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The Cause Of In-Flight Panic
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The Cause Of In-flight Panic
Though we call it "fear of flying" because of Erica Jong's book, the main thing people are concerned about when flying is panic or terror.
Panic is the result of - not a single - but of multiple shots of stress hormones. Normally, thinking of one threat will trigger only one shot of stress hormones and will not cause panic. But if a person has repeatedly considered one threat after another after another, an automatic program can be unknowingly established which will cause panic when any threat in the sequence is brought to mind.
This is based on the "Hebb's Axiom". Donald Hebb became famous as a neurological research due to his discovery in 1949 that neurons in the brain that "fire" at the same time become linked. (The Hebb's Axiom is: "neurons which fire together wire together".)
Though panic is the result of the linking of several threats into a unit, there may be no awareness of this. Often panic develops because a person has not fully developed an ability to do what is called "Reflective Function" (or "mindfulness", or "being meta to ones self", or "having an observing ego"), and to look inside at ones own mental processes.
A person with good Reflective Function rarely develops panic disorder because ongoing awareness of ones own mental processes tends to keep threats from linking together. But the opposite is true when Reflective Function is not well developed or inconsistently used when it is developed.
Why is Reflective Function not well developed? According to psychological theorists Fonagy and Bateman, as the mind of a young child develops, the child needs to recognize that the mind of the mother is separate and has "contents" which are often not the same as the "contents" in the child's mind. Not every mother is well suited to help a developing child reach this recognition fully.
But even if Reflective Function is developed, its use may be avoided. Reflective Function causes us to see things we don't want to see. It leads to awareness of conflict and errors. So, the person who has developed good Reflective Function may be tempted to find ways to keep it from functioning, because when it functions, it causes anxiety due to the awareness it produces.
That, of course, is why so many of us turn to alcohol. Temporarily, at least, it makes Reflective Function inoperative and lets us avoid awareness of conflict and errors.
If you understand that shutting down Reflective Function helps us avoid unhappiness due to conflict awareness, you can easily understand how tempting it is to use alcohol or medication to avoid unwanted feelings.
You can also understand why a physician might recommend use of medication to help you avoid panic, either on the ground or in the air. Though it can help avoid panic on the ground, it is not as good a solution as learning to tolerate conflict so that Reflective Function can operate and grow even more mature.
But when medication is used for anxiety in flight, there are two problems. The anxiety a person feels in flight is not due to conflict. So shutting down Reflective Function does not get rid of flight anxiety. Flight anxiety is about the outcome of the flight. Though only one flight in several million crashes, there is always the anxiety about whether this flight is that one that crashes, at least until back on the ground.
But medication, because it shuts down Reflective Function, causes problems when flying. You need Reflective Function to be able to distinguish what you imagine from what is real, and to distinguish what you fear from what is happening.
Today, I spoke with the mother of a teenager who, when she became frightened during a flight, was given alprazolam. The mother, a keen observer, recognized that it took almost an hour for there to be any change. And when it took effect, her daughter, looking out the window, began seeing creatures in the water below which, though she was imagining them, she believed them to be real.
When medications shut down the ability to distinguish imagination from what is real, it can cause terror. If this teenager could have, instead of imagining creatures in the water, imagined a terrorist on the plane, or the wings falling off that would have caused terror. And that is, indeed, what happens to many people who take medication when flying. They expect relief, and they get the opposite.
Then, in some cases, panicked, they take more medication and alcohol as well. This is dangerous. When sedative medication is mixed with alcohol, it inhibits the regulation of breathing. Breathing rate can slow and cause unconsciousness or death.
Since panic - both on the ground and in-flight - can be controlled by methods which are not risky, use of medication in either case cannot be wisely recommended. A video on preventing in-flight panic is at www.fearofflying.com/store/free-video.shtmlwww.fearofflying.com/store/free-video.shtml
