Rumination
Flight phobia can develop by rumination, repeatedly imagining that one’s flight could have ended in disaster. For example, the person may think:
Thought A: I felt the plane fall.
Thought B: What if it kept falling?
Thought C: What if it crashed?
Thought D: What if I’d been killed?
Thought E: I narrowly escaped death.
Thought F: I almost got killed!
When repeated, the sequence of thoughts becomes memorized. Once memorized, it can run on its own, trigger the release of stress hormones, disable reflective function, and cause psychic equivalence to take place, where the imaginary becomes real in your mind. The sequence then becomes the person’s reality. Though never in any danger, the flight is carved in stone in the person’s mind as a near-death experience. This fabrication can produce phobia.
Don’t let rumination create phobia. Break rumination with the 5-4-3-2-1 Exercise. It enables you to shed the accumulated stress hormones and regain the ability to direct what your mind is focused on. Then apply Executive Function. Do your ABCs. Fully assess the situation. Consider the available courses of action. Build a plan of action (or non-action) based on the most likely outcome. Make a decision and commit to it. If unable to complete your ABCs and reach a commitment, shift your focus to some non-flying subject of interest so as to avoid returning to rumination.
If it’s hard for you to recognize this pattern of rumination because, perhaps, it’s so close to home, picture this: Suppose a CEO is expecting a call from his accountant telling him he owes millions in back taxes and is on the verge of bankruptcy. He expects the call to come in at any minute. He tells Amy, his ever-vigilant assistant, to be on the lookout for this call and to let him know the minute it comes in. Following instructions, Amy sits with one hand on the phone and one hand on the intercom. Unbeknownst to Amy, the CEO has decided that if the call comes through, he is going to leap out the window of his fiftieth-story office. The phone rings. It’s the lottery calling to tell the CEO he has won a hundred million dollars. Amy picks up the phone and, at the same moment, presses the intercom. The CEO, expecting the worst, jumps out the window.
While that may be the kind of thing one would expect to see in a Mel Brooks comedy sketch (where it would be funny), that is how some of us live: spring-loaded, expecting disaster at every moment. So whenever Amy calls, we know we are doomed. Because we anticipate the message, we can’t take in the accurate information. So when experiencing turbulence during flight, we “know” the plane is falling out of the sky.
Can a plane fall out of the sky? Can a wing break off? It is tempting to think that if something can happen in the mind, it can happen in the real world. Not so. Planes cannot fall out of the sky and wings cannot break off. The answer is, “No.”