Turbulence is Expected
March 19, 2025
When your flight hits turbulence, you face a decision: spiral into catastrophic thinking or accept the rockiness. Let's admit it—we've all felt both. The plane violently shakes, and your imagination conjures fiery wreckage. Yet statistically speaking, you're absurdly safe—safer than the drive to the airport.
Anxiety operates with the same deceptive mechanics. As anxiety has crept up more in my adult life, I've been tricked by it.
Maybe its your relationship hitting rocky terrain. You feel imposter syndrome at work. You haven't experienced the career growth you anticipated. These moments of psychological turbulence trigger the same catastrophic mental simulations: professional ruin, heartbreak, poverty, mortality.
But we've heard pilots say it enough: Turbulence is expected. This is now a phrase I often repeat to myself during harder times.
We love convincing ourselves that disaster is permanent
Anxiety thrives on convincing us that temporary discomfort equates to permanent disaster. It's a masterful illusionist, showing us only the worst possible outcome while obscuring the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It serves as both a megaphone (for your negative thoughts) and a muffler (for your positive ones).
In reality, 99.9999% of things you've feared as future catastrophes never materialized. Or if they did, you navigated through them with previously unimagined resilience. Yet anxiety persists in suggesting that this time is different—this time, the plane really will crash.
It won't. Turbulence is expected.
Remember your foundations
Professional pilots don't white-knuckle through turbulence because they understand the engineering behind flight stability. They've internalized the fundamentals that keep planes aloft despite air pockets and crosswinds.
You need the same for your anxiety.
For financial turbulence, your fundamentals might be your employability, your track record of resilience, or your capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. For turbulence in your relationships, perhaps it's your self-worth independent of others, or your history of meaningful connections.
Without the fundamentals, every bump feels like structural failure. With them, you recognize turbulence for what it is: uncomfortable but navigable—and expected.
Even the flight attendants look nervous sometimes
But sometimes turbulence intensifies. Even the flight attendants look nervous. And the circumstances we face can intensify too. These moments demand immediate intervention—therapy, medication, radical life changes. There's no shame in needing these measures; they exist precisely because turbulence occasionally exceeds our individual capacity to manage.
But even then, remember this: turbulence is not failure. It's physics. It's life. It's the unavoidable consequence of moving through an unpredictable world. Turbulence is expected.
Think about every other time you've flown (and landed safely)
The next time anxiety strikes, remember you're experiencing expected turbulence. Not evidence of imminent disaster. Balance your body's natural heightened awareness (which is—to an extent—protective and healthy) with the foundations which have existed far beyond this fleeting moment.
Your history of resilience is evidence that contradicts anxiety's direst predictions. By acknowledging the discomfort without catastrophizing it, you reclaim control from the spiral of worry. This doesn't mean dismissing genuine concerns, but rather placing them in proper perspective.
Remember that navigating life's turbulence isn't about eliminating discomfort—it's about developing the capacity to move through it with greater ease. And with each episode you successfully weather, you build further evidence of your ability to handle whatever comes next.