driving drives me crazy

[mamascrazy1985]

okay so i have been dealing with anxiety for about a year and a half no meds and was doing good then bad then spent the whole last summer watching my 2 lil cousins as well as my 2 girls and spent that time shelled up at home...over the winter i guess i was fine not so bad..... but for some reason this week or should i say past 2 or 3 days have been imortal hell for me.... i spent the last week telling myself hey i havent had anxiety issues in a while..... BIG mistake.... i ahve had a neighbor live with me for the past 3 weeks because she hates her mom another BIG mistake...... well i sent her home last night and got in my car to ride my two year old around in hopes that she would go to sleep..... another HUGE mistake.. for some reason i felt like i was going to pass out and nearly did but thankfully i made it to my mother in laws house and she drove me home.... i just got my car back now and was talking to my husband about going to get something to eat and i have to have him drive me because i am scared to drive and pass out and possibly hurt my children :cry: i dont know what to do anymore i am seriously thinking about meds... all this has to happen now as soon as i get accepted back to college... anxiety is a nasty thing and i wouldnt wish it on my worst enemy <maybe> but i am fine then im sad then im scared and i feel so alone... my husband is now getting to the point where he thinks i am looney and i am scared that he will eventually leave me.... i dont know what to do.... HELP

[Dale]

hi, my names Dale
I also suffer agonising anxiety

I relate to your story about driving.
I was driving through the outback one day in 4WD when suddenly i felt a sensation of ice crawling into my brain, and couldnt feel my arms or legs, and i felt like i was going to pass out. scary stuff!
I have a condition called panic disorder, and unfortunately for me, 36% of people with PD also suffer from Agoraphobia.
they say that alot of people who suffer from agoraphobia have their first 'experience' driving in a car. And your understandable fear of driving and having another surge of fear is a common attribute of agoraphobia. Its fine though, because with proper treatment, 90% of people overcome their agoraphobic senses.

the way to overcome these strong feelings is to prove that you can deal with them. by avoiding what you fear, you are reinforcing your fear for the future. Ask yourself, what happens if a situation arises where you MUST drive somewhere by yourself, but all the while you have been avoiding driving because you are scared, you are going to expecting to have another panic attack, but if you move towards what you fear, in perhaps small steps like driving around the block by yourself and then gradually go further and further by yourself, you will soon gather more confidence in yourself to overcome your fears, trust me, I know.

I really hope this helps you, and remember your not the only one suffering, there are plenty of people with this sort of thing, including me.

Dale

[forwells]

Hi mamascrazy1985 :D

Let me see if i can help you a bit here .

scared scared scared

BIG mistake BIG mistake huge mistake


You see what you are thinking , it is you that is making a mole hill out of a ant hill . Im not having a go at you i am just pointing it out .

I bet you also say over and over again , I cant do this , its to hard etc

This is how it works , When our body is anxious we react to these feelings most often with fear , when we react with fear we start adding what ifs to it and this in turn starts to feed the problem with what could only be discribe as rubbish .We lose ourselves in the rubbish that we are telling ourselfs .

Ask yourself two years ago did you worry about driving , did you worry about fainting while driving . I guess no . The reason your are worried now has nothing to do with the driving , you have just projected your anxiety on to it. Just the same as Dale is projecting his anxiety into Agoraphobia . He is not scared of leaving the house but in scared of the rection that his body has in regaurds to leaving the house .( see you dont tell yourself oh i cant leave the house because the sky might fall in , or the gound might open up and take me , but in fact you cant leave because im scared of my anxiety and what may happen away from your comfort zone you have built, anxiety has you bluffed .) Other people project it onto their health . They cant see the connection between that twitch and stress and convince themselves no matter how many test or doctors tell them that this twitch is not something nasty . But what does the evidence say . They just do not see it and the only reason is because they do not understand what stress is doing to their body and mental state . The are not mentally ill, its just their body and mind is tired and searching for reasons behind why they are scared all the time . This is the bodys job , it is built to look for danger and it does a good job at it but sometimes it misfires.

This fear comes from your body , it is not you , it is not your thinking that has change , It is soley and only from a anxious system which has learned to handle less and less stress . Untill you see past anxieties bluff and see the logic behind these fears you can not get past them . You have to look at it and say well i was not scared of it 12 months ago , there is no logical reason why i should be scared of it , so there for it must be my system on high misreading things and if i can reducing my system on high then it will fade. Yes i can hear your mind going oh but i am scared of fainting . your mot you think you are , Look at the logic , How long you been driving ? Have you ever fainted ? Do people just faint ? No when we faint we feel little time to react such as pulling over .
Another thing fainting is not going to happen . Why because to faint you have to have low blood pressure and no one with anxiety has low blood pressure because anxiety raises this pressure . So as you can see with logic you are worrying about something they in most likely hood will never happen .

How do you get past it ? DO NOT ACCEPT YOUR ANXIETY AS BEING THE NORMAL . This is what happens with Agoraphobia, people except their anxiety is something they have to live with , and in turn it starts to rule there life .As it rules more and more of their life it ads more and more anxiety , so even though you might think that staying inside your house is helping . IS IT? Anxiety is nothing more than our reaction from a stressed out body . If you remove the stress then you have no reason to react to it and it settles .

Fear is a learned response and nothing more . Just as your kid may be scared of the man under the bed and once you explain to them that it is their mind playing tricks. They except this and come to turns with it and it fades away . You cannot be scared of anything unless you chose for it to scare you . Fear is nothing more than a thought . So if you chose to not be scared of it then the body will learn this and slowly except that there is nothing to be scared of . The only difference between you and your kid is he believe you and you question it. It is this questioning of everything that is no help to us :?

Now i went from a person that would get in a car and drive anywhere , i would drive 1200klms in a day not a care in the world , to a person that would freak out just at the thought of getting in my ute . I got past this and you can to . 18 months down i still have some feelings towards it but only on long trips by myself .'

How did i do it ? I just did it , i understode that the only logical reason behind me being scared of driving was that i had convinced myself that it was a problem . It wasnt the problem at all the problem was i was scared of my sysmptoms of anxiety and scared of having a turn out in the middle of nowhere . By being scared my brain didnt understand this and thought that the fear was coming from the ute and not the anxiety itself . Your brain cannot tell the differences between a anxious or fearful thought and real fear . If there is no real fear it will find the thing it thinks you are scared of and remember that as the thing to be scared of . What ever that thing is it will remember. This could be anything and is why some people become scared of some weird and wonderful things like cats , teddy bears , clowns etc . This is anxiety projecting itself onto other things . You have to see it for what it is .

One day i did and i finally had enough , got in my ute and drove , yes it wasnt nice , infact it scared the shit out of me , but i knew what it was . When i came back you know what I was alive , i didnt faint , i did die , i got past it and you can to . You just need to take it in small steps so that you can retrain your brain that there is nothing there to be fearful of .

Remember it is only someting your brain learned and with time and small steps it can unlearn .

Also stop telling yourself , scared scared scared , i cant do it etc . Tell youself yes it sucks , yes its not nice but i refuse to let you control my life any more and i want my life back for me but also for my hubby and little kids

You can do , i have and many others have before you. Oh and i did it with no meds so you dont need to buy into that crap about needing drugs to control your anxiety. The power is with in you , If you think you can handle it without drugs then do it , if you need them then thats fine also . But from my point of view drugs are the longer way because even if you get better you still have to learn to controll your anxiety when you remove those drugs .

cheers kev :D