My Journey With Health And Fitness – Dealing With Anxiety

My apologies that I didn’t post on Saturday but things were a bit hectic. We were preparing for our trip to Playa del Carmen and had a lot to do. Fortunately a neighbour had offered to take us to the airport for 5am on the 28th. Unfortunately we found out the plane was delayed for an hour, and then another 1/2 hour and then another 20 minutes. This was due to far too many planes arriving at the Cancun airport. While we had to cancel our food delivery, we were able to keep our friend who was picking going to be waiting for us up to date so he didn’t have to wait at the airport for too long.

When I was working I traveled a lot. Seriously, I mean I flew minimum 75k miles each year. I was always in the elite category which often meant I got awesome upgrades. But the thing is, I hated flying mainly due to turbulence which I am convinced would crash the plane. I had a co-worker one time try to explain to me what turbulence was as she used to be a flight attendant. The problem with that is, when you have flying anxiety rationale information does not help you in any way.

I have to say as I don’t fly anywhere near as much now it seems to have cause my anxiety to signicantly increase. I literally start shaking when the plane bumps even a little. While my husband will do things like hold my hand, nothing seemed to alleviate my anxiety. But now, I have found a relief.

The first thing I did was find some awesome stats on turbulence. If you know me you also know I am a numbers person. Things like statisics actually give me comfort. So here are some I now focus on, in the history of flying only 60 people have ever been injured because of turbulence. Even I am hesitant to calculate how many people have ever actually flown and what percentage have been injure but I know it is an exponentially insiginficant amount. The other thing I do (and it is each time I fly and hit turbulence) is look up what you can do to relieve the anxiety. A few things that work well for me are finding a calming mantra such as ‘I am safe and secure’ or ‘the plane doesn’t know it’s turbulent, it just knows how to fly’ (the latter is a quote from a pilot who told us that on an extremely turbulent flight from Toronto to Vancouver). I also do some deep breathing and focus on pressing my feet against the floow which makes things more stable.

There is nothing wrong with having anxiety flying, apparently 40% of flyers are anxious when there is turbulence. The important thing is to find something that helps calm that anxiety. I don’t think I will ever stop being a nervous flyer, I think I will just successfully find some things to deal with the anxiety.