that I've practiced doing thousands of times in other contexts. And that's why I used phrases like being able to forklift your recovery experiences from one context to another. The first time I went to the movies, when I was far enough along in my recovery, I had to use that. Like I get really anxious in the movie when I had to float a surrender through that, allow it, accept it, float. And now I made it through the movie. I was fine, I didn't make it, I did it. I did it. And I had to use that when I got on the plane. So that was my experience with that. But even I was nervous. It's okay to doubt. Like, oh, am I really? Can I really do this? Totally okay. And you don't know. You don't know that you won't panic. I might have panicked on that plane. You don't know. You just have to keep practicing so that you know, even when I do panic, I can handle that, even on an aircraft. Because remember, this is all not, we're not learning how to fly without panic or drive without panic or stay home without panic. We're not learning to not be anxious or afraid. We're learning to be better at those things so that we're not afraid of being afraid. Like I probably, I must have said that 100,000 times over the last eight years. So keep all this in mind. It's okay to use some ads if you have duty on a flight. It's not failure. And it's not failure. And it's not disaster for you to be nervous about that flight, apprehensive about it, doubting yourself, not feeling completely confident. It's also completely normal and expected. That's okay if you feel those things before you take your flight. It's totally okay that you feel that, I promise. You just have to use the same, just repeat those experiences that you've been practicing, repeat them on the plane. But now let's talk about the fact that there's flying fear. I had that. I still do to a certain extent. I will fly now. I don't love it. I don't look forward to it. I still don't like it, but I will tell you that I am by no means calling myself an expert when it comes to fear of flying. I do not pretend to be an expert on dealing with the fear of flying, but I can tell you what I did. Before it was time to start flying again, I was feeling apprehensive and I said, okay, well, I also have this thing where I'm a nervous flyer. So maybe what can I do with that? And I am not joking. I literally spent hours and hours on YouTube because YouTube is amazing. Look, YouTube is crazy. Like everything you ever want is on YouTube. Who knew? But I would watch people who, there are people who are enthusiasts. They're aviation enthusiasts. And they video every takeoff out the window. They video every landing. They video the operation of the flaps on the aircraft. They like the sound of the engines. They love the air traffic controllers. If they can listen to that, they love the pilot announcements. They're just enthusiasts. They love it. And they like to document that. And those people were tremendously helpful to me because I was able to sit and watch, sorry about that notification. I was able to sit and watch videos of what does take, what do all those sounds mean at takeoff? Like, oh, this is supposed to happen. I watched, there were some great pilots on YouTube that make really educational and informative videos that are targeted at people that are nervous flyers. And I availed myself of those resources. Oh, this is why the engine sounds like it's just turned off. Like 30 seconds I have to take off. That was a thing for me. We would take off and it's like, oh, okay, we're supposed to bank hard one way or the other. That's what we're supposed to do. Wow, that took a lot of the nervousness out of that. Still don't like it, don't love it, but it wasn't a surprise. So I was able to watch and say, oh, the plane is supposed to bank one way or the other when it takes off right away. Oh, they do throttle the engines back almost right away. Oh, at 10,000 feet, we throttle the engines back. I don't know where it is where you live, but in the U.S. that seems to be a thing. I'm not a pilot. But when I found that out, I was like, oh, because when we were climbing, climbing and suddenly the engines went from this roar in your ears to much quieter, I used to be like, oh my God. And you would feel that because you'd have that deceleration when they throttle back on the jets, right? But now I knew what that was. Oh, we're 10,000 feet. And then sure enough, you'd hear the little bing in the cabin like that's the 10,000 feet. So I knew it was coming. And in that situation and more of a simple phobia, if you're flying, knowing does help, right? So avail yourself of those resources too. Having had done that and understanding, I watched takeoff videos from the flight deck. I watched landing videos, all of those things. Because to me, it just helped me to understand, oh, okay, well, they throttle up the engines, they get to a particular speed. You know, rotate anybody who's an aircraft or an aviation person would understand the word rotate. I didn't know rotate. Like, oh, that's the speed at which the plane will actually leave the ground. Rotate, pull it back on the thing, the plane's gonna pitch up, that's what's gonna happen. I went through all of that. That helped me so much. Before that, I used to just watch the flight attendants and the flight crew. And if they were cool, then I tried to be cool, but I wasn't really cool. Like I used to think like, well, if they're not nervous, then I guess I don't have to be nervous, but I was still nervous. Whereas when I learned much more about what a flight sounds like, what the procedures are, what those engine noises mean, why this happens, why what landing is like, so much better. To the point where there are parts of the flight now that I actually enjoy, like I love landing. I like watching the little flight display now on the screen on the back of things. Cause I know what it is now, and as I just nerd out on it, that's kind of cool. So I understand turbulence a lot better. So if you are also a nervous flyer, that's, those things helped me a lot. It took away a lot of the unknown and the feeling like I don't know what's coming. I don't know what to expect. And I'm nervous about every sound and every bump and every this and every that. It took so much of that away. And if I coupled that with the fact that I was nervous and apprehensive about, I guess I would probably say, I felt like I was testing my recovery and I really recovered. Am I really fully recovered? Doing all that sort of fear of flying stuff that I did, watching those videos and learning so much helped a lot. Cause I knew what I was going into ahead of time. Now, before I wrap this up, I just want to make sure that we understand the difference between what I did not do was I did not frantically seek 100% assurance that an aircraft is always safe. It's statistically, it's the safest way to try. I'm not going to go through all that stuff. But all I was doing was learning what was going to happen, right? Not because I thought I could control it or change it. I'm fully aware that I have zero control in that situation, absolutely none. I'm aware of that. I was not trying to find a way to feel like I was in control. I wasn't trying to find a way to assure myself that planes never have problems. You know, some of that stuff does come up in those videos and the pilots are so good at explaining like the 60 levels of redundancy and we have, we train on all these things. That was nice to hear. But it's important to remember that as I was addressing that nervous flying thing because I was confronted now with sort of really, truly testing was I fully recovered, I was not frantically searching for assurance that I would be okay on an aircraft. That is counterproductive. So do not bury yourself in like your support forms. Can anybody tell me, has anybody else flown? How was it? What did you do to Japan on the plane? You're looking for frantic assurance that you'll be okay. You'll never get enough of that. Never. So like, let this be your assurance. You can handle it, but digging in to try to guarantee that you won't panic on the plane or that you somehow won't suffer that fate. That is tough. That will become counterproductive and it will just fuel that anticipatory fear. It'll just light a match, light a match, light a match. So don't do that. And that's not what I was doing. So there's a difference between learning the procedures of flying and what everything means and being more comfortable with it and wanting a guarantee that everything was going to go exactly the way I need it to because I have a very narrow band of acceptability and I must stay within that band. It wasn't that at all. So you are going to go outside of your narrow band of acceptability when you're going on a plane. You're just going to. But you can handle that. In the end, this all comes down to learning that we can handle these what we think are adverse events. They're uncomfortable events. These are certainly incidents where we're feeling distressed in some way, but we can handle that. Remember, we're always talking about learning how to handle that. So that is my take on flying when anxious, not the fear of flying, but being anxious and then having to fly. Hopefully that has been helpful to you. I think I covered everything I wanted to cover. Try to take some of the mystery out of it. Try to give you some idea of how you might approach this. Unfortunately, it's pretty much all the same. Give you some options, give you some tips for if you're a nervous flyer like I was, things that sort of helped me. Hopefully I got, I covered all the basis and holy has been helpful. I didn't think I'd go for 25 minutes, but here I am. So that's it. That is episode 221. You know, it's over because the music, the music afterglow by Ben Drake. That is the song that you hear at the very beginning and very end of every episode of the anxious truth because Ben wrote the song partly inspired by this podcast, which makes me so proud, I guess. And I'm amazed by that. And he and I became friends and he lets me use the song and I dig it. So if you want to find more about Ben and his music, you can find him at BenDrakeMusic.com. If you are watching this podcast on YouTube, then subscribe to my channel or like the video, leave a comment, thumbs up, all of those things that YouTubers are supposed to say. I guess I'm a YouTuber now. If you're listening to the podcast on Apple podcasts or Spotify or some platform that lets you leave a rating and a review, leave a five star rating if you dig what you just heard and maybe take a second and write a little review because that helps more people find the podcast. Then we get to help more people, which is what I'm trying to do. I appreciate that. That is it, episode 221 in the books. I will be back next week. I do not know what I will be talking about, but I will be here and I will remind you as always that this is the way.