For many of us, the fear of flying is huge. The whole idea sends our stress hormones rocketing. We know that flying is meant to be safer than driving, that you’re more likely to have an accident negotiating the motorway turn-off, but still there’s something that just feels wrong about being up there that high in the sky.
One way of managing our anxiety levels is to shift our focus from the cause of our anxiety (flying, the turbulence, the storm we’re passing through), to the mundane details of the things around us. So we move our attention from our fear of crashing, to the armrest, the seat-belt, the fold-away table, our phone, our book and so on.
For this to take our full concentration, which is necessary to lower our stress-levels, we make it into an exercise. We go through our senses and count 5 things we can we feel, 5 things we can see, 5 things we can hear.
Obviously this is not going to take away the root-cause of our fear, but it can help to bring down stress-levels to a manageable level, for the moment.
For more details on fear of flying, see this interesting post from Psych Central.
