Ask HN: How to overcome fear of flying?
140 by flyingquestion | 235 comments on Hacker News.
I'm in my early 40's and have traveled a lot during my 20's and 30's. I think I was always a little bit nervous about flying, but never enough to make me really anxious. A few years ago, on a short flight to NYC, the plane went through a sudden turbulence. It was strong enough to send 2 flight attendants to the floor. It probably lasted 10-20 seconds and, during those seconds I thought we were going to crash because I had never experienced turbulence that strong. Since then, I started to develop fear of flying. Even though I have flown since then, each time it has made me more anxious. Now I actively avoid flying. After some introspection, I realized that I'm more afraid of the moments preceding the crash than actually dying. This fear got worse after I had a daughter because now I also picture how the last moments would be if she was by my side on a falling plane. Rationally, I do know how infrequent plane crashes are, and how driving is more dangerous, but at the end I convince myself that the best way to not die on a plane crash is to not get on a plane. Since flying is not required for work, and I've already seen most of the world, it's not hard to convince myself that I don't need to get on a plane. The last few times I've flown, I used a mental trick to help me get through it. I read that the odds of a plane crash is 1 in 1.2 million, so I used a random number generator to generate a number between 1 and 1.2 million, and then tried to guess what that number was. That gave me some relief but didn't completely stop the bad thoughts. How do I overcome my fear of flying?
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