Why Am I Suddenly Afraid of Flying?

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Phobia is understandable after a person has a traumatic encounter with something. It’s puzzling, though, when a phobia starts for no apparent reason. But unexplained onset is surprisingly common. At least half of my clients originally flew with little or no difficulty. Then for no apparent reason, when about to board a flight, they couldn’t do it. The average age of onset out of the blue is twenty-seven.

This type of phobia develops when we mature and realize something could end our life. Phobias can also begin when one becomes a parent, and starts to worry what would happen to one’s child if something were to happen to them. Heightened awareness of vulnerability presents a problem. What do we need to be careful about? The list is endless, so we can’t be sure what to avoid.

A few of us turn to avoiding everything. In what is called agoraphobia, the person holes up someplace, perhaps just one room, in order to feel safe. But most of us turn to control. To keep something from getting us, we try to control everything. But since we can’t control everything, we need a backup. Our Plan B is escape. Since our ability to control things isn’t absolute, we need the ability to escape to be exactly that: absolute.

Once we settle on escape as the thing life depends on, we are set up for panic whenever escape is not immediately available. This can mean elevators, bridges, tunnels, subways, high places, a middle seat in a theater, a dentist’s chair, an MRI machine, and of course on an airliner.

Most of us have a healthier way to control feelings: a mental program that activates our calming system, the parasympathetic nervous system. When something shocking happens, though we feel alarm, it lasts for only a fraction of a second before it is automatically down-regulated to curiosity about what is going on. This automatic down-regulation is necessary for high level thinking (it’s called Executive Function) to accurately determine what, if anything needs to be done.

A person who has not developed automatic down-regulation will stay alarmed until the stress hormones that cause the feeling dissipate. Since Executive Function can’t function when alarmed, it can’t figure out what is going on or what to do about it. This collapse of Executive Function throws the person into their worst nightmare. They freeze. They are unable to act. That means no control and no escape. Panic results.