As an international student, I’ve had to travel an obscene amount since starting college. Long haul flights have become part of my back-to-school routine and Boston Logan International Airport has become a second home to me these past two years. Nevertheless, no matter how often I fly, I can’t seem to get rid of the impending doom that floods over me whenever I step foot on a plane.
I’m riddled with flight anxiety, and I’m convinced that it’s a completely rational fear.
Of course, everyone on planet Earth wants to convince you otherwise. Exemplified by the Reddit thread in the r/fearofflying group, which is a supportive community of anxious flyers, is often invaded. People are constantly giving out the same allegedly calming facts about flying which are supposed to make us trust this complete betrayal of gravity:
“You’re more likely to crash while driving to the airport than on a plane.” “Turbulence is like a pothole on the road, uncomfortable but not dangerous.” “The pilots have done this a thousand times and they also want to get home.” At this point, I have all these phrases memorized and they still do nothing to stop my racing mind from convincing itself I have signed my death warrant.
As well intentioned as these Redditors are, it does very little to actually work around the root cause of flight anxiety, because fear is nothing if not persistent.
Maybe I’m being extremely dramatic, and maybe not everyone sends goodbye messages to their loved ones before a flight “just in case.” But I have the slightest inkling that flight anxiety is, in fact, more common than people believe it is.
A recent Harris Poll found that two-thirds of surveyed American adults reported heightened nerves while flying, while one-in-four described themselves as more fearful due to recent aviation incidents. While tragedies such as last year’s collision between American Airlines flight 5342 and a helicopter at Ronald Reagan Regional Airport — or the more recent Air India crash — are rare, they feed aereophobic minds and make even the most relaxed flyers pause sometimes.
I see the pause manifest when people clutch the armrest a little harder when rough air suddenly interrupts their movie or their nap.
I watch as these people process the fact that we are, in fact, thousands of feet above the ground, trapped in this steel tube, sardined with a bunch of strangers, cut off from our loved ones, and fighting in the trenches of an age-old war between man — the pilots — and nature — the weather, tossing the 90,000 pound plane around like a rag doll.
All of a sudden, no amount of deep breaths or repeating that this is the “safest method of transportation” can save one’s brain from contemplating the enormous feat we have undertaken as humans: to conquer the skies, and to realize just how arrogant we are for relying on it. We spiral, 30,000 feet up in the air, hoping we don’t actually hit the ground.
That is, until the turbulence settles, the seat-belt sign turns off, and this death-trap cruises the blue skies that lie above all those dark clouds. Then, everyone forgets the panic that collectively makes us second-guess our decisions.
As Martin Seif, a psychologist who co-founded the Anxiety and Depression Association of America and who has treated many cases of aereophobia, told Time magazine, “Anxiety is very, very strange. The more you fight it, the greater it gets.”
We must learn to accept our anxiety if we want to learn how to deal with it, since it likely won’t go away just because we want it to.
Just like planes encountering turbulent weather in the sky — accepting the storm as opposed to charging at it, knowing that it will eventually be over. We shouldn’t surrender to our fears and let ourselves be controlled by them, but instead, take them in as the basic human emotions that they are. That way, we learn how to cope in a way that doesn’t just feed onto the anxiety, but, as Seif concludes, helps us “[Learn] to let the time pass.”
Recently, I flew from Boston to Amsterdam to start my semester in the Kasteel Well program. I experienced some of the worst turbulence I’ve ever endured. I clasped and squeezed my poor friend’s hand as I tried to let time pass, because I knew there was no use in fighting my brain at that moment.
I eventually realized that I wasn’t the only one who was afraid there, because everyone was trying to transcend the uncertainty, even if they weren’t showing just how panicked they were. That thought alone comforted me for the rest of that seven-hour flight and carried me through the start of this next chapter of my life abroad. Scared, just like everyone else, but still seeing it through.
Flight anxiety and fear are completely normal. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.
