Let’s break the term down. Psyche means the mind. Equivalent means two things are the same. Psychic equivalence is a state of mind in which a person experiences no difference between what is imaginary and what is real.

My internship in grad school was at a Veterans Administration Clinic in Manhattan. The staff there treated a lot of PTSD. One of the staff psychologists told us students about one of their patients. He was a Viet Nam vet. As he was driving by Newark Airport on the New Jersey Turnpike, a helicopter flew low across his car. The sound of the chopper elicited images of being under fire in Viet Nam. He went into psychic equivalence. He slammed on the brakes, stopped his car, and jumped into a ditch to avoid the barrage of enemy fire he was experiencing.

When calm, when we imagine something, we usually know what we have in mind is imagination. But if we get stressed, reflective function, which monitors our mental processes, weakens. Our reality testing stops working. If stressed enough, like the Viet Nam vet, we become unable to recognize that what we have in mind is imagination. What we imagine is our reality.

For example, if your plane is in turbulence, you might think, “What if the plane falls?” If the thought releases enough stress hormones to shut your reality testing down, you believe the plane is falling.

Psychic Equivalence In Early Life

Children are in a constant state of psychic equivalence from birth until around age 3. At around that time, they become able to sense their mental processes. They make an amazing discovery. Something that exists in their mind does not exist outside of their mind.

Think of a four-year-old and a two-year-old playing together. The older child says, “Let’s pretend we are in the jungle. There are lions and tigers. They are going to try to catch us and eat us. Look. There’s one! He’s after us! Run! Look out. He’s almost got you!”

The older child knows the lions and tigers are pretend. He is aware he ”made them up.” The younger child also made the animals up. As yet unaware of his mental processes, he does not know he made them up. Terrified, he runs to his mother to keep him from being eaten.

What allows an older child to know the lions and tigers in his mind are made up? Psychological theorist Peter Fonagy calls it reflective function. Reflective function - part of reality testing - allows us to observe our mental processes and sense which mode - perceiving, remembering, or imagining - we are using. Reflective function senses a difference between what comes into awareness from our physical eye versus what comes into awareness from the mind’s eye.

Mental Modes: Perception, Imagination, And Memory

We don’t give mode sensing much thought. I first learned about it when studying Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). The NLP training taught us that by watching a person’s eyes, we could tell which mode they were in. Here is a graphic on that by NLP coach Tom Daddario.

We are so accustomed to quickly shifting between perception, memory, and imagination that we may not notice doing it. If someone asks you if you would like a slice of apple pie, a decision-making process starts. Your eyes momentarily go up and to your left to remember apple pie you have had in the past. Then your eyes go up and to your right to imagine the apple pie you are being offered. Then your eyes down and to your right to mentally taste the mentally constructed pie. Is there a good feeling or not? Based on your feelings you tell the person yes or no.

When you are calm, you probably sense the difference between memory, imagination, and perception. But when stressed enough, this sensing stops. When you think about something bad happening, if you release enough stress hormones, you stop sensing you are imagining something bad happening. On a flight, it seems to be happening. Before a flight, it seems sure to happen.

Are You In Psychic Equivalence?

How do you know whether you are in psychic equivalence or not? When you are in psychic equivalence, you can’t sense you are in it.

There is a way to know. It is very basic. If you are experiencing fear on a plane, you are in psychic equivalence. If you are experiencing fear when you think of an upcoming flight, you are in psychic equivalence. Why? Because nothing fearful happens on an airliner. There are noises. There are motions. That’s it. Fear comes from imagining what the noise or motion might mean.

When you hear a noise or feel a motion, you could simply recognize you don’t know if it means anything or not, and just let it go at that. A person who has had little or no trauma in their life can do that. But if you have had a significant amount of trauma, you can’t let it go. Unexpected noises and motions trigger stress hormones. Because of trauma, stress hormones mean danger. Believing there is danger, you can’t just let it go. You imagine the noise or motion means “something bad is happening.” This triggers more stress hormones. The hormones lead to psychic equivalence. Though it is an imaginary construct, “something bad is happening” is experienced as a fact. Meanwhile, the plane is fine.

Getting Out Of Psychic Equivalence

What can you do to get out of psychic equivalence? Do nothing. Anything you do will load your mind up more and extend the experience.

If you can’t pull off doing nothing, do the 5-4-3-2-1. Whichever you do, you need time for the stress hormones to burn off. When they have burned off enough, you come out of psychic equivalence.

Staying Out Of Psychic Equivalence

Obviously, it is better not to get into psychic equivalence. Knowing about psychic equivalence can help you question the accuracy of your thinking.

• Noticing Your Processes

Get into the habit of noticing your mental processes. A person who is more aware of their mental processes goes less easily into psychic equivalence.

• Acceptance

Accept, for now, that you have been a sucker for psychic equivalence. Accept that when you were afraid on the plane, the plane was fine. If you deny that you go into psychic equivalence, you will not get over it.

• Awareness

Awareness you are heading toward it helps. If you can sense when you are headed toward it, you are better able to put on the brakes.

• Experience What Is Going On

Do not add to what you experience. When you imagine something threatening, you release stress hormones that send you toward psychic equivalence. Do not subtract from your experience by trying to keep it out of mind. You can’t get desensitized to what you don’t experience.

• Preparation

Preparation is vital. Re-code the images that trigger stress hormones. Images that persist are easy to identify. Look for fleeting images. They come to mind and disappear in a flash. Write them down. Change their codes from negative to positive.

That post on Quora hit my news feed yesterday. Some answered takeoff, and some answered landing. They are both wrong. Answering the question as it is framed—“which is more dangerous”—confirms that both are dangerous.

It is a loaded question similar to “Did you stop beating your wife?” Answering either yes or no confirms that beating has taken place. The loading of the question could be dealt with by answering, “I have never beaten my wife.”

The correct answer is, “Neither takeoff nor landing is dangerous.”

“Has turbulence gotten more dangerous?”

A similar question is being asked about turbulence. Answering yes or no reinforces the idea that turbulence is dangerous.

Passengers who don’t wear a seat belt rarely get hurt.

Passengers who wear a seat belt never get hurt.

The correct answer is, “Turbulence is not dangerous.”

“What is the most dangerous thing about flying?”

If you argue that planes do sometimes crash, that is true. To answer the question accurately, we need to consider this: are we considering absolute safety or relative safety.

Absolute Safety. Absolute safety does not exist. Nothing is absolutely safe. Eating is not safe. Consider lettuce. Breathing is not safe. Consider COVID. Sleeping is not safe. Consider fires, home invaders, and murderous spouses.

Relative Safety. Relative safety is what safety is all about. Of all the things you could be doing now, flying is the safest or one of the safest. When you stop doing your daily routine and get on a plane, you have made yourself safer. You are safer on the plane than in your home. You are safer on the plane than in your car. You might say you are safer driving because you are a good driver. But you are safer in an airliner than in your car even if your car is sitting still. You are safer on the plane than in church. No need to pray on the plane; pray for your safety in church. You are safer on a plane than sleeping in your bed at night.

Arnold Barnett, professor of statistics at MIT, says airline safety has doubled every ten years since jets came into use. Flying has become so safe that, for practical purposes, he says we should think of it as absolutely safe.

He adds, however, that if a person must conceptualize the risk of flying, it is the same as the risk of being killed when shopping, not by any cause, but by only one specific cause: ceiling collapse. That’s something you don’t spend much time worrying about. The media doesn’t do number on us about that. But it happened in 1990 in New York City.

The problem is not being safe. The problem is feeling safe. If flying feels unsafe, it is because bad things have happened when you were not in control or able to escape.

Of the places you could be right now, no place are you more protected.

The correct answer is, “Nothing about flying is dangerous.”

I took a look at the ad. The reason if failed was obvious. It says 90% success rate. The couple and the PR firm thought a 90% success rate was great - which it was - and advertised it. But they did not understand the mind of a fearful flyer. A person with fear of flying believes they’ll be in the 10% that fails in a 90% effective course.

The reason fearful flyers expect to be in the failure group is the same reason they have fear of flying. If a fearful flyer is told there is a one chance in five million of their plane crashing, they “know” their plane is going to be the one that crashes.

Why is that? It’s because of a phenomenon called psychic equivalence. When we get stressed enough, what we imagine becomes real. What we think becomes fact. What we fear is our fate.

If the chance of their plane crashing is one in five million, they “just know” that they will die if they get on the plane. But if they don’t get on the plane, it will land safely. Now, is this crazy? Not exactly. Psychic equivalence - caused by stress hormones - makes them believe their plane will crash. When they abandon their flight plans, the stress hormones subside. They relax. Psychic equivalence goes away. Now, back to normal thinking, the plane is no longer expected to crash. If they, however, decide once again to take the flight, stress hormones will send them again into psychic equivalence. Again, picturing themselves on the plane, they expect it to crash.

When we are cool and collected, if we imagine something, we know we are imagining it. But when we get stressed, we lose track. We don’t know what we are imagining is imagination. It is happening, or it is going to happen.

Because of psychic equivalence, anticipatory anxiety develops when you think about an upcoming flight. The chances of your flight being to your liking is not 100%. Let’s say a realistic estimate that it will be OK is 50%. Imagining that is not a problem. But when you imagine the 50% chance of it being bad, you trigger the release of stress hormones. You imagine not being in control. You imagine not being able to get off the plane. The images have highly negative coding. They trigger the release of stress hormones.

And here is the problem. If the stress hormones slide you into psychic equivalence, you no longer regard the flight as a 50/50 situation. It becomes a 100% situation. You just know the flight will be awful.

We all know that the anxiety before the flight is worse than the anxiety on the flight. Why? When the moment you are anticipating arrives, your switch from predicting to experiencing. And since you did the exercise that changed the codes of the things you experience during the flight from negative to positive, you feel fine.

Turbulence is tricky. The question is whether you go back into expectation, expect the worse, release stress hormones, slide into psychic equivalence and, when imagining the plane falling out of the sky, artificially experience the plane falling out of the sky.

But if you continue experiencing what is really happening, you just experience the plane moving up and down.

Really. You may not like the plane moving up and down. But isn’t moving up and down better than falling out of the sky? If you agree, stay away from going down the rabbit hole. Stay away of predictions, or expectations. Stick with “what is” rather than “what if.”

So the moral of the story is, if you tend to go into psychic equivalence, imagining what may happen on your flight - and imagining turbulence getting worse - causes trouble.

Since checking the turbulence forecast is ALWAYS going to show some possibility of turbulence, checking it is likely to cause trouble.

So here is the prescription.

1. Change the emotional valence codes associated with “no-control” and “no-escape” and “falling-out-of-the-sky” from negative to positive.

2. Make a commitment to experience what is happening as it is happening.

3. Consider the old Doris Day song, “Que Sera, Sera.” One way to look at the song is fatalism: that the future is carved in stone. I don’t believe that. Imagining the future is useful if you have options to consider. But imagining your upcoming flight - assuming you are going to take it - gets you nowhere other than into trouble.

You can reduce the tendency to go into psychic equivalence by doing therapy. Therapy looks inward. As you look inward, you are being calmed by the presence of the therapist. The more your mental processes become associated with the therapist’s calming influence, the more you can process things mentally without going into psychic equivalence. As you strengthen your ability to look inward without sliding into psychic equivalence.

Now, can I ask for some help on this book title? I’m working on a new book and I need a title. Because of the psychic equivalence problem, one possibility is “SOAR: The Fear of Flying Program That Works for Everyone.”

Now that’s not true. But if I titled it “SOAR: The Fear of Flying Program That is 98% Successful,” fearful flyer would say, “ Oh, I would be in that 2%.”

I’m going to put some titles in the poll below. If you would like to help, pick the titles you would respond to and would not respond to. If you have an idea for a better title, email me at tom@fearofflying.com

Air traffic controllers routinely deal with similar or duplicate call signs. They make sure the planes they are controlling are aware of the similarity or the duplication.

Two planes with the same call sign - American 2482 - were in the Phoenix airspace at the same time. This was not because of an error. It was because the American 2482 that was arriving was delayed and the departing American 2482 was on time.

Funk writes “A potential disaster was averted Friday when a Phoenix air traffic controller recognized two American Airlines jets mistakenly were flying the same flight number and acted quickly to avoid confusion and keep them a safe distance apart.”

And he wrote, “If both pilots thought the controller was telling them to fly at the same altitude as they headed toward each other, they might have collided . . . .”

There was no chance whatsoever of the planes colliding that way. No combination of misunderstanding would have put both planes at the same altitude. Take a look.

A. The plane at 9,000 feet would not be told to climb to 10,000 because 10,000 was occupied.

B. If the plane at 10,000 mistakenly thought it was meant for them, so what? They were already at 10,000.

C. The plane at 10,000 feet would not be told to descend to 9,000 because that altitude was already in use.

D. If the plane at 9,000 mistakenly thought it was for them, so what? They were already at 9,000 feet.

Did Funk do the logic? Did he know a collision was impossible? Or did he know and decide to click-bait fearful fliers anyway?

Did Funk mention TCAS, the system that prevents mid-air collisions, even if air traffic control makes a mistake? No a word. Had he pointed out that TCAS would have prevented a mid-air collision between departing and arriving airliners, he would have had no way to shock gullible readers.

So there you have it. Another article by a jerk who either doesn’t know what he is talking about or is out to exploit the anxious.

When you read something shocking about aviation in the media, consider the source. If it is a media outlet that only covers aviation, it may be accurate. If it any other media outlet, there is little chance that what you read is right.

In addition to what other passengers must process, anxious passengers must process what they imagine is happening. Like a computer with too many programs open, their high-level thinking freezes up.

When high-level thinking freezes up, the difference between what is real and what is imaginary vanishes. The mere thought that the plane might fall is transformed into an experience of the plane plunging.

There is a name for this phenomenon. It is called psychic equivalence. Psychic equivalence is the powerful dynamic that turns anxiety into fear and fear into terror.

To understand psychic equivalence is to understand fear of flying.

Psyche means the mind. Equivalent means two things are the same. Psychic equivalence is a state of mind in which a person experiences no difference between what they imagine and what they perceive, which is to say, they experience no difference between what is imaginary and what is real.

Children are in a state of psychic equivalence until around age 3. They then make an amazing discovery. They realize that something in their mind does not exist outside their mind.

When a child realizes this, the magical world of pretend becomes available to them. They are free to make things up. Anything can exist in their mind if they just want it to. It’s fun to play with another child who will put the same thing in their mind.

Think of a four-year-old and a two-year-old playing together. The older child says, “Let’s pretend we are in the jungle. There are lions and tigers. They are going to try to catch us and eat us. Look. There’s one! He’s after us! Run! Look out. He’s almost got you!”

The older child knows the lions and tigers are pretend. He is aware he ”made them up.” The younger child also made the animals up. But as yet unaware of his mental processes, he does not know he made them up. To him, they are real. Terrified, he runs to his mother to keep him from being eaten.

What allows an older child to know the lions and tigers in his mind are made up? Psychological theorist Peter Fonagy calls it reflective function. Reflective function allows us to observe our own mental processes, and to sense which mode - perceiving, remembering, or imagining - we are using. Reflective function senses a difference between what comes into awareness from our physical eye versus what comes into awareness from the mind’s eye.

When high-level thinking becomes overwhelmed, reflective function pauses. When it pauses, we sense no difference between memory, imagination and perception.

The onset of psychic equivalence is insidious. When we have no way to reflect on our own mental processes, we have no way to know we are not reflecting on our own mental processes. Said another way, when we are in psychic equivalence, we have no way to know we are in psychic equivalence.

If the reflective function is weak, it can pause well before high-level thinking freezes up. Reflective function pauses more easily in some of us than in others. How easily it pauses depends on three things. First, how well-developed it is. Fonagy says well-developed reflective function is “a hard-won personal achievement.” Second, how much stress hormone is being released. High levels can pause reflective function. Third, how effectively the parasympathetic nervous system protects reflective function by counteracting the effects of stress hormones.

If you are a person who goes into psychic equivalence easily (though you do not know how easily you do because you don’t know you are in it when you are in it), thinking about an upcoming flight may trigger stress hormones, cause psychic equivalence, and make an imagined plane crash seem real. This can lead you to believe your plane will crash. Some anxious fliers say, “I just know that if I get on that plane, it will crash.” If they cancel their flight plans, stop triggering stress hormones, come out of psychic equivalence, and expect the plane they were sure would crash to arrive safely.

Something similar happens when an anxious flier drops a friend off at the airport. The anxious flier expects their friend to arrive safely. But if they were to consider getting on the plane with their friend, they would then expect the plane to crash.

Understanding psychic equivalence can help some anxious fliers avoid going into it. It can help others look back at their flights and realize they were not in the danger they believed they were.

Psychic Equivalence Transforms Hyper-Arousal Into Panic

But consider what makes psychic equivalence such a problem. Psychic equivalence, by causing terror, transforms hyper-arousal into panic.

If we look at hyper-arousal as a stand-alone issue, what is so bad about it? So what if one’s heart rate is 140? A person doing an aerobic workout wants their heart rate at or above that level. So what if there is tension in the body? Every athletic endeavor strains the body.

The problem is this: psychic equivalence turns what a person imagines into their reality. For example, an elevated heart rate leads a person to think they might be having a heart attack. The thought triggers the release of stress hormones. The stress hormones pause their reflective function. Psychic equivalence. What started as a thought is now a fact. The person “knows” they are having a heart attack. They “know” they are about to die. The thought of a heart attack has been transformed by psychic equivalence into certainty that a heart attack is taking place.

By understanding that psychic equivalence can cause imagination to be experienced as reality, we can understand how arousal, if it triggers psychic equivalence, can cause terror, and thus panic.

Difficult breathing, in a state of psychic equivalence, becomes suffocation. Overwhelm, in a state of psychic equivalence, is losing one’s mind.

Some therapists tell panic sufferers that they should not fear panic because panic will do them no harm. If panic were nothing more than hyper-arousal, that might be true. But when hyper-arousal leads to psychic equivalence, the terror of dying, going out of control, or losing one’s mind traumatizes. Realizing the terror was due to psychic equivalence does not resolve the trauma.

We now know that the key to stopping panic is preventing psychic equivalence. The sympathetic nervous system increases arousal. The parasympathetic nervous system decreases arousal. These two systems are supposed to interact and regulate arousal as needed. But trauma distorts the sympathetic-parasympathetic interaction. Hyper-arousal happens too easily.

When hyper-arousal takes place, reflective function stops separating memory and imagination from perception. Everything a person is aware of seems to be perception, whether it is perception or not.

Panic can be prevented by stopping psychic equivalence. Techniques in the SOAR programs achieve that.

Initially, the child’s whole world is its mother. In that world, every child needs to feel safe, secure, and known. To be known, psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy …

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1. Download SkyGuru from the App Store or Google Play.

2. Open the app on your phone and establish a user name and password.

3. To get the discount, go to the website : https://www.skyguru.app/r/tombunn

4. On the website, look for the block that says “I have a promo code.”

5. Enter the promo code SOAR

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On this video, Alex and I put the app through its paces. It does great things to help you feel better before your flight and during your flight.

• Adjust it to give you more info or less info about your flight.

• If anxiety builds up, turn to AlexAI and discuss it in depth.

• Will the flight will be smooth or bumpy? Information on you route is right there.

• Will it be bumpy during takeoff? Take a photo of the clouds at the airport. SkyGuru will analyze them and tell you.

• Need to relax? SkyGuru offers ten ways.

• There is even a Stop Panic feature.

Get a 50% discount on your first month’s subscription.

1. Download SkyGuru from the App Store or Google Play.

2. Open the app on your phone and establish a user name and password.

3. To get the discount, go to the website : https://www.skyguru.app/r/tombunn

4. On the website, look for the block that says “I have a promo code.”

5. Enter the promo code SOAR

   

6. Complete payment on the website. The subscription with the discount will then be activated automatically in the app as shown below.

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Precipi…

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Because of that, when we dislike how we feel, we try to change our thoughts. We may try to think positively. Does it work? Research suggests it can backfire.

There is no such thin…

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