For instance, did any part of your discomfort come from concerns about the airline industry? If so, then you will want to pay attention to that issue in the section called "Learning how to fly comfortably." us, then there are no techniques to make your flights comfortable. If you cannot get the complete benefits of this self-help program until you decide to trust the airline industry. As long as you believe that commercial aviation is inherently dangerous to fly comfortably, then you must add the goal of making peace with the airlines.

Then make sure you continue studying with this material. Reassurance about airline safety alone may not be enough. If you have been worrying for a while, your worries may continue even with new data. You may need many or all of the skills I'm offering in this program. They will help you translate your new trust in the industry into comfort on your future flights.

To visit the Fear of Flying Store CLICK HERE

Why Does Fear of Flying Take More Effort to Overcome?

Even though one in of every six adults is afraid of flying, a very small percentage seek out help for their fears. For those who do confront their worries and symptoms, the task of getting more comfortable often takes significant encouragement and an extra dose of effort. Here are some of the reasons why.

Obstacles to Achieving Comfortable Flight

You may be confronting several fears at once.
Your perception of risk may work against you.
The media present a lopsided view of airline accidents.
It is harder to gradually face your fears of flying.
Repetition of practice is crucial, but it's costly.

You may be confronting several fears at once.

When a person is phobic of elevators, she typically has only one fear, whether it is closed-in spaces, crowds or heights. This simple phobia means that the task of getting better is not so complicated. Few people have only one fear regarding flying. There are two broad areas of concern. Some people have trouble believing that commercial air travel is safe. And understandably, people dislike the anxious symptoms they feel when they fly. Within those two are over two dozen fears. It's no wonder that many people don't even try to overcome so many obstacles to their comfortable flying.

Your perception of risk may work against you.

Before we engage in a new or difficult activity, our minds automatically begin to assess the risk factors involved. Three criteria are common as we consider whether to move forward with action:

Am I in control of the risk?
Is it a big risk or many little ones?
Is it familiar or unfamiliar?

Commercial flight doesn't score very well on this psychological assessment of risk. Let's contrast flying with travelling by automobile.

First is, am I in control? People perceive that they have very little control of an airplane. They can't get off the plane and they aren't permitted in the cockpit. It seems much safer in a car because we can typically drive whenever we want and pull over whenever we feel like it. (By the way, that's why some people have trouble driving over bridges or in the left hand turn lane at a stoplight -- they feel trapped by not being able to quickly pull off the road.)

The second question is, will this be a big risk? In an automobile accident only a few people are injured or killed at the most. The mind perceives this as a small risk compared to the possibility of over 100 people being killed in one airline accident. In addition, being on the ground while travelling seems less risky than travelling 35,000 feet in the air.

Third, is this risk familiar? People think they have a general sense of how cars work. They know there is this engine that has pistons that produce energy that turn the wheels. We have been exposed to cars so frequently over so many years that we travel by car with little sense of risk. Flying, on the other hand, is an inherently unnatural event for humans and can seem quite mysterious. How do they put some many tons of plane, people and cargo into the air? How do they prevent collisions? What if we run out of fuel, get a flat tire, run into a storm? The complexity of commercial flight leads us to feel insecure, since we are naturally more afraid of the unknown than the known. None of these perceptions is reflective of reality! As you will read in the next few pages, flying is, indisputably, the safest form of modern transportation. To reduce your anxieties about commercial flight, you must challenge your perceptions of reality far more than you need to address the actual risks of flying. As you realize this, you will be well on your way to comfortable flight.

The media present a lopsided view of airline accidents.

The media coverage of an airline accident can contribute to this problem, too. We see or read about the same airline accident repeatedly on the radio and TV and in newspaper articles. If there has been a plane crash recently, it might be shown on the evening news ten or fifteen times over the next three or four weeks. It could come across our breakfast tables every morning for days through the newspaper headlines. Seeing that traumatic event so many times, we have ample opportunity to imagine ourselves on that plane.

Dr. Arnold Barnett, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compared the number of front-page stories in The New York Times that addressed six major sources of death: AIDS, automobiles, cancer, homicide, suicide, and commercial jets. Over a period of a year, stories about airline accidents far outnumbered stories about any of the other five sources of death. In fact, when considering coverage on a per-death basis, the number of airline stories was sixty times the number of stories on AIDS, and over eight thousand times the number of stories about cancer, the nation's number two killer.

Airline accidents are certainly dramatic and newsworthy, and the media serves an important function of keeping the public eye on the industry's safety concerns. However, this kind of frequent reporting skews our sense of relative danger. We tend to associate greater exposure to a problem with our sense of how serious the problem is. It is not so much the number of people killed by a particular source that can produce our vicarious trauma. If that were true, few of us would feel safe enough to travel by car. But the greater the number of times we draw our attention to the graphic image of those deaths, and the greater the number of times we imagine ourselves involved in that event, then the stronger our chances of becoming uncomfortable.

It is harder to gradually face your fears of flying.

We know from over twenty-five years of behavioural research that gradual exposure to fearful situations is a highly successful treatment. You can design a program for yourself that takes you through stages of exposure to components of flying: studying about the industry, visiting airports, talking with pilots, boarding stationary planes, practicing visualizations of comfortable flight. But the step between these practices and boarding a regular commercial flight is a large one. For those who have become phobic of flying and no longer travel by plane, this step requires significant courage.

Repetition of practice is crucial, but it's costly.

We also know that you continue to increase your comfort by continuing to practice facing your fears. If too much time passes between practices, the mind has a tendency to wander back to the fearful experiences and forget the successes. I recommend that my clients take at least one flight every three months to practice their skills during their first year after treatment. But with ticket prices for even short trips costing close to £100, this can be so expensive that people fail to reinforce their gains through practice.

Learning How to Fly Comfortably

If you are afraid to fly, there are a number of steps you can take to overcome this fear. Your very first step needs to be motivation: facing anxiety is indeed uncomfortable, so you need to become determined to choose air travel as the safest, easiest, quickest way to reach those far-away destinations. Is frequent flying a necessity in your profession? Do you have family and friends you want to visit more frequently? Do you want to take vacations abroad? These aims will help motivate you, because a strong desire to overcome your problem can guide you through any obstacles along the way.

In the rest of this section will outline the seven central tasks to flying comfortably. The first task -- learn to trust the industry -- specifically focuses on the issue of flying. The six other tasks all relate to other sections of the Panic Attack Self-Help Program. Once you have read this section, use it as a guide to study the central attitudes and skills presented elsewhere in the Panic Attack Self-help Program. If you would rather work with our kit called Achieving Comfortable Flight, then find out about it in the Self-Help Store section.

Don't begin to judge whether these skills will help you until you've had a chance to practice them in real-life situations. Take small steps toward flying comfortably, such as visiting an airport, boarding a stationary plane, or taking a short flight as practice. These will be chances for you to try out some of these skills. The more you practice, the easier it will get.

If you have patience, the world of commercial flight will soon be just the ticket for quick, easy and comfortable travel.

STEP 1. Start by trusting the industry

STEP 2. Accept your feelings

STEP 3. Breathe!

STEP 4. Relax

STEP 5. Take supportive actions

STEP 6. Handle your worries

STEP 7. Use visualizations for rehearsal

Click here to find out more about the seven steps

Injection molder resource