I was the one who drove everywhere
I’m not exaggerating this. I’d take a car, a train, a ferry — anything — across a whole continent to avoid a two-hour flight. My friends still tease me about it. So if you’re reading this white-knuckled at a departure gate, I’m not writing from the outside. I’ve sat where you’re sitting.
You can’t argue a fear out of the sky
The instinct is to reason with it — the statistics, the odds, the engineering. It never worked for me, and there’s a reason. Fear of flying isn’t about this moment; the plane you’re on is, right now, completely fine. It’s about an imagined future — the drop, the crash, the thing that hasn’t happened and almost certainly won’t. Your mind runs that film on a loop, and telling it to stop just adds another frame.
What the count actually does
Formula doesn’t fight the fear. It gives your attention a different, more demanding job — one that only exists in the present. You breathe, you count, you carry a sound and a picture, all in real time. And here’s the thing that changed flying for me completely: the counting is proof of now. As long as I’m breathing and counting, I am alive, and I am okay — this breath, this second. The turbulence can do whatever it likes. This breath is fine. Then the next one. I’m not in the imagined crash; I’m in the count, and in the count nothing bad is happening.
As long as I’m breathing and counting, I’m okay — not in some future, but right now, in this breath. That’s all flying ever asks of you: get through this breath.
From coward to confident
It didn’t happen in one flight. But cycle by cycle, flight by flight, the fear lost its grip — because I’d proven to myself, over and over, at altitude, in real turbulence, that I could stay in the present and be fine. Now I fly all over the place without a second thought. Someone who found me through this work had the same fear; I taught him the formula, and he flies everywhere now. One person, one story — but it’s real, and it’s why I wanted this in writing.
How to use it on a plane
Take your seat. Eyes open or closed, it doesn’t matter. Start a cycle — seven groups of seven breaths, counting each one, carrying the sound. When you reach the end, start another. Through the safety demo, through takeoff, through the bumps. You’re not trying to feel brave. You’re just staying in the count, where you already are, where you’re already fine.
The whole practice is free to learn. If flying is the thing that finally makes you try it, that’s a good enough reason.
Start with the free practiceFear of flying runs from mild nerves to a genuinely disabling phobia. This is what worked for me and for people I’ve taught — lived experience, not a treatment or a cure. If flying is seriously affecting your life, please also look at proper help, such as CBT with a therapist who works with phobias; the formula sits happily alongside it.