this episode, we're delighted to welcome on Nova Cobham, who's a psychologist, a psychotherapist and coach, and has been a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines over the last few years. So welcome Nova. Brilliant, and

Thank you for having me. Lovely to be here.

welcome, and thank you for doing this for us. the reason we invited you on was because we saw a post that you did a while back now talking about the anxiety cycle and we saw it and thought that would be a great topic to talk about for our nervous and anxious drivers who are listeners. So can we start with that? Can we ask you to explain a bit more about what the anxiety cycle is? Okay.

Yeah, of course. So, the anxiety cycle is basically quite a simple kind of cycle that happens, but as it does several iterations. It kind of becomes a little bit more complex and a little bit more difficult to understand where it arose from. And we get loads of other information that goes into it. But basically there will be a trigger of something that you fear or something that you are worried about, probably something that you've experienced before in the past. And at the time that didn't feel anxiety ridden, but as a result of the consequence of that initial impact, Then the next time you come to do that same thing, there's a fear attached to it. So you go into this kind of anxiety cycle. So it starts with whatever it is that's triggering it. So maybe for drivers, that's something like, Oh my goodness, I've got a, I can only parallel park. That's the only place I've got available to me. I'm going to have to attempt this. Um, and then there's cars coming along and other people are watching you and it becomes incredibly pressurized situation. So that can bring up anxiety related to other pressurized situations. It doesn't even have to be related to being in a car at all. It could be the last time you were under pressure because people were just waiting for an answer from you. It could have been at school when a teacher asked you a question and you're like, oh, I don't know, and you'll wrap it in the headlight. So it can be anything. But once that has been triggered inside you, that emotion and that feeling and that physical reaction to it is then in motion. So at that point You will then need to react to that feeling or do something with that feeling. So some people will react by kind of going into flight mode. So they will want to just move, remove themselves from that situation, either mentally or physically, or they might go into freeze mode. So that is a bit like the rabbit in the headlights. And so they don't really know what to do from there. They're a little bit frozen. All we go into that fight mode, which means that sometimes actually what that means is we kind of go into panic because we go into a sort of like, Oh my God, I've got to do something, but I don't know what to do. And you sort of panic and do any old thing, which doesn't necessarily go very well. Or it might be that you get very defensive in a different situation. It might lead to a little bit of road rage. Um, Um, it might lead to you not wanting to listen to people who are trying to offer you advice because you're just trying to get through it as best you can. so we react to the anxiety via those mechanisms. And then what happens after that, once we've reacted in one particular way, what we do, of course, is we kind of recall that and internalize that. And then once the relief is over, because we've got through that situation, that will be the next stage is when you've got through the situation, however you need to. And you sense that relief at that point when that relief is there, the last thing you want to do is go and dissect the situation or figure out what you did wrong and go back into that anxiety inducing experience. So instead, what we tend to do is we just kind of sweep it under the rug and ignore it a little bit. And then the next time something like that happens, we're still going to go straight into that anxiety response. So this does look quite different depending on the situation that you're in and the person that you are and how you normally deal with overwhelming or stressful situations. But you will be able to figure out your own anxiety cycle by looking for What's triggering you, how you're responding, and then whether, after you've responded, how you're responding to that. So whether you're doing anything about it or whether you're just leaving it alone.

Thank you for listening. Find out about the different ways that you can work with us on our website, www.confidentdrivers.co.uk, and begin to transform the way you feel about driving.