Sons anxiety

[Acaiboi]

Hi all,
I'm not sure what to do or how to help my son. He is 20, currently he lives in London for university. He's smart and caring but also prone to get quite anxious.
At the start of August he started seeing a girl, she's 19 also at university. Things seem to have gotten quite intense quite fast. He keeps telling me he loves her ...eek.
The girl isn't British, her mum is living in Canada and her Dad is in Sydney.
Over Christmas she is apparently flying London-Vancouver, Christmas with her mum there then Vancouver to Sydney for new year with her dad then back in time for the uni starting. Sounds exhausting if you ask me!!

My son hates flying, always has, he had bad experience as a kid with some awful turbulence and hasn't got over it. He will fly but no further than Europe ever and definitely not over Oceans.

To the issue, the last 4 nights he has rang me at 1/2am having a panic attack saying he thinks she's going to die on the plane and with so much long haul flying it's inevitable.
He won't tell her, he was at hers on Tuesday when he panicked and still got up took himself to the living room and rang me.
I mentioned it to my husband and my older son over heard and said that he'd been calling him too saying he thought she was going to cheat on him and panicking about that.

I think my son thinks he isn't good enough for this girl, she's very very attractive (has modelled in the past attractive) is smart, well traveled etc. and I wonder if that's why he is so worried.

I'm not sure what to do since I'm not near by? Any advice or ideas would be so greatly appreciated!

AIBU to be worried and want to step in?

I don’t think you’re unreasonable to try to help somehow when he phoned you about it. Has he had help with his anxiety from anyone ? I’m paying for my DC to have some remote sessions with a counsellor they know from home while at uni. It is expensive but uni counselling had long waiting list and then only 3 sessions were offered with no flexibility to change times even though they clashed with assessed presentations. Another thing that I haven’t tried for anxiety, but did find really good for another issue is hypnosis downloads.com . I looked into it quite thoroughly when I first tried it, one or two of them seem to have been lecturers at Brighton uni. I suppose all you can do is suggest things to help him address the anxiety. It seems so common these days and hard to watch it consuming our young people and the lives we’d hope they could be living.

Meant to say that the online recorded hypnotherapy sessions are much cheaper than individual therapy but could also be used as well as other things. Or maybe gp or his uni might have something better than my DC’s uni. As hard as it is to help carry the burden, it is good he can talk to you and his brother about his worries.

His anxiety isn’t because the girl’s attractive. He has an anxiety disorder and if she wasn’t attractive it would be something else.
He needs some regular professional help