Help With Panic Attacks While Driving On the Motorway
It’s been two weeks since Dan was in his car accident. He’s tried three times now to get behind the wheel of his car and drive to work. However, he can’t make it out of his driveway before his mind begins to flood with fear. His hands begin to shake. His heart begins to race. He has to pull over immediately and get out of the car to calm down. Dan is having a panic attack while driving.
Panic attacks while driving are a common occurrence among adults. They can be overwhelming and terrifying. They can create a pattern of “fear of fear” due to the rational fear of losing control of a motor vehicle. People suffering from them can feel lost and confused, but there are rapid ways to bring them to an end with hypnotherapy.
Panic Attack While Driving From Trauma
Dan’s example is a panic attack while driving from past trauma. This is where the mind associates the act of driving itself with danger and threat. It is the result of a traumatic event involving a car in some way. Typically, it’s a traffic accident, but I have seen other causes. One example is the enclosed and trapped feeling of being in the car that triggers an attack related to another event.
The good news is these types of panic attacks are often resolvable in one 2-hour hypnotherapy session. All it usually requires is bringing up the underlying fear behind the attack in hypnosis and using desensitization techniques to discharge the trapped emotion. I have the most success using the NLP Phobia Cure in these cases. This is such an effective technique, it inspired a trauma treatment used by licensed clinicians called Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories.
Attacks From Rumination and Anxiety
Moving beyond panic attacks while driving from trauma, things start to get more complicated. In these cases, the panic attacks have less to do with the act of driving itself, but rather the state the mind goes into when driving. If you have read our FAQ on hypnosis and hypnotherapy, then you will know we go into a natural state of hypnosis while driving. This is a state of dissociation where we are focused on our internal world as the mind goes into auto-pilot mode while driving. This can be a relaxing and calming experience for many people, but it can also be an opportunity to ruminate on one’s problem.
Sometimes ruminating on our problems can result in anxiety. This can be problematic for people who are labeled as having panic disorders because these people often have habitual thought processes around anxiety that are maladaptive. I discussed this a bit in this post on how to calm your nervous system. To summarize, the experience of anxiety triggers a behavioral pattern where individuals begin to spiral and feed into their anxiety. This spiral continues in loops until the anxiety turns into sheer panic. This can be quite terrifying if it occurs while driving a motor vehicle
Resolve Your Panic Attacks While Driving At Their Root Cause
The above post I linked contains some effective strategies for managing panic attacks while driving. It provides a way to calm the nervous system and bring it back into balance with breathing and imagination. However, this is just a temporary fix to a problem that will repeat in the future. To be free of it completely, you need to work with a board-certified hypnotherapist to resolve your anxiety and panic attacks at the cause.
Just like Dan who has panic attacks because of a car accident, your anxiety and panic attacks have a root cause as well. What this cause is specifically cannot be defined easily in a blog post. Human beings are dynamic and complex. Perhaps, it is anxiety and panic caused by your ex-girlfriend cheating on you. Maybe, the drive to work allows your mind to ruminate on that trauma to the point of panic. Or, perhaps, the root cause of your anxiety goes back to an event when you were a small child. These memories might be outside of conscious awareness, but the unconscious mind remembers and stores every moment of our life.
Hypnotherapy Can Help You Be Free
Regardless of what the cause is, a skilled, board-certified hypnotherapist who has studied the right modalities can help you find what is behind your panic attacks while driving. We can work with you to resolve it. There may be many causes behind your state of anxiety. You may need multiple sessions to resolve them all, but that’s okay. With every session, the number of anxiety and panic episodes in your life will begin to decrease in number. With enough commitment, they will eventually be gone.
I can personally attest to this as a former software engineer whose life used to be ruled by anxiety and depression. My work in hypnotherapy has allowed me to achieve a level of emotional peace I never thought possible. I now use all the skills I learned in my journey to help people achieve the same. Explore my website to read the testimonials I’ve received from clients to see what hypnotherapy can do for you today.
If you found this post on panic attacks while driving helpful, consider reading these on hypnotherapy for anxiety and rewiring the anxious brain
