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Key points
- When planning a flight, anxious fliers may be unable to imagine arriving at their destination.
- Anxiety is reduced when we mentally span the whole process, from planning to flying to arriving.
A client emailed, "I used to worry about what would happen to the plane. I would get on the plane and would only imagine crashing. Now I imagine the things I’m going to do, who I am going to see, et cetera."
We all know the phrase "light at the end of the tunnel." Deep in a tunnel, there is nothing to see. Intellectually, we know the exit will eventually come into view. But emotionally, when there is only blackness around us, it seems like the blackness will never end.
When a child is very young child, if a toy is taken from the child and put under a blanket, the child will not lift the blanket and look for the toy. Young children, Piaget said, lack "object permanence." When a toy is not in view, it seemingly doesn't exist. Beginning around 18 and 24 months, the child can produce an internal representation of the toy. Though the toy is out of sight, the toy is still in mind. The child will lift the blanket and retrieve the toy.
At this point, the child cannot understand that the objects in the mind's eye are representational. The child, instead, believes the representational object and the real object are one thing. British psychological theorist Peter Fonagy calls this state "psychic equivalence." The psyche is the mind. Equivalent means things are the same. In this case the two things that are experienced as one thing are the contents of the mind and the contents of the world. Then, at around the age of three, the child makes an amazing discovery: some of the things in his mind do not exist in the physical world. This discovery - that the mental world and the physical world may be disconnected - is delightful because it opens up the world of pretend!
But that is not the end of the story. Fast forward to adulthood. You are cruising on an airliner. Turbulence begins. Downward motions - interpreted by your amygdala as falling - cause it to release stress hormones. Your amygdala is mistaken. The plane is not falling. The plane is moving forward at 550 MPH. At such a high forward-speed, downward motion of a mere fraction of an inch may feel like a hundred feet. If your parasympathetic nervous system activates as it should, it squelches the alarm and returns you to a calm state. If your parasympathetic does not activate, you are left with a feeling of alarm that will last until the stress hormones burn off, which takes about 90 seconds. But in turbulence, before those stress hormones can burn off, they are replaced with more stress hormones.
As the stress hormones build up, you may unknowingly slip into psychic equivalence, the state that two to three-year-olds live in. Your mental representation that the plane is falling a hundred feet again and again becomes your reality. You believe you are doomed. Meanwhile, the pilots in the cockpit experience the flight as boring.
Turbulence is completely safe if you wear your seat belt. Yet, turbulence can cause panic if psychic equivalence makes a person believe their plane is falling out of the sky. A person who has a benign heart irregularity can panic if psychic equivalence makes them believe they are having a heart attack. The blackness of a tunnel can cause panic if psychic equivalence makes it seem nothing but blackness exists anywhere.
Similarly, when flying in clouds where all is whiteness - or at night when all is blackness - we can lose our mental representation of the earth. The earth, like the toy under the blanket, no longer seems to exist. If we lack emotional object permanence, flying in clouds or at night can cause anxiety or panic.
When confident fliers board a plane they have a mental representation of their arrival. Some anxious fliers lack that. When they board, their thinking goes only as far as being on the plane. But when the plane starts to descend everything changes: they envision themselves on the ground. Their basic form of control - being able to approach what is interesting and distance from what is threatening - is represented again in their mind.
The idea that anxiety is reduced by having the entire process in mind isn't new. Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut had a concept called a tension arc. Think of a rope bridge spanning a chasm. We stand at one end and want go across to the other side. If we can see the bridge is complete, we probably can muster the courage to go across and reach our goal. But if there is fog that keeps us from seeing the entire bridge, maybe not.
Here in Connecticut, near New Haven, there is a tunnel that is so short that when you enter it, you can see the light at the far end of the tunnel. This particular tunnel causes no stress. There is always light at the end of the tunnel. What I propose is this. When you board your plane, make sure you mentally picture all three phases of flight: 1. takeoff and climb; 2. cruise; 3. descent and landing. And add to that what you are going to do at your destination.
As you board, in your mind's eye, include the light at the end of the tunnel.
