General Anxiety Disorder - Flying.

I spend much of my time in what I like to call 'a tizz'. I get into a tizz so often, it can be quite debilitating. I have been known to be in a constant tizz for a period of time, only to cause myself some rather interesting side effects. Once, I ended up with some relatively serious health issues, where my stomach just stopped working.

Due to my lack of effective self-analysis I never really noticed anything wrong with that sick feeling in my stomach, or the constant butterflies, or the heat up the back of my neck throughout my teenage years and early 20s. I kind of thought it was normal and then started smoking and drinking - and hey presto, I felt nothing except hung-over for the next 10 years of my life (which also clearly contributed to stomach giving up the ghost on me).

Recently, I have self diagnosed myself, thanks to Google, as having some sort of General Anxiety Disorder, GAD.

GAD , for me, is often displayed in different ways. The first, probably most interesting thing I get overly, outrageously anxious about, is flying.

When I have to catch a plane, I check the weather forecast at least 100 times before getting on the flight. Since the development of the weather app on my iphone, life has been much easier. Prior to that there was only the weather channel.  If there's an expected storm, my body starts to shake uncontrollably (oh yes, that one time we flew back from Melbourne into a severe electrical storm in Brisbane was the closest I have come to death - either from dropping out of the sky from severe turbulence or suffering from some form of Shaken Adult Syndrome).

I also check to see who the other people on the flight are, if they look like nice, normal, decent people, who the universe wouldn't want to fall out of the sky, or if they are completely insane people who the universe wouldn't miss. Clearly, in my mind, Darwin controls the plane's engines.

I ensure I watch the safety instructions closely. Logically I know that when I fly across Australia, all that is beneath me is red desert, so some small piece of yellow plastic, half filled with air, is not going to enable me soar, like a bird, gently to Earth only to land of a bed of feathers.  Likewise, I know we are not sliding, down the slippery dip to Earth. We will be, instead, plummeting at a rapid rate, spinning uncontrollably, all the while I am gripping my long suffering husband's (LSH) hand telling him how much I love him, and that I am sorry for all the moments that we've had that weren't  picture perfect.


On take off and landing my imagination goes into negative overdrive. I imagine the nose of the plane tipping towards to tarmac, it catching on the bitumen, ripping off and sending a fire ball tearing through the cabin setting us all alight, leaving us to struggle to free ourselves from our seats. As we twist from left to right all we see are our loved ones burning and writhing in agony too, until the bitter end, when the cabin screeches across the tarmac and ploughs into the brick wall, shattering the cabin and our burning bodies into a million pieces.

Hoorah.


When LSH flies on his own, I ask him to call me before he gets on the plane so that I can tell him I love him. I also ask him to call/text me when he lands so that I know he's survived the flight from Brisbane to Sydney, a whopping 1 hour. Of course LSH forgets to do this regularly, because he sometimes doesn't like to play along with my neurosis and goes along his casual, easy-going way, leaving me, usually at work, searching the internet for news of a Qantas plane going down. LSH eventually responds to my 700 text messages after his meetings have finished and I am relieved to hear his voice, only to realise that he has to fly back that night to come home - where we repeat the process all over again. I am sure this drove him nuts when he was flying every single week. But he married me anyway.


A part of my brain allows me to realise that I am being ridiculous. LSH always trys to rationalise with me about my fear and how silly I am being. Of course telling me that more people die in car accidents each year than in plane crashes, doesn't help me. My fear and associated anxiety, aren't controlled by logic. As I mention to LSH, if logic and reason controlled fear, he wouldn't be scared of snakes.

Valium might be the only real reasonable answer.


I do fly, but clearly hate every minute of it. My stomach is in knots. I am on constant high alert for turbulence. Once we encounter some, I try to analyse the flight attendants' faces, looking for a fleeting moment of fear or panic in their eyes. Of course, my long-haul flights have been about 24 hours of essentially, pure adrenalin. The last time, I remember being overjoyed with my being able to finally afford an airline with decent in-flight entertainment. I was glued to my private movie screen and planned out what I was going to watch for the next day of my life. Every time I became engrossed in a film and took my mind off the fact that I was in the air, I felt the plane shake, bringing my thoughts abruptly back to being suspended in a heavy piece of metal, and sitting on top of highly flammable liquid, 35,000 ft in the air and this was no time to be enjoying oneself. In fact I needed to keep a vigilant watch for turbulence.  Why does that help me? I don't know. I guess, I also don't want to tempt fate. You see, not only am I highly anxious, I have an Asian mother, who has indoctrinated ridiculous amounts of superstition into my brain. So avoiding tempting fate and touching wood are part of my everyday life. I will even touch wood if I have had a thought about something that might be interpreted as tempting fate. So, perhaps enjoying a flight might be seen by fate as my flouting the system and therefore sending immediate retribution. Thank goodness I'm not religious. If I had Revelations to deal with I would have shut down years ago.