“I had a male client who said he had a fear of flying for seven years,” says Bunn, who founded the SOAR program to help people with a fear of flying. “Every time he flew he was totally miserable, except for one time when, before he came back from a business trip, he hooked up with someone. He said they didn’t get any sleep. They made love all night long and he dragged himself out of bed onto the airplane and had a perfectly anxiety-free flight.”
Tom Bunn is a former captain of the United States Air Force and a former pilot for Pan American World Airways from 1965 through 1986; and the statement shown above was from this article written by Sid Lipsey for Yahoo! Travel, which suggests the possibility that sex is the best way to cure fear of flying as the result of a new study pertaining to fighting post-traumatic stress disorder — also known as PTSD —conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Interesting.
“Studies have shown that trauma victims are more likely to develop PTSD if they have previously experienced chronic stress, and a new study from MIT may explain why. The researchers found that animals who underwent chronic stress prior to a traumatic experience engaged a distinctive brain pathway that encodes traumatic memories more strongly than in unstressed animals.”
Logic tends to dictate that blocking this type of memory formation — essentially preventing traumatic memories from consolidating in the brain in the first place before a potentially stressful situation — may offer a new way to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder; and that sexual intercourse may be one such blocker which is potentially effective without resorting to the use of drugs.
Researchers “found that in animals that developed PTSD symptoms following chronic stress and a traumatic event, serotonin promotes the process of memory consolidation. When the researchers blocked amygdala cells’ interactions with serotonin after trauma, the stressed animals did not develop PTSD symptoms. Blocking serotonin in unstressed animals after trauma had no effect.”
I do not have a fear of flying — also known as aviophobia — and I never have; so I unfortunately cannot comment on it either way or personally test the theory that sex could be the best way to cure fear of flying…
…but did a couple who allegedly had sex in a lavatory aboard an airplane operated by Norwegian Air Shuttle during a recent flight from Paris to Stockholm deserve to reportedly be “congratulated” for “reproducing” by a flight attendant who — using the public address system of the airplane — announced their act to fellow passengers; or were they possibly simply attempting to “self-medicate” themselves in terms of curing a possible fear of flying?!?
Perhaps there is a legitimate purpose for viewing pornography during a flight after all…
