Bridges, highways, traffic.
You may avoid it altogether or turn around the moment you feel panic coming up. And every time you do, it just gets worse – and your life shrinks.
Today I’m going to give you 5 things that will completely change how you think about driving with anxiety, starting with something that will probably surprise you.
I speak with people who suffer from anxiety every day – and one of the most common things we talk about is the fear of driving.
The idea that you’re in a vehicle, surrounded by other people on the road, or having kids with you in the car – and anxiety or panic showing up out of nowhere.
“What if I crash the car?”
“What if I panic in traffic and I can’t leave?”
And I totally get this. You’re in control of a vehicle, and your actions have consequences. Back during my time with anxiety, I had lots of panic attacks in the car.
Especially when I hit traffic and I felt so nauseous I couldn’t think clearly. I felt like I would in no way be able to get home – and I actually had to leave the car, but couldn’t!
That freaked me out!
If you relate to this, these 5 points are really going to open your eyes and change how you deal with driving.
The first one surprises most people…
1. You’re not afraid of driving.
Most people don’t actually realize this and treat driving as something they can’t do anymore. As if they forgot how to drive and have to re-learn that, slowly by slowly.
But that’s not the case. You’ve likely driven for years before anxiety hit and you know how to drive.
You just don’t know what to do when anxiety hits. And that’s the whole point: we’re not afraid of driving, we’re afraid of having anxiety while driving.
Think about it. The anxiety or panic you get makes you feel like you’re losing control.
Suddenly, you feel distracted by your beating heart or your vision starts getting blurry.
How in the world are you going to get yourself to safety? That is the fear.
You fear the fear response itself. Just like someone who avoids public transportation or crowded places. We fear the symptoms of anxiety and the story that we have created around it.
2. You’re allowed to drive with anxiety.
Do me a favor, call your doctor or Google if you have to hand in your driver’s license automatically if you suffer from anxiety.
You’ll see that you don’t.
Why? Because it’s generally safe to drive with anxiety or panic.
The anxiety you feel is a result of your internal survival mechanism being triggered. This survival mechanism is responsible for why we humans have survived for thousands of years.
It triggers automatically upon detecting a threat. Before we even consciously notice the tiger hiding in the bushes, our nervous system has already kicked in this response.
When we’re actually in danger, we don’t realize the weird and strange sensations that come with this mechanism. But when we’re simply driving our car – without any CLEAR danger present – we start to feel each and every one of them.
Think about it. If a car runs a stoplight and you’re about to crash into it, this mechanism activates also – but you’re too busy braking or steering to safety to notice how you feel.
And this is one of the biggest misconceptions around the symptoms of anxiety. A lot of people who suffer from it mistake it for being something dangerous.
It’s not. It’s simply stress hormones going through your body that feel very uncomfortable but aren’t dangerous. That’s why you can still drive – even if anxiety shows up.
Which ties in to the next thing I want you to know…
3. Your alertness increases, not decreases
Most people worry about crashing because they feel like they’re losing control or eyesight.
Often, we go into all or nothing thinking and immediately jump to the worst-case-scenario of us causing a massive crash on the freeway.
That makes a lot of sense, because naturally we don’t want that and we surely feel like we’re losing all sense of control. But… are we?
If what you’re feeling is the survival mechanism at work, how likely is it that this exact mechanism is what’s going to get us hurt?
In other words; the survival mechanism’s ONLY job is to keep you safe.
If it were to actually make you crash your car, it wouldn’t be doing its one job, would it?
When this survival mechanism triggers, a lot of stress hormones are released. Like adrenaline, for example.
The side effects of this nervous energy are the symptoms you experience – but the mechanism actually makes you hyper alert, scanning for danger.
Your pupils dilate, your hearing capacity increases. Blood is moving to your limbs and you’re holding the steering wheel tightly.
You’re hyper focused on getting yourself to safety. Whether that’s returning home, or getting the next exit or pulling over.
That means that simply said, you’re the safest person on the road.
Because – get this – most people on the road aren’t hyper-alert for danger. Most people don’t view driving as something extremely dangerous.
Most car accidents are caused by people who weren’t hyper focused. It’s those people who are thinking about other things, or rushing off home after work, who cause crashes.
The people driving on auto-pilot (not self driving) are the ones with the slow response rates and the highest chances of getting into accidents.
Not you, though. You are hyper aware of your surroundings.
You’re the first to brake if you notice something up ahead.
This is really important to remember. You only feel like you’re losing control but in fact you’re the most alert person on the road.
Plus, you can always pull over or leave.
4. You can always leave
This was one of the hardest things for me to learn, because I always was so worried about not being able to leave if panic showed up.
Sitting in traffic, I couldn’t just drive through the other cars and take the exit. I literally was stuck in the car.
But is it true though?
When you start your anxiety recovery journey, one of the first things you’ll learn is that you don’t actually have to leave if anxiety shows up. You’d just want to, or believe that’s the only way to safety.
But – if you really want to leave, could you?
I started realizing that if the car suddenly caught fire, I would open the door and get out.
That may be a silly thought, but it helped me to remind myself of that. It would calm my brain down by showing it that I could leave.
You wouldn’t remain seated in your car if it would catch on fire, right? But your brain doesn’t understand that.
When you tell your brain that if panic shows up you need to leave… oh but also, you CAN’T LEAVE… What do you think your brain is going to do? It’s going to freak out!
So remind yourself that you can leave. You can always pull over. If you’re in traffic, you can always get out of the car.
You don’t want to – and I get that – but you can. Luckily, you don’t have to leave if anxiety shows up. The only thing you need to do is respond to it.
If you want to learn more about that, check out this blog post on responding properly.
5. Avoidance leads to more anxiety
The last point I want you to take away may be one of the most important ones.
This is also one of the first things you learn in our anxiety recovery program. It’s how avoidance leads to more anxiety.
It’s so natural to want to avoid driving if you’ve had anxiety while driving. The brain will remember the surroundings and the condition of that experience and remind you of that.
Even thinking of driving can already make you feel anxious because the brain has learned that driving is dangerous. The brain is great at linking together these things to keep us safe.
So – even before getting into a car, we feel this anticipatory anxiety coming up, falsely convincing us that the car is actually dangerous. So we avoid it and validate this danger.
By avoiding the car – or avoiding certain things like freeways or bridges – we confirm and validate to the nervous system that yes, driving is extremely dangerous.
“Thank you for warning me about it!”
Except, it isn’t. And you probably know that. Millions of people drive every single day. Maybe you used to too.
So it’s your job to prove to the nervous system that driving is OK – and that feeling anxiety symptoms is OK.
Unpleasant. Not harmful.
I’ve spoken to people who specifically bought a Tesla because of their panic attacks. They believed they needed the self driving functionality every time panic hits.
Unfortunately, that just validates – once again – the ‘danger’ to the nervous system. Keeping us on high alert with more anxiety as a result.
What you can do next.
It depends a bit on the severity of your case, but for some of you that might mean getting into a car, expecting anxiety to show up, and reminding yourself it’s just that survival mechanism at work. And your job is to validate safety.
For some of you it may mean to first simply think about driving, or visualize yourself doing it, and practice reminding yourself that the symptoms you feel are harmless. It’s “just” anxiety.
In any case, what sets people free from anxiety is the understanding of how it works. What it can and can’t do, and then responding differently to it in a way that shows your nervous system you can handle this.
It’s about taking small steps to slowly and gradually prove to yourself that driving is safe – and you can do it even though you feel very uncomfortable.
If you want to learn exactly how to do this, step by step, with mentor support, you can book a free discovery call with a member of my team to learn more about my mentorship program.
Besides that, it can really help to listen to other people’s experience with driving anxiety and how they overcame it.
Take Stefanie for example; a mom from Rhode Island who used to get massive panic attacks when driving over bridges. She avoided lots of family events like weddings because she couldn’t get into a car.
She learned what anxiety is – and how it won’t make you lose control while driving – and started to respond properly to it.
At one point during the journey, her brother got married and her and her sister pulled up to the wedding. Her family saw her get out of the driver’s seat and were completely shocked.
They never thought she’d be the one driving. But she was.
It’s an incredible story that gives me the chills every time.
Alternatively, listen to Amy’s recovery story. She used to believe she would crash the car every time anxiety hits, and is now back on the road without any worries.
To recap: remind yourself that the symptoms you are feeling are side effects of that survival mechanism – with its one job to keep you safe.
You are allowed to drive and you can always pull over or leave if you want to. In fact, you’re even more alerted and focused on safety than the other people on the road!
Recovery doesn’t happen overnight. It takes practice. Start by taking small steps and reach out if you need help.
You’ve got this!
