Seems to me someone once said, "You have nothing to fear but fear itself", or words to that effect. The "secret" is to R-E-L-A-X. Don't panic. And above all, do NOT let ATC fly your airplane.

These days I have a different way of avoiding stress.

 

First, I do very little flying online. Instead I make up my own departures and my own arrivals, and I pull my own route or arrival runway changes.

 

Second, when I feel myself on the edge of overload I simply pause the sim, something that is a no-no on VATSIM and other online services.

 

My goal is to have fun, and to try to increase the workload I can carry, but I really have no interest in learning to cope with stress per se because I'm no longer doing real world flying, I'm simply out to have fun.

 

(And anyway most of the flying I do these days is product test flying.)

 

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But there was one facet of my life where I implemented your advice, and it was when my wife and I decided to get PADI scuba diving licenses.

 

Early on I found that I was using air at an incredible rate. My instructor realized that I must have been breathing way too deeply and way too often -- because I was scared without realizing it. So he told me to do exactly what you have told me to do -- relax. And it worked. By relaxing I never had to suck hard for air, I used less of it, my dives were longer and much more enjoyable, and I never risked running out.

 

In fact as part of our training we did a wreck dive at 90-120 feet, a mind-blowing experience. We didn't go inside the wreck (a sunken freighter), but encountering its big propeller, half-buried in the mud yet towering over us, and then gliding silently and effortlessly over the monster hull from stern to stem, was eerie and thrilling, almost an out of body experience ...

 

And I wasn't bothered by the depth -- the knowledge that the now-much-less-visible surface was WAY above us -- nor was I bothered by having to stop twice? on the way up to decompress.

 

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The only time I have been bothered underwater was during training. A group of us went down 30 feet to a sandy offshore bottom where we were to swap our scuba gear with a pre-selected neighbor. I found it extremely difficult to surrender my mouthpiece even though we had taken off the rigs first and would simply need to switch to our neighbors' mouthpieces before putting on that person's rig.

 

But I did it. If you're going to dive you have to learn to be willing to get rid of your rig and start buddy-breathing with somebody else. It may be the only way to free yourself after you've gotten caught on something, or if you let yourself run out of air, or whatever.

Edited August 20, 2008 by xxmikexx

P.S. ...

 

There's more to the scuba diving story but I've decided to continue it in a new thread located here ... https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/blog.php?b=45

Edited August 20, 2008 by xxmikexx