Can eyesight cause driving anxiety?
I work online with people all over the world to help them overcome their fear of driving and this is a question that comes up very often.
I am not an optician and have no medical qualifications but I do help people convinced that their eyesight is the cause of their problems. I’ve also worn glasses or contact lenses for over 35 years, regularly have professional eye checks and have discussed this with several opticians.
Let me explain how although fear of driving and eyesight can be linked, the problem is most likely something else you’d never even thought of.
This video explains more about eyesight and driving anxiety
Is your eyesight the cause of your driving anxiety?
It can be but it’s often not.
If you are experiencing eyesight issues such as blurry vision, tunnel vision or anything else at all then the first thing you must do is see an optician/ophthalmologist (or whatever an eye expert is called in your location) to rule out anything serious.
What if you’ve done that though and nothing came up?
This leaves you in a frustrating position where you’re glad to be healthy but annoyed that this mysterious driving anxiety remains a problem.
Have you bought glasses and they either helped for a while then the problem came back? Or are you one of the people for whom glasses did nothing?
Let me explain what the problem really is, why glasses won’t help and how to fix it.
It’s nothing to do with driving or eyesight
If you read my other pages such as How to overcome driving anxiety you’ll see that driving anxiety has nothing to do with driving.
Your driving anxiety is a symptom, not the problem itself. Your fear of driving is just how another problem is showing itself.
In a similar way, your eyesight isn’t the problem either. Your eyesight issue is what’s happening as a result of having the anxiety, it’s not the cause of your anxiety.
The correct sequence of events is:
A problem from the past causes driving anxiety which causes eyesight problems.
Your eyes are only going funny because of the stress and anxiety caused by driving. There’s nothing physically wrong with your eyes, you aren’t going blind and you can get back to just how you were before. That is of course if you have done what I said and had your eyes checked by a professional first.
Let’s have a look at a case study of a client and this will all make more sense.
Driving anxiety case study
This is based on one of the many clients I have worked with. Some details have been changed for privacy reasons. This is typical of the problems I work with.
Tom had a problem when he was driving one day and suddenly had a panic attack.
He felt the need to pull over but couldn’t understand what was going on. He’d never had this before but he felt so bad that he thought he was having a heart attack. His friends called for an ambulance.
They ran all kinds of tests back at the hospital but could find nothing wrong.
When he went out driving a few days later he experienced the same feelings again. It was fine when he drove around town but got worse and worse the more the drove at high speed.
His eyes went blurry when he drove and he was convinced they were the cause of the issue. He spent months going from one specialist to another who all told him nothing was wrong.
His problem went and normal eyesight returned after working with me for just two sessions. It turned out that many years ago he’d suffered an injury to his arm and his mind was reliving the pain from that when he drove. If you want to know how that works then check out my many YouTube videos such as the one below.
His eyesight was funny because of the anxiety, it wasn’t causing it.
This video explains how your fear of driving began
Contact me for help
Contact me now to get over your fear of driving and get back on the road.
Learn more about driving anxiety in my YouTube videos.
