Flying after a bad experience- any tips?

[Gastropod]

Horrible experience on a flight recently due to poor weather and several aborted landings.

Am usually a pretty zen flyer but am flying this afternoon and feeling quite nervy.

Any tips? I dont want to take any medication. Just to find my zen mindset again!

deep breaths. I hope this flight goes well and you get your confidence back.

Some calming music

I always try to think of it from the flight attendant's perspective. They'll almost definitely have had awful flights with aborted landings, awful weather etc but they still come to work and still fly. They could choose so many other jobs but they still do it. Also helpful to see it from the pilot's perspective. They're watching the action from the front. They want to land safely so they'll make sure they do.

I don't know if that helps at all but it tends to help me as those people could do any job but they still go that one.

Also strangely, it was something going wrong on a flight that reassured me that everything would be ok. Someone needed oxygen and his partner was screaming hysterically. The way the flight attendant's calmly leapt into action, took control and sorted it all was so reassuring and it can't be an everyday occurrence.

Just think that you were flying in difficult conditions last time, and still landed safely after numerous attempts, after the very well-trained pilots and air-traffic control people judged the situation. That what felt frightening and out of control for you at the time was a routine, fairly ordinary work snag for the professionals on board. (And I say that as someone who used to regularly fly on a small plane into an airport with a tiny runway and notoriously stormy weather where we often had to fly around waiting for a nosewind to go down, and abortive landings weren't unusual.)

I was once flying to NY from LHR for work and a colleague I knew only slightly fainted going to the loo, fell and split her head quite badly on a bulkhead midway, with the added snag that we then couldn't land as planned because a blizzard had closed all the NY airports. The cabin crew were so impressive (I accompanied her up to an almost-empty First, so got a close up view of the whole thing) as was the air medical advice unit on the ground they contacted for assistance. I was pregnant at the time and I remember thinking 'I would absolutely trust these women to deliver my baby mid-air, and they would do it without getting a hair out of place in their chignons.'

Thank you all so much, this is definitely helping!