Aerophobia: when the fear of flying is pathological

People who feel real panic when boarding an airplane. What happens to them?

If the technological advances of the last 100 years have made their mark in any area, it is interconnection and globalization. Today we can be on the other side of the planet in a matter of hours, and we can even live in two countries at once, money permitting. Passenger airplanes make that possible.

However, not everyone benefits in the same way from the benefits of international flying. People with a fear of flying, or aerophobia, may go to the extreme of not getting on an airplane because of the panic and stress caused by this type of flight. and stress caused by this type of experience.

What is aerophobia?

Aerophobia is a type of phobia in which what produces an intense fear is the situation of being inside an airplane that is flying or that could take off. What is frightening is the idea that a plane crash could occur, which by its nature is associated with a very high risk of death.

However, not all cases of fear of flying are considered a sign of aerophobia, not all cases of fear of flying are considered to be a sign of aerophobia.. As in almost everything, in fears there are different degrees of intensity, and aerophobia will only exist as such if the panic is so intense that it is a limiting element of the person's quality of life.

That is why, although it is estimated that approximately 25% of people are afraid of flying, among these the proportion of people with aerophobia would barely reach 10%.

Emotions take control of the phobia

Sometimes, this fear goes further and even extends to airplanes that for different reasons are not going to fly, either because there is no scheduled flight or because they are imitations of airplanes and do not work, for example. In these cases a generalization occurs.

As with all types of phobias, this fear of flying is not based on a sense of danger based on reasonable fears, but is basically irrational. It occurs despite the awareness that flight safety measures are optimal..

Even if reason understands the safety guarantees of the aircraft, emotions follow a totally different path, and often exert a great influence on the former, distorting it and causing almost delirious thoughts to appear.

Symptoms of airplane terror

Among the symptoms of aerophobia are many of those that are typical in the rest of phobias:

• Heavy sweating.
• Increased Heart rate and breathing.
• Dry mouth.
• Nausea.
• Headache.
• general discomfort

Causes of flying phobia

One of the elements that better explain the appearance of aerophobia is the fact that having experienced a traumatic event related to aircraft in the past.. This means that you may have experienced a plane crash first-hand, or you have seen one, or someone you know suffered its consequences.

In other cases, aerophobia occurs when certain personality traits interfere with the way you handle the situation.

For example, people with a high tendency to control can become highly stressed at times when they have no control over what happens, and flights aboard an airplane are one such context.

Similarly, a general propensity for anxiety causes one to analyze what is happening in the environment in such a way as to find many clues that can be interpreted as indications of an accident that is about to happen. All of this causes stress to rise, which in turn causes one to keep looking for false indications of danger.

Treatment

The most common treatments for extreme fear of flying include gradual exposure to the terror-producing situation.. The objective of this strategy is to create a progressive desensitization.

In this way, by accompanying a person to a real or virtual airplane and allowing him or her to make small progress, the person learns to stop associating these situations with the extreme fear they usually produce.

The programs of exposure to the situation that produces fear based on virtual reality are very useful, because they are cheap and easy to carry out as they do not depend on the owners of a real airplane, and they also allow controlling everything that happens in the flight and ending the session at any time.