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Date: 2012.06.20 | Category: Travel | Tags:

After an entire month spent traveling, I am almost home — two hours away from Oakland Airport, to be exact. I am flying over the Rocky Mountains on a Southwest plane which offers wifi. This is the first time I’ve used wifi on a Southwest flight; it’s been rolled out a bit sporadically, so is not available on all flights, but if you can get it, it only costs $5, which is a pretty good deal.

Since leaving SFO on May 18, I have spent almost 30 hours flying on airplanes. Regular readers of this blog know that I do not enjoy air travel; I’ve been open about it here, figuring that a lot of people share this anxiety and perhaps talking about it can be helpful. It’s something I’ve grappled with for years, most likely owing to an extremely turbulent flight from London over a decade ago. I mean, I practically grew up on on airplanes, since we flew so frequently to visit my mom’s family in Sweden. I have never let my phobia stop me from flying — when your closest relatives live a couple thousand miles away, there’s really no other alternative — but I was usually miserable or terrified. I constantly envied my globetrotting friends Bill & Toby Gottfried, who are always jetting off to South Africa or Australia or the U.K. When I asked them once how they cope with flying so much, they looked at me rather oddly — after all, a long flight gives you so much delicious free time to catch up on your reading!

So I feel at least a small bit of pride over having gotten through this trip with pretty much no anxiety whatsoever. We just flew through a bad patch of weather, the kind where the pilot comes over the P.A. to ask the flight attendants to take their seats. That’s serious stuff. A flight attendant just yelled at a guy who had gotten up to use the restroom. Ordinarily, I’d be hyperventilating, freaking out, sweating profusely, and grabbing either the arm rest or Joe’s arm (not an option on this flight as he’s staying on the East Coast for a few days). Instead, I’m — well, I’m not going to say calm, but my anxiety level is at a 4 or 5 instead of a 9 or 10. And on the flights to and from Europe, which were essentially turbulence-free, my anxiety level was at a 1 or 2. I even got through a couple of the shorter flights without my prescription anti-anxiety meds and without drinking anything stronger than tea.

How did I get to this point? I was willing to try anything, short of having someone shoot me with a blow dart full of elephant tranquilizer and wheel me onto the aircraft. (I have never dared to take a sleeping pill before flying, even long-distance, fearing that I wouldn’t wake up in case of an emergency, or that being out cold would prevent me from moving my legs, thus leading to deep vein thrombosis. See, I worry about everything.) I’ve seen two different hypnotherapists, tried various prescription pharmaceuticals, ear seeds, alcohol, buying the most intense thrillers and mystery novels I could find, Sudoku, reading numerous books with titles like Flying Without Fear, tapping, and taking online courses taught by pilots. I got to the point where I was generally OK as long as the flight was smooth, but any hint of turbulence made me want to run screaming down the aisle, and my anticipatory anxiety was so overwhelming before I flew to France last November that I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown.

The one thing that worked better than any of the others was the hypnosis by the first hypnotherapist I consulted — I was fine after that for a year or so, but I felt that I needed a resource I could draw on more regularly (and more cheaply). After spending a few hours browsing online forums, I found a reference to a two-part audio recording by a British hypnotherapist named Glenn Harrold called “Overcome Your Fear of Flying.” There were a bunch of positive reviews on Amazon.com, and it only cost about $15 (a fraction of what it costs for an appointment with a hypnotherapist). I downloaded the MP3 from Audible onto my iPhone, and listened to it through headphones every single night for the month leading up to our trip. (It’s in two parts, so I alternated parts one and two, as suggested.) I usually listened before bed, so I’d estimate that I heard it all the way to the end no more than a half dozen times. Sometimes I was sound asleep after five minutes, despite the excruciatingly bad background music and Harrold’s heavy South London accent.

When I got on my first flight, from SFO to New York’s JFK, I could hear Harrold’s by-now-familiar voice in my head, telling me to breathe innnn through my nose and ouuuut through my mouth. Everything went well and I was able to enjoy my weekend in New York without panicking over my upcoming flight to Heathrow. I haven’t listened to the recording again since I left home, because I felt that it had become somehow imprinted on my brain after all those repetitions. Still, next time I have to fly, just to be on the safe side, I’ll break it out again at least a couple weeks before I leave.

I do think I fare better on shorter segments — I’d rather change planes on the East Coast than take a 12-hour flight straight through from SFO to London or Paris — but who knows, maybe someday, I’ll fulfill my lifelong dream of visiting Australia and New Zealand. The idea seems more plausible now than it did a month ago. (The flying-there part, anyway. The money part will take a while longer.)

Of course, I’m only human. I waited until I got home to post this update, figuring that if I hit “publish” while we were still in the air, the plane would immediately crash into the Sierras, instantly making this The Most Ironic Blog Post Ever. Happily, the final hour of the flight was smooth and uneventful. It’s good to be home.