Turbulence

Ever since a young age, I have spent a lot of time on planes.

My Mum and Dad met when they were crew members of the same airline.

I think I took my first flight alone when I was 10 years old. Maybe younger.

At the time of writing this, I'm 37, and one thing still bothers me when flying.

Turbulence.

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In my experience, people who fly fall into one of two camps on this topic.

Either you're afraid of turbulence or it doesn't bother you at all.

I am very much in the first camp.

In this post, I want to share how I used to respond during turbulence, and how some recent events have changed my approach.

First, let me tell you what goes through my mind during turbulence.

It's pretty simple: The plane is going to fall out of the sky and we're all going to plummet to our deaths.

It's the eventual meeting place for phobias of all kinds.

The rational part of my brain knows that this is an extremely, extremely unlikely scenario. It knows that I am much safer in the sky than in a car on the road.

But the rational part of my brain isn't really very active during turbulence.

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Whether it's the up-and-down kind or side-to-side kind or the mix-of-both kind, I have danced with turbulence so much that I can almost sense its nature.

Regardless of the type, my response during turbulence was always the same.

Grip on to everything as tightly as possible.

Ideally, four points of contact. This means, both legs squeezing the sides of the seat in front of me, and both arms squeezing against the armrests of my own seat.

Essentially, hold on for dear life.

Literally.

The one thing that used to help me a lot during turbulence was being able to look outside and see a horizon.

But ever since we had kids and I started drinking the appropriate amount of water one should drink on long flights, I have traded the precious window seat for a practical aisle one.

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Before I tell you what changed recently, let's take a tiny detour into what turbulence means metaphorically.

It's obvious right?

Turbulence is a very real loss of control.

Given this, my response may seem almost justified: Hold on tightly and try to control as much as I possibly can.

Mostly, my limbs and what they squeeze against, in this case.

If you happen to be in the same camp as me when it comes to turbulence, let me tell you what I've learned about this hold-on-tight approach.

Ironically, you actually feel more of the turbulence when you do this.

It's almost like you're attached to the plane, so when it moves, you move almost instantly with it.

My response to deal with the situation, was actually making the situation feel much worse.

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At the time of writing this, I've been on eight flights in the span of 20 days, and I have two more coming up in the next seven days.

The shortest of these flights was 3.5 hours and the longest was a little over 14 hours.

I've had a lot of repetitions trying to deal with turbulence, in a relatively short period of time.

The very last flight I took prior to writing this, was 6.5 hours long.

During this flight, there was a two-hour period of non-stop turbulence.

During this two-hour period, the approach I had been using for my entire turbulence-fearing life, finally started to change.

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At first, the change was borne out of pure exhaustion.

It's really hard to squeeze tightly to something with all your limbs for a long time.

So after a while—I can't remember exactly how long—I just sort of, gave up.

I went limp.

I let go of trying to control everything.

Besides the obvious metaphorical insight here, let me tell you what this felt like physically.

Recall from before, when I told you that holding on tightly actually makes you feel everything immediately?

When you're loose, there's a delay in feeling the turbulence.

The delay isn't very long, perhaps a second or less, but it's significant.

It was significant enough for me to force myself to keep trying it—as I type this out, I realize the irony in forcing yourself to stay loose.

With time, it got easier to do.

My hands were still a bit clammy, because I think my brain was struggling with the reality of what I was asking my body to do, but slowly, my brain started listening too.

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Is my fear gone?

Most definitely not.

At best, I've found a better approach to managing it.

The turbulence we experience in our lives isn't limited to what we feel on planes.

If you're someone who holds on tightly, try even just once, to be loose.

It may help.