In brief
- Repeated flying can help to reduce anxiety and instill confidence
- Instead of giving into fear and avoiding a potentially stressful situation, you’re taking charge, which can give you a greater sense of control and agency
- Many people find that the more they fly, the less they experience anxiety
The benefits of booking another flight
After a stressful flight, many nervous flyers may say they’re never flying again – but avoiding flying can actually exacerbate the fear.
Why? To the anxious brain, avoidance may seem a sensible solution. But research and clinical experience suggest that flying again sooner, rather than later, is one of the most effective ways to reduce flight anxiety in the long term.
We’re not trying to force you to fly, but will explain what the science says about anxiety and why carefully timed re-exposure helps the brain to unlearn fear and restore some calm.
Why avoidance feels helpful (but isn’t)
When you avoid flying after a fearful experience, your brain receives a powerful message that flying is dangerous, and avoiding it kept me safe.
In the short term, this avoidance reduces anxiety. However, in the long term, it teaches the brain that flying is something to be afraid of. This can happen even if you’re rationally aware of how safe flying is.
Psychologists and therapists call this negative reinforcement.
The relief you feel from avoiding the stressful experience (like cancelling or postponing a flight) reinforces the fear response. This can make the next flight feel even more threatening.
By avoiding flying, you can unintentionally fuel your fear and make anxiety grow. That’s why booking another flight relatively soon after is a way to combat this.
Anxiety is learned, and it can be unlearned
Fear of flying (or aviophobia, if we give it the clinical name) is a learned response created by the brain’s threat system.
When you experience anxiety on a flight, your brain links flying with fear. You may experience physical symptoms of stress and panic. The memory can be stored and embedded, meaning you believe flying is something that should be avoided.
This fear isn’t rational, because the brain is in survival mode. (That’s why reading aviation safety statistics, no matter how amazing, don’t work for many anxious flyers.)
The brain is not interested in statistics or reassurance. It’s focused on survival and it seeks to avoid situations that could expose you to risks.
Once you recognise that you’re afraid of flying and accept it – and not try to avoid it – you can find ways to tackle it.
When the brain repeatedly experiences a feared situation (like flying) without the expected catastrophe occurring, the fear response gradually weakens.
Or, to put it another way, every time you experience a flight and land safely, you’re providing reassurance to your brain that flying is safe.
This is why flying again quickly after a safe flight is a positive thing. Doing so interrupts (or breaks, depending on the length of avoidance) the negative thought spiral before it becomes deeply ingrained.
Why anxiety reduces through repetition
The technique is known as exposure therapy and is a key part of several clinical approaches to helping people cope with fear of flying, including CBT.
Exposure therapy can be an effective way to treat a whole range of fears and phobias. The structured process helps the brain to learn through experience that the feared situation is survivable.
Flying again soon after a difficult or stressful flight helps prevent the fearful memories from becoming exaggerated or embedded.
If avoidance stretches on for years, the brain is more likely to treat flying as an unresolved threat. The sooner you fly, the sooner you can break this loop.
Anxiety is based on imperfect information. When you fly again and the plane lands safely, the prediction is proven wrong. Even if anxiety during the flight is intense, the outcome (a safe landing) effectively contradicts the fear.
Exposure therapy works over time to challenge this mismatch between expectation and reality. Each flight should help to build confidence, and reduce fear.
Experts in anxiety call this inhibitory learning.
While it’s unlikely to remove the fear of flying entirely, safe and successful flights help the brain to make new associations that challenge (and hopefully replace) the old, negative ones.
In time, the brain can learn that flying can be experienced and survived. You may never learn to love it, but you can live with it.
Progress may not always be linear, either. Some flights may feel easier than others, and that’s OK. Over time, you should feel less anxious overall.
Train your brain that discomfort does not mean danger
One of the biggest barriers to flying again is the fear of physical sensations you may experience during periods of high anxiety. These can be frightening, especially if you’ve experienced something like a panic attack while flying.
These sensations are caused when we enter into the fight-or-flight response. While these physical and psychological symptoms are uncomfortable, they’re not harmful.
Importantly, these sensations can’t be maintained indefinitely (which is why anxious flyers often find long-haul flights easier to manage) and they can’t escalate. Anxiety rises, peaks, and falls – and this happens even if you do nothing to stop it. Your body simply can’t maintain such a high level of stress.
Research into panic and anxiety consistently shows that fear symptoms are self-limiting and will often reduce within minutes. It’s not a permanent state of panic, but a peak and then release.
The human body can’t sustain a state of extreme stress for long periods. Understanding this can help you manage with peaks of stress and help you avoid anxiety tipping into panic. It won’t last forever.
Should I wait until I feel confident before flying again?
As the evidence shows, confidence comes through experience. While many nervous flyers believe they should wait until they feel confident before flying again, the truth is that confidence comes from flying.
Exposure techniques work best when it happens while the fearful memory is still active but manageable, research shows.
Clinical guidance indicates that gradual exposure is most effective when avoidance is reduced early. This happens before fear becomes habitual and avoidance becomes acceptance.
This doesn’t mean rushing to book a flight or forcing yourself to fly.
Instead, it means choosing a next step that feels challenging but achievable. If your anxiety is strong, this could include searching for flights, visiting an airport or even visualising yourself on a plane.
The purpose is to allow the anxiety to be present without letting it dictate or define your behaviour.
If you need to, seek professional support
Fear of flying can be debilitating and if you feel it’s impacting your life, then seek professional support. Professional therapy, including CBT, has proven to be highly successful at helping fearful flyers tackle their phobias (as well as treating other anxiety disorders).
We’re not medical experts and can’t prescribe a treatment for you.
Exposure, CBT and other therapeutic approaches focus on changing the relationship with fear rather than eliminating it entirely. This can help you reframe your relationship with flying, with lifelong positive impacts.
Seeking support for fear of flying isn’t an admission of failure. If your fear of flying is impacting your life, it’s often the most effective way to break the cycle of avoidance and regain freedom to travel.
Don’t let anxiety rob you of new experiences
Avoiding flying won’t help you overcome your fears, that’s the view of experts. It’s also likely to be the experience of anyone who has lived with aviophobia. Avoiding flying teaches the brain to fear flying even more, creating a vicious circle.
Flying again as soon as you can can help to reframe anxiety. While anxiety may still appear, each flight should help to reduce its intensity and influence.
If you do decide to fly, you can access reassurance tools by visiting our Help Desk and by downloading our Calm Flight Toolkit.
Please share this article with anyone who might benefit from it.
FAQs
While avoiding flying may provide short-term relief, it’s a form of negative reinforcement that teaches your brain flying is something to be afraid of. Avoiding flying reinforces the fear response, making the next potential flight feel even more threatening. It can create a vicious circle that can make your flying anxiety even harder to deal with.
Yes, research and clinical experience suggest that flying again sooner rather than later is one of the most effective long-term ways to reduce flight anxiety. Flying anxiety is a learned response, and flying again quickly after a safe flight interrupts the negative thought spiral before it becomes a part of your thinking.
No, the evidence consistently shows that confidence comes through experience, not waiting. Gradual exposure to anxiety is most effective when avoidance is reduced early, before fear becomes habitual. Each successful trip helps retrain your brain to understand that flying is safe. This process may take some time and it’s not always linear, but over time, you’ll make positive progress towards dealing with your fear of flying.