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We’re pleased to announce that Volumes 1 2 and 3 of Flying without Fear are now available.

Flying withoutFear  Volume 1  The Facts

£11.99 each inc p & packing

Hello again and welcome to the third newsletter  from flyingwithoutfear.com. You’ll notice that we are now  using the flyingwithoutfear.com url  again. Search engines did not find us as easily under anxiousflyers…so we’re back home agin.

In the last letter we outlined your ‘Charter’ in other words the things that you can reasonably expect in the way others behave towards you and the way you should think about yourself on your journey to overcome your fear. Now we’re going to look briefly at some of the causes of a fear of flying.

I hope that you have looked into the site a little more and are arming yourself with information about the whole subject of the fear of flying. You’ll be learning to change your behaviours so you’ll need to back that up with knowledge.

If you haven’t seen the success stories on the site, this might be a good time to see how successful other people have been.

1. A bad flight
2. A fear of loss of control
3. Claustrophobia
4. A significant life event

Many people report that after a particularly bad in flight experience, usually turbulence or a Go Around that they have been put off flying for ever.  After this they seem to be attracted to media reports that support their view that flying is dangerous. Unfortunately once this negative impression has been formed it’s almost impossible to remove it without proper help. On our New Audio Course I suggest that it’s like a virus on the hard drive of your mind and you need some good anti-virus software to get rid of it.

One of the characteristics of someone with a fear of flying is that their language is very emotional. Their planes didn’t just descend they invariably plummeted. Their imaginations suggest things that ought to have happened like, the lights went out when any rational study would make that impossibility. Curiously however, despite most  fearful flyers admitting to their lack of knowledge of flying (because of their fear) they always seem to know how far the plane dropped and whether it was going too fast or nearly stalling. None of these things are measurable from a passenger point of view in any case. But it does show how our minds work. We gather information, distort if if necessary and make it fit our beliefs.

One of the ways of lessening the influence of these accounts is to remove the emotive language and replace it with an account as near to the truth as possible. It is much more useful to say that the aircraft seemed to descend and seemed to be going quickly because this makes you ask the question “Well how can I be sure of that?”  It is the starting point of changing the thoughts (CBT). Emotional thoughts cause emotive language which makes you behave in an emotional way. Thought re-structuring needs rational descriptions and rational thoughts and these will lead to more positive behaviours.

May I suggest that if there is something which has  happened in the past that makes you feel anxious that you take a little time out and write two  accounts of it,  one in the way that you felt about what happened and another in rational and factual language.

For many successful people another major cause of a fear of flying is the apparent loss of control. The problem with being limited by this viewpoint is that you can never be in a position of being good enough to be in control. To be as good as the crew operating the plane you’d have to be one of the crew...which would mean a full time job in the industry, so you can’t be a high powered person wanting to be in control, and be a crew member because there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Our advice is to be in control of the things that are possible. Choose the airline you want to fly with, choose the time of the flight, choose your seat and choose what time you arrive at the airport.  Control the controllable and see the rest as part of the procedure.

Claustrophobia is one of the major reasons for a fear of flying, and like many other physical symptoms can often be controlled with diaphragmatic breathing. There is more help available on the site for this.

And finally for this letter, another major cause of a fear of flying is a significant life event, falling in love, having a family, an accident or illness and of course bereavement. All these things make us aware of our vulnerability and heighten our sense of risk, danger, helplessness and loss.  There is more information on the site about all these subjects

To conclude. It’s not possible to cover every reason and cause of a fear of flying, quite often there are clusters of events or symptoms that combine and manifest themselves as a fear of flying and since the media feeds the fear element in us at every opportunity it can be no wonder that a fear of flying is so high upon the list of fears in our modern society.

But remember it is possible to overcome a fear of flying regardless of cause and severity. Be confident that you can succeed. Check out the Shop

Next week we’ll look at the next step in overcoming your fear of flying.

LINKS TO THE SITE           INFORMATION INSTANT HELP FEAR EXPLAINED