Aerophobia: when the fear of flying is pathological
If the technological advances of the last 100 years have been noticed in any field, that is the one of 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, if money allows us. Passenger planes make that possible.
However, not all people benefit in the same way from the benefits of international flight. People with fear of flying, or aerophobia, can go so far as not to get on the plane in panic and the stress that this type of experience produces.
What is aerophobia?
Aerophobia is a type of phobia in which what produces an intense fear is the situation of being inside a plane that is flying or that could take off. What is frightening is the idea that an air accident can occur, which by its nature is associated with a very high risk of death.
But nevertheless, not all cases of fear of flying are considered a sample 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 quality of life of the person.
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 extends even to planes that for different reasons will not fly, either because there is no scheduled flight or because they are imitations of planes 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 that is based on reasonable fears, but is basically irrational. It occurs despite being aware that the flight safety measures are optimal .
Although the reason understands the security guarantees of the plane, the emotions follow a completely different path, and often exert a great influence on the first one, deforming it and causing almost delirious thoughts to appear.
Symptoms of terror to aircraft
Among the symptoms of aerophobia There are many of those that are typical in the rest of phobias:
- A lot of sweating
- Rise of heart rate and breathing.
- Dry mouth.
- Sickness.
- Headache.
- General discomfort.
Causes of flying phobia
One of the elements that best explains the appearance of aerophobia is the fact that have experienced a traumatic event related to airplanes in the past . This means that you may have experienced an air accident in the first person, or you have seen one, or someone you know has suffered its consequences.
In other cases, aerophobia occurs when certain personality traits interfere with the way in which the situation is managed.
For example, people with a high tendency to control can get very stressed 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 to anxiety means that what happens in the environment is analyzed so that many clues are found that can be interpreted as indications of an accident that is about to happen. All this increases the stress, which in turn leads to the search for false indications of danger.
Treatment
The most frequent treatments for the extreme fear to fly include the gradual exposure to the situation that produces terror . The objective of this strategy is to create a 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 those situations with the extreme fear that they usually produce.
Programs of exposure to the situation that produces fear that are based on virtual reality are very useful, because they are cheap and easy to make by not relying on owners of a real plane, and also allow controlling everything that happens on the flight and end the session at any time.
