Ask HN: How to overcome fear of flying?

One thing you can try is, when you get to your seat, talk with a few people around you. Just enough to get a sense if somebody around you flies often. When you get into turbulence, or the fear starts hitting you, look at the face (not awkwardly) of that person. You may even have a pilot sitting near you. If anything, look at the flight attendants faces. Are the flight attendants giving each other looks? Does any of the above people's faces show worry? 99% of the time, you will not see even a slight look of worry in frequent flyers. Just think about that, these people have been through it all. Crazy wind landings, extreme turbulence, bad storms, most everything. If they are not worried, take comfort in that.

If they are worried though... well.. then.. yeah. Also, if you do this, and your daughter is with you, even if you are worried, try and stay calm and not show it. This will comfort your daughter as she is looking to you first.

Edit: One more bonus! If you know someone who flies military aircraft, or know somebody who knows someone, try and talk with them sometime. Take them out for a beer. They'll tell you some things that will make bad turbulence in a commercial jet seem very minor =p Might give you a good relative scale of things.

Learn to meditate and make a commitment to stop avoiding flying if you actually need to fly somewhere. Avoidance just feeds the anxiety. Try to remind yourself of the positives of flying - you can travel far distances in a short period of time and enjoy more time at your destination than you might have otherwise if you took some slower mode of transportation.

Also, I always remind myself that the higher up the plane is from the ground, the longer the pilot has to correct things or come up with a plan to land safely if something does end up happening. This won't help with anxiety about takeoffs and landings, but it may help for the large majority of the flight spent cruising at high altitude.

what was the name of the simulator?

My wife is afraid of flying and uses an app called SkyGuru (I think). It uses your phone's accelerometer to measure turbulence and let you know the plane isn't likely reaching its structural limits and I think it also uses a timer to guess when certain sounds will be heard (landing gear retracting, flaps going up, the ding when the plane reaches 10k feet). She said that it has helped

I also had a fear of flying, one that lasted 3 years. It came on because of 3 terrible flights in a row. It was bad to the point where I could not even think about stepping on a plane.

I ended up missing weddings and job opportunities because the fear of flying was so intense.

I now fly regularly, and without issue. It took a long time, but I've found a few things that worked for me:

1. No caffeine on a flight day. This helps for any anxiety that may start to build for me.

2. Noise cancelling head phones w/ ear plugs. A lot of my anxiety came from paying attention to the sound of engines. Was something odd happening? Keeping the sound of the engine drowned out helped keep my mind off the mechanics of the airplane.

3. Neck pillow / comfortable clothing. Being warm and comfortable lets me fall asleep, completely avoiding any anxiety that may have otherwise come.

4. Timing flights to avoid common storm times. I'm in Florida, and the afternoon thunderstorms can be extreme. If I can, I try to fly out early in the morning, or late at night when the storms tend to not occur.