Well, we were on a season break. We sharing with you some bonus shores 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 72. Rewiring the brain understanding and overcoming driving anxiety with Joshua Fletcher. And we've clipped this into several small shorts, all around five minutes each. This episode is probably the episode that we share the most with those of you who gets in touch and are asking for help. So, if you have driving anxiety, there's probably something for you in one of these shores.

My association with the car was agoraphobia and also claustrophobia. I don't like being in here if someone else is driving or if I'm driving. I don't wanna lose control. I don't want to feel the sensations of anxiety and panic. Some of those sensations include, Heart palpitations, ization, sudden overwhelm, everything becomes bright. Peripheral vision shuts down, sweaty palms, you know, feeling a bit sick, winding down the window, doing all these things. Um, I didn't like that. And that my threat response, my fear response, I developed an association that the car was suddenly now dangerous. So even thinking about doing a journey, Triggered my threat response and I'd feel sick and horrible and my mood would change. Never mind getting in the car. But thankfully associations can change. So now I can get into a car and, and, and be like, yeah, or just a normal association, like, oh, I can't bother driving, you know, rather than having fear dictating. Um, but yeah, no, it was, I felt, I feel safe in the car now and I used to. But the association with the, with the car during that phobia, during that anxiety, yeah, it definitely changed temporarily.

And so one of the, this is one of the reasons we've. Started to go out and speak to other people is we hear from a lot of people about exactly the same as you used to be able to drive. I've been driving for however long and then suddenly one day I'm driving and bam, I'm whammed with mystery driving anxiety or actually. More specifically mystery anxiety while driving, which then becomes, like you say, associations becomes driving anxiety, and that's sort of part of what we are looking at. What is it that happens to somebody when they're suddenly whammed with this anxiety out of the blue? Why does that happen?

That's a really good question and for me, one of the biggest components to overcoming driving anxiety is psychoeducation is actually learning what's happening. So what happens is when your body feels under threat, a process called neuroception happens where your threat response kicks in and, and the amygdala in your brain signals to the rest of the body. You know, fight, flight, freeze, and fall, go. Something bad's gonna happen, and you get a big dump of adrenaline. So if you've ever sat behind the wheel and your hands are shaking and you've had to pull over, or you're doing all these things, that's your threat response kicking off. That's your adrenaline. You feel like you're gonna lose control. You don't lose control, but it feels like it and you feel like you might do, um, that's the whole point of a, of an adrenaline rush. Or some people call it a panic attack. I don't call it panic attack cuz it's not very accurate. You're not, nothing's attacking you, but it does feel scary and very imminent. So what happens is when you are driving along, And sometimes people can have panic. Loads of people have panic attacks behind the wheel, usually nothing to do with driving. It's usually stress to do with their own lives, and there's an accumulation of stress and accumulation of stress. This threat response, the amygdala, is not part of our thinking brain. It will just detect that you're incredibly stressed and trigger just in case he's trying to look after you. Like, whoa, why are you stressed? Maybe someone caught you up in the road. Maybe I. You went through, um, you know, a deep puddle. Maybe something happened, another driver annoyed you. Maybe you just had a thought about work. Bang and. Hit with, uh, a little of adrenaline. This is how most driving anxiety starts. That feeling of, I'm not in control. And so therefore, and this is the key thing to remember, driving anxiety mostly starts because then we engage in safety behaviors. So for me, my first panic attack hap happened on the last lane of the motorway. And so I didn't know that was a panic attack as such. I thought something really bad was gonna happen. So I engaged in, in C B T, we call it a safety behavior. So I was like, well, just in case I pulled over to the slow lane, but nothing bad happened. It was adrenaline rush. However, my amygdala remembered that I did a safety behavior and so it goes well next time you go in the motorway, don't go in the fast lane. I looked after you go in the far slow lane in the middle lane. And that's how my driving anxiety started. And suddenly two months later, I'm planning journeys on Google Maps. I'm avoiding certain roads. I wouldn't go over bridges, you know, because of all these things. And I'm slowly developing these agoraphobic, driving anxiety tendencies. Uh, cuz that's what the brain's supposed to do. You know, if my, if you're bitten by a dog as a kid, your brain, your amygdala will fire off every time you hear a dog. See a dog's all on tv, whatever. But what's great is that you can rewire it, but you rewire it by doing the tricky stuff minus the safety behaviors. That's a very kind of quick way of explaining it cuz it's a bit of a journey to overcome driving anxiety.