It’s not unusual to be an Australian and to have a fear of flying. Most people living in here who like to travel will tell you, we’re a long way from anywhere else! In fact, we’re considered one of the most remote countries in the world, all the while being the 6th largest – the shortest distance between capital cities by road (if you don’t count Canberra!) is between Melbourne and Adelaide … and it’s a 725 kilometre trip.
And travelling from Brisbane? Well, have a look at these numbers!
So while many of us love hitching up a caravan, or throwing our tent in the boot and taking off in the car, having a case of serious wanderlust (or needing to go in-person to ‘head office’) usually means hopping on a plane.
According to a survey of 1000 people conducted by a travel insurance company in 2019, 37% of respondents admitted to having a fear of flying. So if you don’t like to fly, you’re not alone. Since January 2023 we have seen roughly 110 individuals who have come to us for hypnosis with a phobia or fear of some kind. We estimate that at least half of those have been for a fear of flying.
A fear of flying manifests in different ways, for different people. Some people say that it’s not the flying so much as it is the claustrophobia – the being in a contained space they can’t leave. Other people say it is the proximity to others; for some, it’s the concept of the height.
Some people have had a bad experience, but many people haven’t – sometimes it’s just an “all of a sudden I was afraid” thing. People talk about how they feel like they’re going to die, before they even leave the ground. Occasionally, people will talk about things like having to travel for a funeral, and the sadness and anxiety they were experiencing became embedded with the idea of flying, so they began to associate air travel with negative emotions. Sometimes people have air sickness, and sometimes people feel nauseated even as they’re approaching the gate … everyone is different, but all of these experiences are real enough to stop people doing what they want to do, or doing what they must do.
Hypnotherapy is a great way of changing this pattern, of ‘unlearning’ this state-bound response. We’ve so many different tools in our toolkit, different techniques and approaches that we can take. It is often something that can be resolved quite quickly – people who use hypnosis to treat their fear of flying report that they develop the ability to be calm, to feel much more relaxed in the lead-up to travel, and many say they end up enjoying the experience of flight because they’re less focused on their anxiousness and more able to focus on the details of what they’re going to do when they get where they’re heading.
Being afraid of flying is normal, and a lot of people have this fear, but also, many people don’t. And a lot of those people fall into the “I used to be afraid but now I’m not” category. You can be of their number.
Even if you are afraid now, whether you have a reason to be or if it is just something conceptual that has developed over time, it doesn’t need to be forever.
InsureandGo Australia. (n.d.). About us. Europ Assistance Australia. https://www.insureandgo.com.au/about-us/
