Several studies have found that up to 40 percent of people have some degree of anxiety about flying. An anxiety or panic attack is often acutely physical, marked by sweating, numbness in the hands and feet, and a pounding heart, leading sufferers to think they are having a heart attack.
What is your biggest fear?
I’ve been in the US now for about two years. As a foreigner, I still have a fear of talking in public because of my imperfect English. I feel pretty comfortable in most of social settings, but when I need to talk to the public, I’m sometimes too much worried about my mistakes in the usage of the language.
I’m much more afraid of driving. I’ve flown overseas plenty, but driving scares me more, and I feel that a fear of driving is much more reasonalble as you are more likely to be injured or die from driving. Flying is strange, I agree, but it’s quite the irrational fear when you compare the statistics. Then again, maybe one’s fear of flying doesn’t come from the thought of crashing, but just claustrophobia, or a completely unidentified reason.
public speaking
HI i am working as a software engg. in a mnc in usa for the last 2 yrs … i am feeling very scared of living alone here …… The time are very hard to spend here ,,, i am here for money only …..
I wants to return back to my country
I’m a great public speaker. I do however have the fear of falling and being impaled by any sort of shaft sticking out of the ground (if anyone knows what this fear is called, please tell me).
Being an old maid, unmarried and without children.
Seriously. I am 27 years old, very educated, politically liberal, etc etc and still that is my worst, most desperate fear.
My fear is that I will grow old, and not be able to support myself, and become a bag lady. Old, wrinkled, and lonely… and no one will love me.
I am afraid of liars. They ruin society for everyone else…
Hillary Clinton
‘You have nothing to fear, but fear itself!’ Who said that?
Someday, I may be either nearly or completely reliant on others to perform basic life tasks.
irrationally it’d be arachnophobia for me, although i know that in my area there are no dangerous/poisonous spiders. rationally (is there such a thing as rational fear?) it’s a burden to me to think that i won’t ever learn to let go. things, love, life, money, whatever. i’m convinced it’s life’s lesson to learn how to let go and i still can’t do it. it will torture me…
Sadly, one of my greatest fears is of going to the doctor. I can fly a plane, and perform in front of large crowds on a regular basis. But put me in the exam room, and a panic attack soon ensues.
I am terrified of the consequences this will have on my family ultimately, so I’m doing my best to get in to a physician; but I’m suffering panic attacks just picking up the phone to make the appointment.
Is there anyone else who has this one? Or am I on the only one…? I have a feeling it’s the latter.
Getting caught doing you know what.
Ranald Duhig, Brisbane, Australia.
… cockroaches, but not beetles; spiders, but only those with hairy legs and that look like they could tackle a pigeon as an appetizer; elevators, but only in places with irregular electricity; religion, when used to excuse the inexcusable; people, who suggest without introspection that the protection of our freedoms lies in trampling the freedoms and lives of others. Is there some kind of a link, or collective term, that could group these fears, other than schizophrenia?
Not death, but to never have really lived at all.
Tunnels…it started after an MRI test, the closed kind. Entered the I-77 tunnels at 65 mph in a car ( Big Walker Mountain and Bland ) and had a very bad panic/claustro experience. Then later , after flying literally hundreds of times with no ill effects, I found it had spread to include flying. What a miserable flight to the coast I had! Then it hit me in the dentist chair…but I’m getting over it…went to dentist Friday and didn’t have my little claustro-panic whatever…
Cell phone phobia, I don’t want to answer my cell phone I don’t even like listing to my messages. My dream would be to have is a personal assistant.
With reference to F.A. Hutchison, I’d always believed that quote was attributable to FDR. I’m probably wrong.
My biggest fear? Not spinsterhood, flying, public speaking, or even dying . . . I fear having exhausted my time on this tiny orb without having ever had an opportunity to make a real imprint. I don’t want to be a retail or clerical monkey for the rest of my life. I want my life to have meant something.
I’m afraid of actually experiencing mass starvations and myself becoming an environmental refugee because of drought and bees dying…
Driving! For me, concentrating on so many different things at the same time, i.e., watching my speed, steering, looking in the mirrors, etc., is all very nerve wrecking! The fact that there are also other lives, particular my husband and my children in the car with me. I just cannot relax and go with the flow. I am in awe as to how people do it without almost any effort at all. Living in New York also didn’t help it any because you don’t need to drive there. Here in Seattle, everyone drives even 2 blocks to the grocery store. I wish I could do it…maybe they will come out with a pill for driving anxiety, if they haven’t already.
F.A. Hutchison
That was said by our very fondly remembered FDR.
Okay, if you REALLY want to talk about airplanes and flying, I don’t look at it as ‘fear’, I look at it as a logical, rational evaluation of what are your chances of surviving in the event something goes seriously wrong — because we ALL know of Murphy’s Law.
I have a standing bet that more people survived the Titanic disaster ( bad as it was ) than the SUM TOTAL of all the people who have survived similarly serious commercial airplane crashes SINCE the Titanic. I used to disqualify skidding off the runway after the airplane has already landed as not being a ‘serious crash’ but rather a bloody miracle by airplane standards, but this latest Brazilian fiasco makes me wonder if I should include them too!
Nobody has proven me wrong yet.
It isn’t so much the crash that turns me off of flying, it’s what do you do for that last about fifteen minutes of your life between the time the airplane starts flying VERY BADLY at 35000 feet to the inevitable certain end of your life when it hits the ground with a BIG crunch. THAT must be an interesting trip down! I wonder how many passengers die of heart failure on the way down.
Compare that to the fact that from the end of wooden railway passenger cars sometime in the 1920s to the bitter end of first class railway passenger service, the Pullman Company NEVER killed a passenger. Now THAT’S what I call survivability.
Kurt
A long time ago someone once said: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Today change is very real, but I often fear that all this change does not result in the world getting better, just unrecognizable.
spiders and other bugs with more than 4 legs.
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