You are 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 license for years. If you want to transform how you. Feel about driving this podcast is for you. Before this episode starts, I need to jump in with a very quick apology. There's a few echoes in this episode, but we spoke to Tracy. All three of us thought that this was a great episode that perhaps wouldn't come across in quite the same way. We rerecorded it. So hopefully you'll forgive us for some of the echoey bits and still enjoy the information anyway. in this episode, we're delighted to be welcoming on Tracy Hannigan, the sleep coach, and Tracy specializes in adult insomnia. Welcome Tracy. Hey, thank you for having me on. I'm really excited to be here. We are as well because this is something a bit new, bit different. It's um, cuz we all know that sleep affects us, but we also wanted to find out from an expert about does sleep affect the way that we drive? And could it be causing anxiety and stress? Yeah, so some of the context around that is that we hear from people who have been driving for years. Perfectly happy driving. Don't really give it a thought. And then all of a sudden, and they describe it as out of blue, they experience some driving anxiety and they don't know where it's come from. They can't fit it into a natural pigeon hole. They, they sort of say, it's not like I had an accident. It's not like something happened. I just had it bam outta the blue. And it's almost like a mystery, and we just are interested in exploring some of the possible potential contributing factors, and we think sleep might be one of those contributing factors. Yeah, I could definitely see how there would be a relationship. There's a, there's actually a bidirectional relationship between anxiety and sleep. And when people are having difficulty with their sleep, specifically, if it's insomnia related, their um, psychological arousal is higher. Their safety system, their radar is switched on. It's just a little bit more sensitive and it's very adaptive actually, but it becomes a bit of a vicious circle. So it's adaptive in the sense that. If we were, um, walking across the, the Masai chasing wilderbeast all day and we're very, very tired and we climb into a cave to sleep. We don't want our tiredness running the show if a lion appears, right? So if we we're anxious and we perceive ourselves under, under threat, it becomes difficult to sleep. If we then start worrying about our sleep, we start sleeping even worse. So it becomes a bit of a vicious circle in that way. But if, if people are sleeping poorly, that hypervigilance, that hyper arousal, that sensitivity to threat. Is actually a 24/ 7 phenomenon, so it can affect other things in people's lives. The unconscious scanning that people do when they're driving for things that don't fit the pattern like much too quickly or that thing just jumped out between, those cars are much more sensitive to those inputs. We might not necessarily react to them appropriately. Sometimes a bit, bit too much, a bit too little, but the safety radar is that much more keyed up. And so when you're in a situation where you are constantly having to be scanning threats, you could easily see how not sleeping could become paired with being anxious in the car. Anxious. That makes so much sense. Yeah, that doesn't it really? Yeah. So if you had a bad night's sleep, maybe you were woken up by the children or the grandchildren in, or if you suffer within insomnia and have, poor sleep patterns, then you are more on high alert. Yeah, some of the things that our brain becomes really good at when we don't sleep well, we always talk about the things that our brain becomes bad at. But there are things that we do get good at, and one is, focusing on the negative, focusing on threatening things, perseverating about things, the fixating on them. That's, again, that's simply our safety radar, being looking for danger. You know, we've become really good at looking for danger, but unfortunately this creates a little bit of a selection bias. So then we start seeing all of the negative things and then they start piling up and piling up, piling up, and we become, less able to kind of think laterally and think creatively. And so you can see how all of those things could create issues for people's driving as well. Yes. So not only might it be that you are on high alert for danger on the road and other cars, other drivers, but actually you're gonna be more likely to be having negative thoughts about maybe other things in your life. Absolutely. So you're gonna be focusing more on stressful areas of your life cause you had a lack of sleep because you're tired. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then of course you then become more anxious and worried. Um, you might make poorer decisions. Uh, we do have slower reaction times when we don't sleep well. So all of these things can feed into, um, a scenario where it becomes a bit of a vicious circle. You know 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.