How I stopped worrying and learned to love flying
Heart beating fast. The lights feel too bright and you can’t sit still. That uncanny feeling of dread. The flight is only beginning.
For many, taking a plane is a dull part of modern life. For some, however, it’s a source of intense discomfort, a paralyzing barrier.
Aviophobia, or fear of flying, is very common – some estimates say that up to 40% of the general population experiences some form of flight anxiety. On one hand, it’s quite rational: after all, who can really say that humans were made for flying at 40,000 feet? But on the other hand, it just doesn’t match the absence of actual risk that applies when taking a flight. Most of us will know that flying is the safest mode of transportation by far and it keeps getting safer every year.
I’ve known all of this for a long time, but it never helped me. I couldn’t stop myself from worrying every time I went on a flight. When you’re in the thick of it, there’s a part of your brain that takes over which doesn’t care about facts and statistics: the fight-or-flight response. No matter how much you try to reassure yourself, this ancient brain mechanism will not care.
This worry constantly clashed with my love of travelling and seeing new places. A while ago, I decided that enough was enough – I needed to rid myself of this issue. Now, I love flying and one day I might even try to get a pilot’s license. Here’s how I did it and what I learned during the process.
Knowledge is power
Understandably, you wouldn’t want to learn more about something that scares you. It seems counterintuitive: why would I want to spend more time on a topic that makes me uncomfortable? But this is why it’s precisely what we have to do. Why? Because:
It’s not the activity itself that scares us, but the fear of the unknown.
Think about flying itself for a moment. It’s not exactly a rollercoaster: it’s less bumpy than a train or a car, and you can tell by just looking at your cup of water barely moving while you’re flying. For me, it wasn’t the physical experience of flying that felt worrying — it’s the endless barrage of thoughts about what might happen, the feeling of not being in control of it all. Every sound seems unusual, every mechanism of the plane feels unknown.
I realized that this chasm of knowledge was exponentially increasing the amount of uneasy thoughts I’d have. So I resolved to learn all I could about planes. This was painful at first because, as mentioned, it’s uncomfortable to learn about a topic you’d rather avoid. But as I kept scouring pre-GPT Google, something began becoming clearer to me: aviation is actually really interesting. It’s one of the most amazing inventions ever created, and the system required to keep modern aviation running smoothly every day is frankly unbelievable. I found myself effortlessly interested in this topic and that feeling also helped me view it as something interesting, not daunting.
I wouldn’t say I know more about planes than the average plane geek does, but it feels calming to be able to understand slighly more about what is actually happening while I’m flying. There are less unknowns, and that leaves the primitive part of our brains less likely to spiral into worry.
Fear and excitement are two sides of the same coin
When I began trying to overcome this fear, my goal was to become indifferent to flying. I thought this is what it meant to beat an anxiety: to be zen about it, unaffected by what used to control you. This was a mistake.
Anxiety is not meant to be suppressed. It’s meant to be understood, and channeled into a more positive emotion.
As my lovely fiancée brought to my attention, the research is clear on one thing: fear and excitement share the same physiological reaction. They are both heightened states of awareness with increased heartbeat and secretion of adrenaline: in short, they both get you worked up. The main difference is that one is a positive channeling of this state, whereas the other is detrimental. I think most of us can also agree that, counterintuitively, trying to “control” our thoughts like a stern boss usually makes them grow. So, instead of trying to mute our emotions, what if we welcomed them as part of who we are—and guided them toward something more meaningful?
I became very interested in the topic of aviation, and this helped me replace my negative heightened state with a more positive one. I began to view the planes as marvels of engineering, which excited me in the same way that I’d be excited to ride a rollercoaster or take a bullet train. This was not a feeling of calm but rather a viscerally active, yet positive, feeling that replaced my worries. I was more grateful than anything to be living in a time where I could use something so cool.
Then after a while, as happens to all viscerally positive feelings, repetition mellowed it down into a quietly content feeling. If you’re not an engineering nerd like me, you don’t have to get into planes themselves: you could be excited about the prospect of seeing family or a new country. Regardless, if you can stop trying to feel calm and gently channel your excited energy from negative thoughts to positive, I think this is a good state to be in.
Why I wouldn’t change my journey
We tend to think of anxieties as burdens, painfully negative side effects of life. In many ways, they are really annoying and sometimes crippling. However, I wouldn’t change my experience even if I could.
In the process of fighting anxiety, you learn a lot about yourself. You learn what’s effective for you and what isn’t, what makes you tick. You come out with a better understanding of who you are as a person, and that’s valuable.
If I was to sum it up, I would say: find something that excites you about flying. But don’t try to suppress your old feelings and manufacture a new feeling — this will cause your mind to rebel like a child that was told what to do. Going from an excited state to a calm state is very hard even for the most seasoned monks, but slightly shifting your excited emotion towards something more positive is a lateral shift that your mind will like much more.
