My Sudden Fear of Flying and What I Did About It

I had a strange experience about a month ago where all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, I was scared to fly on a plane. I wanted to share my experience with you, even though it’s a little bit embarrassing, because working through this really helped me understand just how easy it can be for our brains to get into this negative loop of self doubt, and what strategies actually work to help get out of it.

So here’s what happened. I’ve never really loved flying. I don’t like lines, I’m really impatient so being at the airport two hours early always bugs me, and I get pretty bad motion sickness so being in any moving vehicle is not my idea of a fun time. But I’ve never been scared or afraid to fly, and I’ve been on lots of planes. Then all of a sudden this family trip to Hawaii that we took in January starts to get closer and I started to be scared to go on the plane. I started having this jumping feeling in my chest and my heart rate would pick up a little bit when I started thinking about getting on the plane. Then the little hamster wheel in my brain started going into overdrive thinking about all the horrible things that could go wrong. I was imagining the plane crashing and all these horrible things! What the heck right?

Because this is what I do for a living I was pretty quick to catch these negative thoughts and start to challenge them. First I tried reasoning with my brain. I reminded myself that flying in a plane is really low risk, and I’m much more likely to die in a car accident and I drive in cars every day. I reminded myself that these thoughts were irrational and they didn’t need to control my life. I helped a little bit, but the thoughts kept coming back.

So I started to think about why all of a sudden I was so scared about this plane crashing. After thinking about this for some time I realized it wasn’t me I was scared for, it was my daughter. I was scared about her dying in a plane crash. Then I realized that since I Allison was born there have been a lot of things that have made me more nervous and cautious than I used to be. For instance I’m a good swimmer, I’ve always been comfortable around water, but sometimes when I think about my daughter going swimming it brings up those worries and my heart start to flutter a little bit.

This is something that moms have been telling me for years! And I know it’s normal. It’s normal, and probably at least partly biological, for moms to worry about things that didn’t used to scare them because they are worried about their kids! Things that wouldn’t have scared us before all of a sudden become scary or even terrifying when we think about how our kids could get hurt.

Just because it’s normal to have these fears though doesn’t mean that it’s helpful.

The one thing that really turned my brain around was thinking about my daughter. Sounds counter-intuitive I know because thinking about my daughter her safety was the thing that got my anxiety hamster wheel spinning in the first place. But I started to think about how I wanted my daughter to experience the world. How I want Allison to be brave and bold and try new things and not hold her back from new experiences. I remembered the mom I know who always screamed when she saw a bug and now her kids scream when they see bugs.

Our kids are like little sponges that are constantly learning and watching us to see how to react. If I am nervous and fearful my kids are to be nervous and fearful too. But if I feel that fear, pushed past it, and overcome that negative belief, I’m showing my kids how to develop courage. It’s normal to be scared sometimes, it’s how we deal with this fear that makes us stronger as individuals.

Keeping in mind that I want Allison to learn to be courageous and to work through her fears helped me realize that I needed to show her how to do this. I need to be a role model for my daughter and show her how to overcome fear. Like I said, at first I tried reasoning with by brain, but that didn’t work. But it hit me like a punch to the gut when I started to realize that I was going to rub off my fears on Allison. I needed to find something that twigged my emotions deep in my core to easily push back that fear. That strong emotion for me was the sense of commitment and responsibility that I have to teach my daughter how to be courageous. Worked like a charm and we got on that plane and had a great time. Doesn’t mean I stopped worrying about my daughter, but at least now I had better control over that worry so it didn’t run my life.