Question: My wife has always been afraid of flying. The last time she flew, around a year and a half ago, there was some turbulence mid-flight and she got hysterical and wasn't able to calm down until we landed (thankfully this was on the way home). We have a family bar mitzvah on the west coast at the end of the month and she is already very apprehensive about going. I have tried to talk with her about the safety of flying but that just gets her upset. I would appreciate any techniques or suggestions that you have to help make this easier.

Flying related anxiety is fairly common. Approximately one out of every five people are apprehensive about flying and between 2 and 10% are afraid to the extent that it is referred to as a phobia. I will briefly summarize cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), the treatment of choice for fear and anxiety. I encourage you to read further on this and hopefully the two of you can follow up on some of these principles.  

CBT involves cognitive restructuring and exposure therapy. Cognitive restructuring is a specialized way to identify one’s fear-provoking thoughts and challenging them. This is then followed by exposure, which involves practicing with what you fear, in order to retrains your brain, which currently is sending a fear signal when there isn’t any danger. The exposure is typically accomplished in a gradual fashion.

Unlike most other fears, flying is a bit difficult as we don’t typically have the resources to practice flying in a graduated manner. Forms of exposure that we typically utilize to slowly make people comfortable with flying are discussions about the flight, reading articles about flying, and preparing for the flight. Youtube videos of flying as well as trips to airports can be very helpful. There are also virtual reality programs where one can experience a computer-generated simulation of flying that feels quite real and thereby accomplish this exposure. Recently, apps have been developed to also accomplish this (e.g., SOAR or VALK).

In addition to the exposing oneself to feared situations, learning relaxation and self-soothing strategies can be helpful. For short-term relief, prescribed benzodiazepines (e.g., Xanax of Klonopin), will help but the downside is that it may interfere with the process of learning how to cope with anxiety.

This article originally appeared in the Yated Neeman