Anxiety With Driving: If you’ve ever gotten behind the wheel of a car and suddenly started shaking, felt your heart rate increase, and felt panicked, or if even the idea of driving makes you sweat and become nervous, you may have anxiety while driving.
Even though driving a car is a typical, closely monitored daily activity, many people may observe their anxiety levels higher when driving. But why does this occur? And what are the solutions to get over your anxiety with driving?
Below, we’ll dive into why you may know yourself observing anxiety when you drive. We’ll also recover from how to overcome anxiety while driving. When driving, anxiety all of a sudden is always present.
What Is Driving Anxiety?
To better know about anxiety with driving, it’s great to go over what anxiety is.Anxiety is a normal feeling of worry, or it is a phobia that happens when we observe ourselves in a stressed or worried situation. We can understand anxiety about an issue at work, money, or relationship troubles.
Anxiety disorders—such as generalized anxiety disorder—are a group of mental problems that not only impact how you think, analyze, and act but also greatly impact your quality of life. These mental health conditions are generally common, affecting approx. forty million American adults every year—around 19% of the total adult population.
While different anxiety disorders have particular symptoms, there are some common anxiety issues you may experience while driving.
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Common physical symptoms of anxiety include:
- Sweating
- Trembling or shaking
- Heart palpitations (increased heart rate)
- Difficulty breathing or hyperventilation
- Dry mouth
- Chest pain
- Numbness
Other symptoms of driving anxiety—or anxiety in general—include obsessive thoughts, feelings of panic, an inability to stay calm, or flashbacks to a traumatic event.
Everyone feels anxiety symptoms vary, as some may come up instantly or create up through anxious cases. So you may experience fears of driving anxiety all of a sudden or even after you’ve been driving for a period of time.
Causes of Driving Anxiety
As mentioned earlier, anxiety is a result of a dreadful or stressful scenario. If you experience anxiety while driving, you may be dealing with fear.
Phobias are a kind of anxiety disorder that affects an intense fear of specific objects. If you have a fear, you may have a lot of worry over the situation. Analyze intense anxiety when going through the situation you actively prevent—even with something as common as driving.
The phobia of driving—known as amaxophobia, amaxophobia, ochlophobia, or motorphobia—is a kind of phobia that concludes in a persistent fear of driving. Some people with this worry may even feel so much anxiety with driving that they can’t go outside or work, run errands, or go to other places.
People who experience intense anxiety with driving may be good to go with driving, but only really themselves to drive; they might only really be a certain person to drive as a passenger in a car. They may not importantly be fearful of driving but are more afraid of dying in a motor vehicle accident.
While a connection between the fear of driving and a car accident is reasonable, there are other reasons you may feel anxiety while driving. [Anxiety With Driving]
You may feel anxiety with driving if you’ve been in a motor vehicle accident or experienced another traumatic event while in a car, whether you were driving or not. Not only can a past accident lead to anxiety while driving, but other scenarios, such as driving through a bad temperature or somewhere not so known, getting lost can also make you feel anxious.
Feeling anxiety with driving could also be the conclusion of post-traumatic stress problems. PTSD is a problem that can happen after someone has been through a scary situation.
You might also be afraid of or feel anxious about driving if you have a panic disorder or a history of panic attacks.
Panic disorder—another type of anxiety disorder—is characterized by frequent, unexpected panic attacks and a sudden wave of fear when no danger is present.
Other panic symptoms include feeling out of control, being tense when your next panic attack will occur, preventing places where your past panic attack happened, and physical symptoms such as racing heart, sweating, trembling, and nausea.
People with anxiety disorder may be anxious drivers if they suffer from a panic attack while driving.
While driving anxiety is an unofficial mental health situation, a healthcare provider may give a diagnosis of anxiety disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder if the signs are severe enough to interfere with your life.
There are some different treatments for learning how to get over driving anxiety.
How to Overcome Driving Anxiety May Experience.
Typical treatment availability for anxiety contains therapy, medication, and self-care activities. Your healthcare supports the best treatment plan for you based on your problems, other health problems you’re experiencing, and more.
Therapy
Psychotherapy is one of the most known treatments for anxiety, with the use of medication as well. According to the American Psychological Association, approximately . 75% of people who take therapy experience some privileges.
The types of therapy that may be used for anxious driving behavior are cognitive-behavioral therapy or exposure therapy.
Preferred as a “gold standard” of treatment due to its great effect, cognitive-behavioral therapy supports you learning how to find out and replace unhealthy behaviors that develop your anxiety.
Exposure therapy can help you overcome driving fears, either as a worried driver, and is declared an effective treatment, with as many as 9 in 10 people seeing an improvement in symptoms. [Anxiety With Driving]
This type of therapy includes slow exposure to situations that develop symptoms so a mental health professional may learn breathing and relaxation techniques to implement before and during exposure.
One small study also found that virtual reality exposure therapy helped anxious drivers overcome a fear of driving—or being a passenger—by making them feel as if they’re physically inside a vehicle.
Medication
As such, there is no certain driving anxiety medication; there are medications used to cure anxiety symptoms. 2 common medications to treat anxiety involve (BZD, BDZ, BZs) benzodiazepines and antidepressants.
Benzodiazepines (BZD, BDZ, BZs) work by promoting sedation and minimising feelings of anxiety. This medication may not be the recommended choice for driving, as drowsiness is a side effect.
Antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors may be recommended by mental health experts to cure anxiety disorders.
Common antidepressants for anxiety include sertraline, duloxetine, and escitalopram. However, sertraline and paroxetine are the only 2 medications sanctioned by the FDA for curing PTSD if that specific disorder is the result of your driving anxiety.
There can be hazardous effects to medication; let your healthcare provider know of any bad effects you experience if you initiate taking any. [Anxiety With Driving]
Self-Care
Depending on how severe your driving stress is, self-care strategies might relieve your symptoms.
Developing a calming environment in the car might help relax you.
Start small and only focus on the literal road ahead of you—meaning the stretch of road you’re currently driving. While crossing a full bridge might make you anxious, only concentrating on one tiny section, then the next section, then the next one can support breaking a bigger goal into smaller, more manageable pieces.