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.

Yeah. And I think actually, and you just mentioned about, oh, prescribing in the car, bringing it up in the car. This was one of your questions when we were talking, wasn't it? Yeah. It's like, how does. And the Davina program. Was revelation to me because I just never knew anything about it. So it was like, whoa. And I've told so many people, men go and watch it. It's brilliant. But my question is, as a driving instructor, what is it that I can do that, you know, people are with perimenopause or menopause or, you know, what can I do as a a trainer to help them with this?

Well, I suppose one of the things is for them to see it themselves. So I suppose you can ask them when did this feeling of anxiety start? Was it when you were, since you've been driving? Or did it start two years ago or five years ago? And what age, if you don't mind me asking, kind of, are you, and you know, they say, oh, I'm 47, I'm 43. And of course people go to perimenopause earlier. So 43 isn't. The question, neither is 26. You get some people with very young menopause. So it's not, but um, it's mostly for people in their forties that you would be looking at and fifties. And I suppose also you can just say, I've done a podcast with this crazy woman who's written a menopause book. What do you think about that we were talking about? And then you're not making it personal to them, are you? But you know, you could say, You know, we've been reading this book or whatever. Or you can say, did you see the Davina documentary? Who knew it did that to your brain? Um, and I suppose by generalizing it and not kind of poking at someone, and then if they say, you can say, well look, here's some great resources. Why don't you read a book and see if any of it's gonna make or go to your doctor and then cause they space car like being a hairdresser. And they all, you also have to get on quite well. Um, so it's, it's maybe a space that you can use in it, in a kind of really good way. I dunno.

Yeah, we're an agony. Really. That's what we are.

And the other thing I was thinking about, cause I'm now doing this book on the pills, so I'm doing lots of stuff on. Premenstrual syndrome and all the hormones going up and down during the normal cycle of a woman. And I was remembering, I, I had an early job when I was a student working in a hospital on a giant dishwasher that was a bit like a conveyor belt in an airport. And all the dishes were going round and just in the couple of days before my period when I was on that dishwashing machine, I just smashed plates all the time. Right. And after. After the second month, we thought, no, let's just keep her off the dishwashing machine for those couple of days before her period, and there weren't so many plates smashed. But I wonder, there's my coordination, there's my driving. It's affected by my hormones. I'm a plate smasher, but could I be a bad driver on those two days? I suspect so I suspect that our coordination, cause you know, estrogen and testosterone are going up and down and they, they definitely do affect your coordination. Um, you know, cuz those are the days you want to sort of hide under the duvet and stay at home. And it's worse for some people than others. And it's people, some people are fine, but some people, obviously people like me get affected by it. Not seriously, but you know. It was clear that I was not handling things well.

Stay away from the plates. Stay away from the plates.

Yeah.

And when I watched the pill revolution at the weekend, so they were saying then that when women are going on the contraceptive pill, that a third of them were reporting possible anxiety, low mood depression, so, When you combine women on the contraceptive pill, women going through perimenopause and menopause, that's a lot of hormonal anxiety going on that could be affecting our erodes. And I also know that it's not just women, is it? So you mentioned Kate before we press record, that also some men.

Well, it's not quite the same, but men's hormones levels do go up and down. And in particular as you get older, older drivers over 50, uh, I think it's 10% of men over 50 have low testosterone, and that has an almost menopausal like, Feeling for them too. And so they get depressed. They often get very tired, and I was talking to a male doctor about what we call the, which is when you're short of testosterone, and he says, I've got some lorry drivers that have to park after a couple of hours and sleep in the layby because they can't hold their concentration. But they could when they were younger, and that was one of the points at which one of these lorry drivers recognized that his testosterone or something was wrong with him, went and then got his testosterone topped up to normal level and kaboom, you know, was not needing to take a nap halfway through kind of his shift. By the time you're 70, you know, your testosterone is much, much lower and by the time you're 80, you know, as we get older and testosterone's all about spatial awareness too and muscle and energy and being on it, all of which are probably quite useful for driving. So, you know, we've got to be sympathetic to each other. I think men and women about this and, and, but I mean, I think it's amazing if you can give people this knowledge. Of themselves and be looking out for it.

Yeah, definitely. And. I'm so glad you mentioned the men and I'm, I'm really interested in the lorry droppers, but because I work in my day job, I work in cancer care, so I work with quite few men on hormone treatments and so they have very similar symptoms to the menopause. So it is everybody, like you say, it's a people problem. We're we are all, we are all, all people have hormones.

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