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.

Well, this is as a driving instructor, this is something that I was gonna ask. Listen to you intently because someone that's teaching people to drive, we always say about the sleep side of things where people are sleep deprived and how that then affects their driving. They can't concentrate properly, although they think they can, but their function is, is just not quite there. And they can't do what they normally do because they're just tired. Although they don't think they are, they just can't function the way they normally do. That's as, as a driving, that's one of the biggest things that when I'm training people in the fleet industry or company drivers, you know, that is one of the biggest things that I see is the sleep. And it's, it's, you've mentioned it there with the hormones and, and then brain fog as well. So that idea that actually you are foggy at a time. When you've gotta make really important decisions sometimes, and maybe there's something in there about that hesitancy that you get sometimes at junctions or at roundabouts or something that's a bit difficult that you, that you normally would find quite easy. But now what you can't is like, why am I, why is that difficult? Why? Why? What happens?

I mean, people have told me stories of, you know, not being able to suddenly read the map and trying to read the map on their phone and it all blurring and not making sense to them yet. They're making a journey that they've made a number of times before and they know what to do, but they suddenly get that kind of complete panic and the minute one kind of panic kicks off, then other panics kick off and you know, you end up. Not reading the map, going to Sainsbury is getting there, forgetting half of shopping, coming out and going, where did I put my car? Now I know that happens to people normally, but according to my Instagram, which is called Minow Scandal, and I have over 30,000 people sending me stuff on Instagram. So it's a big conversation space. I'm, um, loads of people are losing their cars all the time. I mean, do you hear about that?

This is where, I mean, a little tactic that I have is I always try and park in the same space. I always try and park in the same area. There's a car park I go to regularly so that I can be a little bit on autopilot.

I mean that, that's kind of funny. But there are people who get incredibly high levels of anxiety, which take them from being, as you said, a normal driver. And I, I experienced this a bit myself. That to not being able to drive on motorways and finding the idea of driving on a motor may made them feel sick. I mean, I didn't not do it. But I absolutely had to grip my teeth, and that wasn't, wasn't the case before. And during my menopause, I got divorced and so I had to basically, you know, learn to drive again. And a lot of the time my husband had driven the car and, you know, because I'm a woman, you know, I'd sat in the passenger seat occasionally throwing, you know, ice allies to the children or whatever. And so literally I was de-skilled. As a driver, that also happens. But then I suddenly, you know, having to deal with driving separately and driving kind of zip cars I got on the corner of the street, so I didn't know what car I was gonna get every day or whatever. And I remember being absolutely terrified. I have to say, once I went on hormone replacement therapy, which is estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, which is a female hormone. I felt much better. I felt much more confident and I sorted out my life. And you know, now I've got a new partner and indeed a new car. And you know, my life is fine. It's fantastic now, but there was that really difficult period which involved stress of two things happening at once. And I think in midlife, people are not just suffering from hormones, they're suffering from their parents being ill, they're suffering from their teenage children being difficult. They're trying to keep their job. All these things, I think throw you and if, if you're not a confident driver, which I wasn't really, if you just throw me a little bit to one side, you can really throw me off course. I don't know if that's what you find in in the people who come to you.

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