Driving lessons for anxiety will not work.
I spent over 20 years as a driving instructor during which time I taught over 1,000 people to drive and trained hundreds of instructors across the UK. I now work online as a hypnotherapist and I help people all over the world to overcome their driving anxiety.
With all of this experience and knowledge, let me explain why driving lessons for anxiety will achieve nothing and often make the problem worse.
This video explains why you’re wasting your time with driving lessons
Why driving lessons for anxiety won’t work
The reason that driving lessons won’t help with anxiety is simple:
Driving anxiety has nothing to do with driving!
Driving anxiety is merely the symptom of another problem. You have something else going on in your mind that needs taking care of and your driving will only improve when that other issue is fixed.
You are completely wasting your time going out in a car with a driving instructor because you’re working on the wrong thing.
Taking driving lessons for anxiety is like calling an electrician to fix your leaking roof.
This video explains how your mind works
What causes fear of driving
Driving anxiety is caused by an emotion from a past event replaying when you drive.
It could be that when you drive you are reliving a memory of losing a pet many years ago. The feeling from that has become trapped inside your driving.
This explains why the feeling is so misplaced and why you’re scared of things now that you’ve done many times before.
Losing a pet has nothing to do with driving on a highway but your mind has linked the two things.
In the same way that hearing a certain song reminds you of a past event, driving is now making you remember your pet. All of this happens subconsciously so you won’t be aware of it and it won’t make any sense to your conscious mind.
Going out on a driving lesson where you learn to check your mirrors, keep space around you and be calm is never going to fix the memory of your pet!
I’ve written a whole page on how to overcome driving anxiety which goes into great detail about this so please read that for more information.
This is why no amount of driving will help. In fact, forcing yourself to drive only makes things worse.
This video explains why people fear driving after passing their test
How driving lessons make anxiety worse
Driving instructors and other “experts” who don’t really understand driving anxiety will almost always rely on exposure therapy to fix the problem.
Exposure therapy is when you go out driving with the aim of beating the fear by force.
There are two main problems with this:
- It is extremely dangerous to force yourself to drive when you’re anxious
- It doesn’t work
The reason it fails is that by facing your fear you only make yourself even more scared which then strengthens the problem.
Take the pet example above. The more you drive, the more the pain grows as your mind thinks your pet is dying!
You’ll be even more scared next time you drive because you’ve given yourself yet another bad experience of driving. Your mind then fights back harder than ever because it now thinks driving is even more dangerous than before.
There are people who insist exposure therapy worked for them. What they don’t realise is that they have simply moved the problem and it will show up in some other way.
See my page on exposure therapy for more information.
Why driving lessons for anxiety will fail
Now you understand why driving lessons for anxiety will never work.
Even from just a few points made on this page, you can see how:
- Working on driving means you’re working on the wrong thing
- Driving more only makes the problem worse
- Driving instructors simply do not understand how the mind works
No amount of driving will beat driving anxiety.
If you really want to overcome driving anxiety then read other pages on my website and check out hundreds of free videos on my YouTube channel.
If you want to get over your fear once and for all contact me now.
