How Do I Overcome My Fear of Flying?

More than 99% of clients report total success in just 1 to 3 sessions

How Do I Overcome My Fear of Flying?

More than likely you are here reading this because you are tired. Tired of trying breathing techniques or taking meds. Tired of avoiding flying and missing out on family gatherings, business deals, or romantic holidays with your partner. Maybe you want to stop being snappy with your partner before a trip because of this bad phobia requiring that you put yourself in a mental state of pretending to be somewhere else other than on a plane. You no longer want to live in fear of a panic attack on the way to the airport. You are tired of trying to suppress that panic feeling that lurks when you know that the plane is about to take off. You want to stop having nightmares every time you plan a trip requiring air travel. You are just plain tired of all of this and want to overcome your fear of flying permanently.

So how does one do that in the fastest and least expensive way possible? Before I answer that question, let me give you some background about what’s going on physically in your body and brain when there is a phobia or trauma. 

Conquer your flying phobia - permanently

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Let’s start with an explanation of what a phobia is. A phobia in its most basic form is a learned physiological response to a specific stimulus. The physiological response is the body’s fear system engaging, otherwise known as the fight-flight-freeze response. This response is what all mammals, including humans, have evolved as a survival response to a perceived threat or danger. For most of our existence, it helped early humans survive in a pre-civilized world as hunter-gatherers for over 100,000 years until the dawn of civilization about 12,000 years ago. Our brains and bodies haven’t changed much since we became “civilized”. We still live with essentially the same brain structure as pre-civilized humans did. That means that our brains are still on the lookout for threats to our safety and to our existence. Our brains are built to detect and avoid things that could be dangerous to us like predators, snakes, bugs, and heights. Those who didn’t have those fears likely didn’t survive long enough to procreate, at least in the pre-civilized and pre-modern world. What underlies fear of flying might be a natural fear of falling and the basic knowledge that a fall from any height higher than our bodies can be deadly. It may also be based on a natural fear of being trapped somewhere without the possibility of immediate exit.  From that point of view, a natural fear about being thousands of feet in the air without exit is understandable.

When a person has begun a fear response, there are certain unique things that occur in the body and the brain. First, the Adrenal gland produces Cortisol and Adrenaline in copious amounts. Adrenaline increases heart rate and blood pressure, which brings more oxygen to the cells and boosts the body’s energy supply. Cortisol regulates metabolism through the body’s sugar levels, also increasing the energy supply, all to allow the individual to fight off a predator or run away from them. Meanwhile, the brain is also changing the ways in which it operates in response to a perceived threat. The Amygdala is a small almond shaped portion of the brain located in the base of the brain. It is often referred to as our “primitive brain” and is responsible for emotional processing as well as for linking memories to emotions, in this way helping with learning. When a threat is perceived, the Amygdala takes over or “hijacks” control of the brain from the Frontal Lobes, which are responsible for rational thinking and decision-making. In this way it suppresses rational thought, resulting in an emotional overreaction with increased likelihood of impulsivity. It is the Amygdala that triggers the Adrenal gland to release the stress hormones of Cortisol and Adrenaline.

If the perceived threat is severe enough, the Amygdala can lock in that stimulus-response pattern such that any time the person is presented with circumstances that appear like the original threatening situation, the Amygdala automatically goes into high gear and again hijacks control of the brain’s response, sending the body into fight-flight-freeze mode. This is the essence of how a person becomes phobic as well as how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is installed.

Since the Amygdala does not have a temporal sense of past, present, or future events, any experience that is recorded there is not forgotten. To the Amygdala, the past, present, and future are all the same. This is the reason it is so difficult for people with phobias or traumas to forget them. To forget something, one must be able to put it in the past. The Amygdala does not have a past. Whatever happens there is always happening right now in the present, even if in reality it happened many years or decades ago. The traumatized or phobic brain’s Amygdala typically remains in a hyper-vigilant state, constantly on the lookout for the feared stimuli, in a continual state of readiness to take over and go into fight-flight-freeze mode.

So now how do we help people unlearn their phobic response to flying? Since the experience mostly lives in the Amygdala, the key is to move the information out of there and back to the Prefrontal Cortex, where executive functions like rational thought, decision-making, and problem-solving occur for daily tasks and can process the information in a non-threatening manner. But this is easier said than done. One of the reasons Cognitive Behavioral Therapy doesn’t work very well for this is that the Amygdala does not operate on cognitive principles like the Prefrontal Cortex does. It doesn’t speak the language of Cognitive Therapy. It knows threat and safety. That’s all! That is also the reason exposure treatments don’t work very well or take a long time if they do work at all. The moment we start exposing the Amygdala to the threatening stimuli, it goes into “red-alert” and the fight-flight-freeze response is activated.

The way the Total Reset Method works is through utilizing a different strategy. One that works in a way that does not trigger the Amygdala to go into fight-flight-freeze mode. The first thing that we do to ensure this is to create a secure internal state for the client and to hold that state through the entire process with a security anchor. For this reason, clients find the treatment comfortable and non-threatening. They are reassured that they are not going to relive or re-experience the bad feelings.

The second stage of the process involves re-coding the memory of the bad experience. Memories are coded via sensory information. A memory typically contains images, sounds, feelings, and sometimes smells and tastes. Bad memories and phobias are locked such that specific images and sounds trigger specific feelings, very much like stimulus-response. With phobias and traumas, the feelings are generally fear or disgust but can also be anger. But memories can be altered. The reason is that the brain does not distinguish between an imagined memory and a “real” memory. The same parts of the brain are utilized when we imagine something as when we recall it.

All that needs to be done is to imagine the memory in some different ways than it is remembered. It’s the same scenario but remembered from a different perspective with different sounds and images.  When that is done several times over through a guided visualization that the client creates for themselves, the memory and specifically the visual and auditory positions of it are so different that they no longer trigger the feeling states that were previously locked to those images. So through changing the coding of the stimulus-response framework that a phobia needs to produce the phobic response, the chain is permanently broken. It is believed that when that happens, the information is reconsolidated from the Amygdala back to the Frontal Lobes of the Prefrontal Cortex, where it can be understood and processed in rational terms and where it can be filed into the past and forgotten.

Because this is so effective at breaking the stimulus-response phobia pattern in the brain, it only takes 2-3 sessions to completely get someone over their phobia.

In summary, the Total Reset Method works by first putting the brain in “safe mode” through an anchoring technique. While the brain is in that “safe mode”, the coding of the traumatic memory is altered, thus breaking the link between the visual image of the bad memory and the traumatic or phobic feeling response, generated by the Amygdala,  that was previously triggered by that image. Once that code is altered, the person can think of the memory and it no longer pulls up the negative feeling state that it once did. When that occurs,

If you are interested in learning more about how the Total Reset Method can change your life by enabling you to attend family events, go on stress-free vacations with your romantic partner, and supercharge your business by allowing you to go anywhere in the world, then use the link below to schedule your free strategy session.

Reach out today to quickly and easily
conquer your flying phobia - permanently.