Overcome Your Fear of Turbulence With This Visualization
I hate traveling by plane. I know, I know, this is the safest way to travel, cars are much more dangerous, blar de blar, but the moment I am tied and we take off – into the sky , where people should not go … All I can think of is that I am locked in a shimmering silver death machine .
However, with deep breathing and a small dose of benzodiazepines, I’m usually fine when we’re completely in the air. Unless, of course, turbulence begins. That’s when my palms start to sweat, I grab the armrests and gasp with every fall and bump; Even worse, if I’m with someone else and / or with someone at least sympathetically looks at me, I start to cry. Isn’t it sad how we all die? And didn’t we have a good life, which until this moment we hardly appreciated?
I know that turbulence does not cause plane crashes . I know it! I’m damned the life of a hacker, for heaven’s sake. I have to be completely calm when a small jolt distracts me from watching “I, Tonya”. And still.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was on a plane and remembered this Lifehacker tip :
Instead of tense, focus on relaxing your muscles to move with the turbulence, not against it. It can be tricky to do, but it also gives you a reason to think.
I also remembered hearing somewhere that just like you shouldn’t be worried about roughness in the road, you shouldn’t be worried about turbulence on an airplane. So, I have combined these two nuggets of wisdom in the following technique: I pretend I am driving. I imagined my hands holding the steering wheel. (I didn’t hold my hands up because I’m not crazy.) I felt like I was pressing the gas pedal (mentally). I was driving in turbulence, as if we were driving on a dirt road, enjoying the adventure rather than racing through the sky.
And so the turbulence … stopped bothering me. I found myself even kind of enjoying it? It stopped being the thing that was going to kill me, and began to feel like just another part of the trip. Maybe annoying, but not terrifying. I relaxed on bumps and slopes and focused on the (imaginary) road ahead.
I’m still surprised it worked just as well and I look forward to trying it again.