Aerophobia: When The Fear Of Flying Is Pathological
If the technological advances of the last 100 years have been noticeable in any area, it is that of interconnection and globalization. Nowadays we can be on the other side of the planet in a matter of hours, and we can even live in two countries at the same time, if money allows it. Passenger airplanes make that possible.
However, not all people benefit in the same way from the benefits of international flights. People with fear of flying, or aerophobia, can go to the extreme of not getting on the plane out of panic. and the stress that these types of experiences produce.
Aerophobia is a type of phobia in which what produces intense fear is the situation of seeing yourself inside a plane that is flying or that could take off. What is terrifying 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. As in almost everything, fears have different degrees of intensity, and aerophobia will only exist as such if the panic is so intense that it is a limiting element in the person’s quality of life.
That is why although it is estimated that approximately 25% of people are afraid of flying, among them the proportion of people with aerophobia would barely reach 10%.
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 occurs in all types of phobias, this fear of flying is not based on a feeling of danger that is based on reasonable fears, but is basically irrational. It occurs despite being aware that flight safety measures are optimal.
Although reason understands the safety guarantees of the plane, emotions follow a completely different path, and often exert a great influence on the first, distorting it and causing almost delirious thoughts to appear.
The symptoms of terror of airplanes
Among the symptoms of aerophobia There are many of those that are typical in the rest of the phobias:
Causes of phobia of flying
One of the elements that best explains the appearance of aerophobia is the fact that having experienced a traumatic event related to airplanes in the past. This means that you may have experienced a plane crash firsthand, or seen one, or someone you know suffered its consequences.
In other cases, aerophobia appears when certain personality traits interfere with the way the situation is handled.
For example, people with a high tendency to control can feel a lot of stress at times when they have no control over what happens, and flights on board an airplane are one of those contexts.
In the same way, a general propensity for anxiety causes us to analyze what is happening in the environment in such a way that we find many clues that can be interpreted as signs of an accident that is about to happen. All of this increases stress, which in turn causes us to continue looking for false signs of danger.
The most common treatments for extreme fear of flying include gradual exposure to the terrifying situation.. The objective of this strategy is to create progressive desensitization.
In this way, by accompanying a person to a real or virtual plane and letting them make small progress, the person learns to stop associating these situations with the extreme fear that they usually produce.
Exposure programs to the situation that produces fear that are based on virtual reality are very useful, because they are cheap and easy to carry out as they do not depend on owners of a real airplane, and they also allow you to control everything that happens in the flight and End the session at any time.
