6 Ways to Conquer Driving-Related Anxiety and Panic
1. Focus on the road ahead.
Driving-related anxiety often leads you to think ahead to the whole trip. As you drive, you might keep imagining the scariest parts ahead. It ends up being a lot to manage—not just the road right in front of you, but your entire drive.
None of us can manage a whole trip in our heads—we must take the road as it comes. Being present and not planning every moment will help you focus on the present instead of the future. We can manage the piece of road we’re on right now, reassuring yourself that everything is fine in this moment.
It takes practice, of course, since the mind wants to jump ahead and make sure things will be okay. Focusing on sensory experiences can help to ground your attention in the present, like seeing the road in front of you and feeling your hands on the steering wheel.
2. Challenge catastrophic assumptions.
Panic can lead to believing that a disaster awaits you on the road, even if it’s never happened on all your previous drives. Our fear is good at threatening us that “next time it’s going to be really bad”—that you’ll panic and “go crazy” or “lose control.” And yet in every instance so far, your worst fears haven’t happened. One study showed that 95% of all worries never came true and the other 5% we can prepare for.
But none of these events is the true fear behind panic—it’s about what happens next or the unknown. Our fear tells us that if we’re in these kinds of situation, the panic COULD cause something undeniably awful to happen. In reality, the most likely thing you’ll experience if panic or anxiety gets really intense is, fear for a few minutes and then it will pass. Learn to tolerate the discomfort of the anxiety by sitting with it. While staying present with it, it will dissipate, and you will be proving to your mind that you can handle the situation with confidence.
By moving through the fear scenarios our minds tell us, we can stop letting it control our behavior. Become aware of what your automatic thoughts are and the fear triggers that start the progression of anxiety and you will feel in control of your driving anxiety.
3. Dismiss emotional reasoning.
Sometimes our fears give us valuable information that helps us avoid danger. However, our fears can also be unfounded. A common thinking error when our anxiety is high is that feeling like I’m in danger is evidence that I’m in danger.
For many people, “feeling is believing,” says psychotherapist and former airline pilot Captain Tom Bunn. “If I feel it, it has to be true.” He noted that people prone to panic tend to interpret physiological symptoms of anxiety as danger, whereas “some people enjoy the physiological arousal, like getting on a roller coaster.” Use both your emotion together with your reasoning to get the best of both worlds.
4. Beware of psychic equivalence
Most of the time we can tell the difference between what’s real and things we imagine. But when we’re intensely anxious, this distinction can dissolve—a process known as “psychic equivalence.”
Under stress, you might default to believing that your emotional experience represents your true perception. When people worry about having a panic attack, that can cause enough stress that the message to the body is we are in danger and then your body reacts to protect you. They forget that their mind doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined and your anxiety is imagined, since it is not currently happening.
Intense fear can lead to a powerful form of emotional reasoning, in which the driving-related disasters you're afraid of feel like reality instead of fears. When you're relaxed you may know perfectly well that panic doesn't make you faint, for example, but might think you're on the verge of fainting when panic hits, however, if you can breathe in through your nose to the count of 4 and out your mouth to the count of 8, you can’t faint, since you are getting oxygen directly to the brain. The 4 and 8 breathing, has been medically proven to send a calming chemical into your entire system to calm you immediately, so it’s less likely to trigger psychic equivalence.
5. Eliminate avoidance
Every time we avoid what we’re afraid of we are strengthening it. Our brains learn that what we’re avoiding must be dangerous—otherwise, why would we avoid it? You can try to talk yourself down and reason with your fears, but nothing retrains the brain like direct experience. Confronting the situations that triggers anxiety is the most powerful way to teach your nervous system that it doesn’t have to sound the panic alarm and you can handle it. In CBT we call this approach “exposure treatment.”