Going into Your Own Movie
When you were a child, you probably saw a movie in which animals were lost. If you started to cry, an adult might touch you and say, “Honey, it’s just a movie!” By touching you, the grown-up presented you with something real to help you notice the difference between a real experience and an imaginary one. When flying, if you produce a movie of your own in your head and get lost in it, you need to find your way back to what is real. First, recognize that what you have taken for real is not real, but imaginary. Second, like touch offered to a child by an adult, you need to let reality replace imagination.
The solution is to experience the flight just as it is, adding nothing, and subtracting nothing. Distress comes when a person adds the imagination of impending disaster, or attempts to keep the flight out of mind and fails. But your own movie is adding something. Here is how going into your own movie works: In a movie theater, as film runs through the projector, a sequence of individual photographs flashes on the screen. The mind assembles them into a moving picture.
Imagine you are examining a strip of movie film taken during a few seconds of a flight. Each photographic image on the filmstrip is called a “frame.” We are going to study seven different frames.
Frame One: A passenger is reading a magazine.
Frame Two: There is a noise.
Frame Three: There is nothing happening.
Frame Four: There is nothing happening.
Frame Five: There is nothing happening.
Frame Six: There is nothing happening.
Frame Seven: A flight attendant asks, “Would you like some orange juice?”
The Reality Movie
Since this is what really happened, let’s call this “The Reality Movie.” A person who’s not anxious stays in or close to reality and experiences what happens as it happens.
Frame One: The passenger is reading a magazine.
Frame Two: The person hears a noise.
Frame Three: The person thinks, “What’s that?”
Frame Four: The person thinks, “Oh, I don’t know.”
Frame Five: The person turns his or her attention back to the magazine.
Frame Six: The person is reading the magazine.
Frame Seven: Asked about orange juice, the person responds, “Oh, thanks.”
Your Own Movie
A person who is anxious has trouble sticking with “The Reality Movie.” Experience is split between reality and expectation of something awful.
Frame One: The passenger is reading a magazine.
Frame Two: The person hears the noise.
Frame Three: The person thinks, “What’s that?”
Frame Four: In response to the thought “What’s that?” what comes to mind, psychologists tell us, depends upon what the person’s mind is “primed” for. The confident flier is not primed to come up with anything, and unable to answer the question “What’s that?” returns to reading. But the anxious flier is expecting something to go wrong. Of the things that could go wrong, let’s say he or she most fears engine problems. So when the anxious flier thinks, “What’s that?” engine failure comes to mind. The amygdalae respond to this non-routine thought and release stress hormones.
Reflective function—the mind’s quality-control system—has already been weakened by anxiety. When imagination of engine failure triggers the release of stress hormones, self-examination of thought processing ends, and imagination masquerades as reality. Now, certain of engine failure, there is no attempt to explore alternative explanations. Thus, the internally produced movie begins. Stress hormones keep the mind focused on the movie.
Does the person have enough reflective function to say, “Wait, this is just my imagination,” and exit from the theater of the mind? If so, the person’s reflective function is operating like a caregiver who says, “Honey, it’s just a movie.”
If you catch yourself in your own movie, don’t let stress hormones keep you there. Turn to the 5-4-3-2-1 Exercise to intentionally focus on things that are both real and non-threatening long enough to burn off the stress hormones. Once stress hormones are reduced, you can again choose where to focus your attention—perhaps, like the confident flier, back to a magazine. But if reflective function is insufficient, imagination is experienced as though it were reality. This triggers even more stress hormones, locking the movie even more solidly in place.
Frame Five: Heart rate increases; breathing rate goes up; the person feels tense, his mind locked onto this false reality with no key to unlock it. What was imagined, then feared, then expected, arrives. It becomes the only available reality.
Frame Six. The person is deep inside the terror of his or her own movie. Contact with external reality has been lost. The person stares, unfocused, straight ahead.
Frame Seven. The flight attendant asks, “Would you like some orange juice?” If no one has intervened, the person neither hears the words nor is aware of the flight attendant’s presence. The person is away from reality, locked inside the terror movie.
How Another Person Can Intervene during Flight
When an anxious flier goes into her own movie, another person can intervene by intrusion. The fearful flier needs to be taken from the internal movie back to something that is real. To intervene, someone must get directly in the person’s face. He can hold up two or three fingers, and demand, “How many fingers do I have up? How many fingers? How many? Count them! How many fingers do I have up?” The person embroiled in her own movie may say, “Uh . . . Uh . . . Uh . . . t – t – t – t – two.”
The demand to come out of the internal movie may need to be repeated. If so, someone can hold up a different number of fingers and demand an answer again. Or point at an object and say, “What color is that? What color is that?” When the person comes out of the terror movie, she will be shaken, but the spell will have been broken. At least for the moment. If you fly with other people, explain this to them and have them try it with you.
Don’t Go into Your Movie before the Flight
I am afraid the plane is going to crash or be used in a terrorist attack. I know the chances of that happening are small, especially when you compare it to the chances of being in a car accident, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I still feel that it is almost certain the plane will crash while I am on it.
Going into your own movie can happen before your flight. It happens if you unwittingly allow imagination to masquerade as reality. When my wife, Marie, was in art school, she was given an assignment to create an imaginary room. She was then told—using only her imagination—to decorate the room with furniture, lamps, textiles, and so on. So her instructor could see what she had come up with, she was asked to produce sketches of the room as she had imagined it.
As she worked on the drawings, it took less and less effort to bring the room to mind. By the time the drawings were finished, the room and all of its decorations came to mind effortlessly. The room no longer seemed like one she had created in her imagination. It seemed like a room she had previously been in. Why? Through repetition, her imagination of the room had been memorized.
When an anxious flier repeatedly imagines an upcoming flight ending in disaster, the imagination becomes memorized. Once imagination is memorized, it takes on a life of its own. What may have started out as mere possibility becomes probability. As stress hormones begin to rise, probability becomes certainty, and the person “just knows” his flight will crash.
He may be unable to board, or he may board and then get off. If he remains on the flight, he expects disaster at every moment. The mind is spring-loaded, like a mousetrap. The slightest ripple of turbulence can trip the latch and—snap—the person is trapped like a hapless mouse, held captive not in the jaws of a trap but by a nightmare: the plane falling out of the sky, which has been made real in his mind. The example below illustrates what happens when you go into your own movie before a flight:
I have to fly from Chicago to Orlando on September 12th and then back on September 14th. I am now to the point where the anxiety is starting to overwhelm me. I am unable to even see past those two dates. I am convinced I am going to die on either of those dates, so why bother looking forward to the concert tickets I have for later in the month?
When your inner CEO does his ABCs, the first step is to assess—not what he imagines is going on—what is really going on. The second step, build a plan, does involve imagination—not free imagination but disciplined imagination of cause and effect. Your inner CEO may think, “If I carry out this set of actions, I should get results like that.” You imagine what you are going to do, and you imagine that causing certain things to happen. This disciplined imagination of cause and effect sets the stage for the third step: commitment to carry out a plan. And commitment rests the amygdalae and stops the release of stress hormones.
But free imagination, undisciplined by cause and effect, gains nothing. Undisciplined imagination does not reveal the outcome of the flight. Imagination of “what if” does not prepare a person for the flight. It does the opposite. If allowed free range in one’s mind, “what if” replaces “what is.” When imagination becomes reality, flight can become difficult or impossible. The anxious flier is wise to take notice when free imagination begins, and limit it to cause and effect, or stop it by turning to the 5-4-3-2-1 Exercise.