A fear of flying can strike anybody at any time, and for most people is manageable with some self-talk and a few distraction techniques. However, when a fear of flying turns into something that can prevent you from travelling, or from enjoying any aspect of your holiday as you stress about the flight home, it’s time to take action.
The official term for an extreme fear of flying is aerophobia. Yes, it’s an actual phobia, which takes it to a level beyond your control. Aerophobics don’t feel the same mild anxiety before a flight that many do, though this is how it might have started. Aerophobics feel acute anxiety, can feel breathless and experience a racing heart, and a strong desire to simply get up and run. This is quite literally your ‘fight or flight mechanism’ kicking in, and is your body’s perfectly normal response to a terrifying situation. Unfortunately, your body is not in a genuinely terrifying situation, it is simply your brain going into overdrive and sending incorrect messages to your body.
You will no doubt have tried to take the steps of reassuring yourself by looking at the actual risks posed by flying. According to a 2017 Harvard University study, the odds that your plane will crash are one in 1.2 million, and the odds of dying from being in a plane crash are one in 11 million. It’s often said that your risk of death in a car crash is far higher, which is statistically true – there are 67 million adults in the UK, and in 2020 1560 fatalities. That is 0.0023% chance of dying in a car accident.
These stats are all very well, and you can chant the numbers on repeat, tell yourself you’re being silly and to just get on with it and try to be logical about it all, but your phobia doesn’t stem from the logical, reasonable part of your brain. It stems from the prehistoric, self-defence, hyper-alert part of the brain we needed then, and sometimes of course even now, to keep us safe.
To access this part of our brains we need to use hypnotherapy.
We take as much time as you need to talk in detail about your experiences, about each occasion you have experienced the fear and your physical and emotional reaction to it. I need to understand how long you have struggled with your phobia, how it has impacted your life and how it makes you feel even when not in the grip of your phobic response.
We move on to use a powerful therapy known as BrainWorking Recursive Therapy, or BWRT. This very dynamic treatment will help you rewire your brain’s usual pattern of subconscious responses, so rather than travel the current path of a fear response, it takes the more logical, calm approach you want. No more fight or flight, now your prehistoric response mechanism won’t kick in.
On average it takes no more than three sessions to cure you of your phobia. From those initial discussions to learning about ways to find calm in stressful situations, you will need to visit me just three times.
Don’t let fear of flying spoil your life, Rediscover your freedom in just three weeks, with hypnotherapy for fear of flying.
