You're listening to the Driving Confidence podcast for drivers who want to be calm and confident on the road. We will be sharing tips, stories and advice to beat driving nerves and anxiety and build your driving confidence. Whether you are just starting out as a learner or have had your driving licence for years, if you want to transform how you feel about driving, this podcast is for you. While we're on a season break, we're sharing with you some bonus shorts from an old episode. Normally, we create one short for each episode, for this break, we focus in on one episode in particular, which is episode 73, Anxious Hormones, exploring the links between hormones and mystery driving anxiety, with guest Kate Muir. And we've clipped this into several small shorts, all around five minutes each. This episode is a perfect listen if you are someone or if you know someone who is experiencing symptoms of perimenopause or menopause.

I, the other thing that happens is that women, at this point in the middle of the night, they tend to catastrophize. There's very much a kind of, oh my God, I'm gonna crash the car, or Oh my God, I'm not gonna be able to do this at work tomorrow. And then by the time it's sort of you get up in the morning, all that's rubbish, but in the middle of the night you are really panicking, and I wondered if that affected people as well.

Can I ask? Quite a lot where people associate their anxiety with driving. Something's happened while they're driving, but it's not actually the driving that caused the problem. and their, their association with where it happened is their problem. So they, although something else has happened, You know that. Yeah. So life stress, hot flash, sudden anxiety cuz of a hormone drop and then all of a sudden, like you mentioned, motorways and it normally happens on a dual carriage by motorways, something fast. And then it's like, well, I can't do that because it made me feel like this, so I'm not gonna do that. Is that the case from, I suppose, you know, your experience, that they would start associating those emotions with a driver?

I think it could be dri, I dunno about it with driving, but I know about it with the rest of life around perimenopause and menopause and that survey I mentioned. One in 10 women gave up their jobs and said it was because of menopause symptoms. Now I would imagine one in 10 women are doing something odd in their driving quite possibly because of menopause symptoms, and it could be limiting their driving or being more careful. I mean, the other thing I, I, I want to make clear, isn't it that we're not worse drivers than men. In fact, we're better, aren't we? insurers sort of think that we're, we're safer, don't they? But we obviously self-censor. I think.

Yeah.

I, I.

And I can't help but think that if there's one in 10 women giving up their jobs, it's probably more than one in 10 struggling with their driving in that case, because to give up your job is. Huge. So the chances are there's more than those one in 10 struggling with their driving as a result, but they might not read what I'm, when I was reading your book at the weekend and rewatching the Davina program, what struck me was that I don't think women will be aware that that what the problem is. I, I've got a feeling when we hear from people, they just say, It's a mystery. I don't understand it. They're trying to think their way out of the problem. They're trying to find a solution that might then be a magic wand that they can go, oh, it was this, and that's okay. And actually, even if we help them go, oh, light bulb moment, maybe I was in my forties or I was in my fifties. This could, that could have been me. That might have been happening to me. It's not actually gonna change anything. But what it might do is give you that information. And knowledge is power, isn't it?

Yeah, and obviously for a lot of women like myself and women who are, you know, like. Who work in the N H s doing jobs where they're 12 hours on their feet, they're in theater, they can't sit at their desk and have a look at fan there for a minute, and that's gonna solve their menopause problems. They really need to be able to remember the name of the medicine they're giving and stand up for 12 hours. And so for a lot of women, H R t hormone replacement therapy is really, really effective. And also we were all scared of it years ago, and I go into this in my book, but the kind of hormone replacement therapy that I'm using and davina's using and lots and lots of women in Britain are using is body I identical. And it's not made out of synthetic old estrogen, uh, from horses, urine, and things like that. It is made from soy. And it's a copy of your own hormone, and it does not have the cancer risk of the previous old-fashioned h l t. It is a more modern medicine, and it's also because you just rub it in through your skin mostly. If it's the estrogen, it goes straight into your bloodstream. It doesn't give you clots, it doesn't do all these things, so it's really, really good and it's not like, oh my God, I can't touch that stuff. Some women don't want to have it and can't have it, but actually it's. It's, you know, Hey, you may be prescribing in the car here, might you, you can say, could it possibly be menopause and have you been to see your GP because it, it's not as bad as you. You think this stuff, and it's worth investigating in a way that the previous generation really didn't, didn't know that. And that only since we've understood what hormones do in our brains and our bodies, and our bones, and our muscles, that they look after all of that and not just the hot flushes. And also I'm thinking one of the big things that happens to women is joints, joint pain, back pain, you know, because estrogen is your, your kind of oil in your joints, basically. And if they don't have it, a lot of women can get a stiff neck or a frozen shoulder. I expect that's also, I haven't even thought about all this with driving, but I'm thinking about it as we go along. But you maybe have people with physical pain, I don't know.

Yeah, definitely not being able to sort of like turn around and look properly over their shoulder and. Yeah, I mean, you are, you are nodding you, you're probably the person to talk about that more. Me. It's, it's quite interesting because, you know, this is completely new to me in the case of driving, but I've now got a new perspective on it.

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