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| 29 Mar 2008 09:42:50 pm |
 Practical Hints for Air Travellers |
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Here are some practical hints to conclude my article on Fear of Flying -
1. Drink non-carbonated drinks – gases expand at altitude and carbon dioxide may reduce the availability of oxygen. However, if you do hyperventilate, then breathing over a carbonated drink is sensible.
2. Avoid drinking alcohol – alcohol lowers the oxygen in your bloodstream and makes it more difficult for you to replace it. It also has double the effect that it does on the ground – i.e. makes you tipsy at altitude much more quickly than the same amount would at sea level.
3. In addition to carbonated drinks and alcohol, it makes sense to avoid beans and curries that may cause gas to expand in your abdomen. This cannot readily escape and may cause discomfort – not to mention flatulence when gas is trapped in the stomach or large intestine!
4. All airports and planes are now non-smoking of course but it would help to avoid smoking both before and after a flight. This is because carbon monoxide produced from smoking reduces the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood. If you must smoke, try to cut down at least, for peripheral blood vessels are constricted due to this, which lowers oxygen rate even further.
5. Use the Valsalva manoeuvre (close off the air supply to your nose with one hand and blow strongly against the pressure until you feel air passing through your Eustachian tubes – the pathway that connects ears and throat), swallow, yawn, move your lower jaw from side to side or suck a sweet to reduce ‘popping’ sensations in the ears and equalise the pressure between the middle ear and the atmosphere.
You can contact me via www.theconsultingrooms.co.uk or by telephone on +44 (0)1278 784490. Personal consultations are available in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset which is easily accessible from Bristol, Bath and North Somerset, South Wales, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Devon. You will find me very close to the M5 junction 22 at Brent Knoll between Bridgwater and Weston-super-Mare. |
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Category : General Practice
| By : consulting2 |  Comments [0] |  Trackbacks [0] |
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| 16 Mar 2008 04:17:02 pm |
| Fear of Flying - part 4 |
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Fear of Flying continued .........
Uncomfortable body symptoms such as muscle tension, palpitations, sweating, high blood pressure, light-headedness, tingling sensations and nausea may respond to a range of techniques available to the hypnotherapist. To a greater or lesser extent, progressive muscle relaxation, diaphragmatic breathing, autogenic training and biofeedback will help although diaphragmatic breathing will only have a limited influence on high blood pressure and biofeedback is unlikely to help directly with light-headedness, tingling sensations and nausea. These are all techniques that clients can learn to apply for themselves, which has the added advantage of implying a sense of control.
1. Progressive Muscle Relaxation – may lessen the experience of distressing symptoms. There are possible contra-indications for sufferers of arthritis, fibrositis and atherosclerosis.
2. Diaphragmatic Breathing – important during air travel because the air becomes thinner outside the aircraft as you climb away from the earth’s surface. At altitude the cabin is pressurised to the equivalent of 5-6,000 feet above sea level, which means that there is less oxygen than you are probably used to but importantly, there is always plenty for everyone’s needs. You would not ordinarily feel the difference unless you breathed rapidly and shallowly, which is what happens when you get anxious. Diaphragmatic breathing will enable you to move more air with less effort and thereby compensate for the reduced pressure.
3. Autogenic Training – defined as a systematic set of exercises developed in Berlin earlier this century by two physicians, Johannes Schultz and Wolfgang Luthe. Basically self-hypnosis initiated by verbal cues to relax but in contrast to progressive and deep muscle relaxation, it involves no direct instructions to tense and relax muscles.
4. Biofeedback Methods – involve the use of instrumentation to learn voluntary control over the automatic nervous system. There are three basic stages
(i) AWARENESS that the response is maladaptive (i.e. not productive) and the realisation that particular thoughts as well as bodily events can influence this.
(ii) CONTROL of the response using the external signal as indication of progress and
(iii) Learning to TRANSFER the control developed into general life situations as well as travelling by plane.
Biofeedback can be used to validate and monitor progress and to discover whether progressive muscle relaxation exercises, diaphragmatic breathing exercises, autogenic training or cognitive techniques best facilitate the relaxation process.
Of course, regular exercise is an effective way of producing both bodily and mental relaxation. It provides a means of reducing muscle tension, general physiological arousal and helps to empty the mind of stressful preoccupations.
You can contact me via www.theconsultingrooms.co.uk or by telephone on +44 (0)1278 784490. Personal consultations are available in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset which is easily accessible from Bristol, Bath and North Somerset, South Wales, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Devon. You will find me very close to the M5 junction 22 at Brent Knoll between Bridgwater and Weston-super-Mare. |
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Category : General Practice
| By : consulting2 | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 29 Feb 2008 02:59:50 pm |
| Fear of Flying - part 3 |
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Even more about Fear of Flying ......
The shared belief amongst anxious flyers is that something terrible is going to happen over which they have no control. Beck and Emery suggest that three questions need to be posed to facilitate a restructuring of distorted thinking errors. These are
1. What is the evidence upon which your beliefs are based?
2. Is there an alternative way of construing the situation?
3. What are the consequences, EVEN IF they happen?
Peter A Bakal M.D. (A Reframing Approach for Flight Phobia) points out how airlines unintentionally feed distorted thinking and condition people to fear flying by using expressions such as “terminal” for the airport building, “departure lounge” and the “last and final call” for the boarding call. One of the first messages given on the plane is how to cope with a crash and how to use oxygen in case of an emergency. Anxious flyers need little help to create a picture – they arrive at the “terminal”, are asked if the place they are going is their “final destination” and are told this is the “last and final call” for flight ………”terminating at Christchurch airport”.
Bakal’s technique involves reframing the negative suggestions prevalent in flight terminology, Ericksonian metaphor-type suggestion therapy followed by future pacing (visualising a successful flight). He reported excellent results with a series of 21 patients followed up for three years.
There are many stress-reduction and relaxation-type audio CDs available on the market which may help to support a comfortable flight. I produce a range of these myself which you can view at www.helpmyselfhypnosis.com Affirmations may have a useful role to play here too – read ‘Creative Visualization’ by Shakti Gawain and ‘You can Heal Your Life’ by Louise Hay.
You can contact me via www.theconsultingrooms.co.uk or by telephone on +44 (0)1278 784490. Personal consultations are available in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset which is easily accessible from Bristol, Bath and North Somerset, South Wales, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Devon. You will find me very close to the M5 junction 22 at Brent Knoll between Bridgwater and Weston-super-Mare. |
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Category : General Practice
| By : consulting2 | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 09 Feb 2008 10:29:16 am |
| Fear of Flying - part 2 |
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As promised, more about Fear of Flying.......
Anxiety about air travel can be explained as being due to the faulty appraisal of flying as a threat, which in turn produces changes in thoughts, feelings, bodily reactions and behaviour. Symptoms are the body’s way of dealing with threats and danger and behavioural responses involve either fight, flight (escape), freeze or faint as adaptive defences.
Eliciting from the client specific problem areas can be useful in matching symptoms and techniques. Common difficulties involve no or little knowledge about how planes fly, uncomfortable body symptoms and irrational ideas and negative thoughts about flying. Ignorance of the principles of flight is probably the easiest to remedy with such information readily available via the Internet or public library. An excellent book entitled ‘Taking the Fear out of Flying’ by Maurice Yaffe devotes an entire chapter to this subject. Bodily symptoms and worrying thoughts both lend themselves to hypnotherapeutic interventions.
Defusing worrying thoughts
Since people can drift in and out of an hypnotic state quite spontaneously throughout the day and because we know that the presence of an emotion is likely to enhance an hypnotic suggestion, it makes sense to take particular note of what people are saying to themselves – their internal dialogue and the images they create to complement this. Combined with anxious thoughts associated with flying for example, internal dialogue along the lines of “I will ruin my family’s holiday because I am terrified of the flight” is dangerously counter-productive. It is necessary for the client to become aware of their thought processes so that they can challenge and re-frame them.
Automatic thoughts have several distinguishing features from other kinds of cognitions, which make them easier to identity:
· They occur spontaneously
· They are idiosyncratic to each person
· They are difficult to switch off
· They often lead to similar thoughts
· They are believed regardless of how irrational (i.e. bypass conscious critical facilities)
· And they are hardly ever noticed – so are rarely challenged or questioned.
· They are generally formulated in terms of absolute statements and ideas and lead one to expect the worst.
· They tend to appear in abbreviated form – words, phrases and images – and confirm the labelling of flying as a threat dangerous to self or aircraft or both – for example “flight tomorrow ……panicky last time….turbulence…crashing…who would take care of the children?”
Uncritical acceptance of automatic thoughts is an excellent formula for feeding anxiety, for such narrowing of perception excludes any possibility of alternative considerations. This cognitive ‘tunnel vision’ involves selectively attending to only one set of clues (negative ones!) from a much larger range often manifesting in distorted thinking – such as
1. Catastrophising – assuming the worst situation will happen given any possibility for an undesirable outcome (e.g. one change in engine tone means your numbers up).
2. Selective abstraction – that is selecting information that fits in with your preconceived ideas (i.e. picking out reports of aircraft accidents from the newspaper and dismissing the hundreds of successful take-offs and landings that happen every day) to prove the point that flying is dangerous.
3. Polarised thinking – interpreting events in dichotomous terms (e.g. unless a flight can be absolutely guaranteed safe, it must be dangerous.
You can contact me via www.theconsultingrooms.co.uk or by telephone on +44 (0)1278 784490. Personal consultations are available in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset which is easily accessible from Bristol, Bath and North Somerset, South Wales, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Devon. You will find me very close to the M5 junction 22 at Brent Knoll between Bridgwater and Weston-super-Mare. |
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Category : General Practice
| By : consulting2 | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 31 Jan 2008 11:21:15 pm |
| Fear of Flying |
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A couple of things have conspired to make me think I would like to write an article (well, actually it will probably be several articles!) about fear of flying. The first is that I have recently returned from an absolutely fabulous holiday in New Zealand. It involved a great deal of time spent in aeroplanes and made me realise how very fortunate I am to have been able to do that with equanimity. The second is that lots of other people seem now to be thinking about their own holidays and this has driven a steady stream of those who struggle with anxiety about air travel to my practice.
Fear of Flying
Anxiety about air travel is a very common problem. It is estimated that over 30 million people in Britain and the USA want or need to fly but remain either earthbound or terrified in the air. Stewart Agras, an American psychiatrist and his colleagues at the University of Vermont, as far back as 1969 (when air travel was not so accessible) reported on the basis of 325 randomly selected persons that flying is, along with going to the dentist, the fourth most widespread common fear and affects 198 out of 1000 in the population – following snakes (390), heights (307) and storms (211).
In working with clients who struggle with travelling by air, I’ve found it useful to consider
- Is there a generalised anxiety disorder?
- Is there a problem with panic disorders and agoraphobia?
- Are there specific phobias such as being strapped in, sight of deep water, falling, fire, darkness etc.?
- Are there social phobias such as entering a room full of strangers, being told what to do, being judged etc?
These considerations may warrant further exploration, perhaps in the form of hypno-analysis, in order to modify or remove the underlying belief, which predisposes the client to anxiety.
These beliefs centre usually upon issues concerning acceptance, competence or control and represent a particular and persistent way of construing the world. The first relates to fear that you or your behaviour will not be acceptable to others, the second to concerns that you are not equal to others in coping with situations and the third to feelings of being dominated by events out of your control (or being domineered by others). Anxious flyers can often be helped to identify the source of their major concern – it might be a critical parent, teacher or friend (if acceptance is the primary issue); failed tasks in the past (when competence is the concern); or an authoritative parent or relative (when control is the major preoccupation).
Some medical conditions may also require particular precautions and clients presenting with any of the following might be well advised to consult their GP
- Blood disorders
- Cardiovascular problems
- Central nervous system disorders
- Ear, nose and throat problems
- Gastro-intestinal problems
- Metabolic problems
- Respiratory problems
In addition, air travel is contra-indicated for those with infectious diseases, those who are seriously ill and in advanced pregnancy – beyond the 35th week for long international journeys and beyond the 36th week for short journeys.
You can contact me via www.theconsultingrooms.co.uk or by telephone on +44 (0)1278 784490. Personal consultations are available in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset which is easily accessible from Bristol, Bath and North Somerset, South Wales, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Devon. You will find me very close to the M5 junction 22 at Brent Knoll between Bridgwater and Weston-super-Mare. |
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Category : General Practice
| By : consulting2 | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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