Hypnosis for Driving Anxiety: Is It the Best Option for You?
Fear is a very natural part of life, but sometimes, having fear and anxiety about things that you need to do every day can become a burden. The burden of this fear can make you incredibly unhappy. When that time comes, it’s important to work on reducing and relieving those stress points.
One thing that a lot of people have anxiety about is driving. Driving can be very stressful because it is dangerous and somewhat out of your control, but that doesn’t mean it needs to become an impossible feat in your life.
For many fears and phobias, those who suffer from anxiety will try something known as hypnotherapy to relieve their stress. This is when hypnosis is used to help recondition the mind to reduce those fears. Is hypnosis for driving anxiety an effective way to combat the fear?
Today, we’ll be learning more about hypnosis for driving anxiety, how it works, and whether or not it is the right solution for you. Plus, we have an alternative driving anxiety relief solution to offer to you as well!
What Is Hypnotherapy?
Hypnotherapy is a type of therapy in which a state of hypnosis is used to treat the patient from their fear, stress, or other concerns. Some people call this method guided relaxation or intense concentration. Through the practice of these methods, the patient should be able to enter what is known as a trance.
A trance is a specific state of awareness in which your focus is so entirely on the process that nothing else computes. During hypnotherapy, a therapist helps you to enter this trance state so that you can put your attention on a problem.
While the patient is in a trance, the therapist will help to guide and focus you on specific thoughts, tasks, or problems that you are working together to address. The heightened state of focus that is a trance can help to break down walls which would otherwise prevent you from improving your state of mind.
How Does Hypnotherapy Work?
Hypnotherapy relies on hypnosis to help a patient enter a trance state, as mentioned above. Hypnosis is not a state of total control by the therapist.
Instead, it is a state of suggestibility. This means that suggestions are more powerful when you are in a trance, and your subconscious mind can be more easily worked with than when you are fully conscious.
Not everyone is susceptible to hypnosis. About 15% of people are highly affected by hypnosis, while 20% are not affected at all. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. The overall success of hypnotherapy will depend on how susceptible one is to hypnosis.
Two Types of Hypnosis
There are two main ways that hypnotherapy is used by therapists to try and help their patients to heal and improve their lives.
Suggestion Therapy
This is what most people think of when they think of hypnosis. In suggestion therapy, a patient enters the hypnotic state. Then, the therapist will talk them through suggestions and changes that the patient should consider in their lives.
These suggestions can range from bad habits to severe fears and perceptions of dangers. In the case of hypnosis for driving anxiety, the therapist would help to break the conception that driving needs to be scary and stressful during the suggestion session.
Analysis
Therapists can also use hypnotherapy as a way of gathering information about why a patient is experiencing specific types of stress or pain. While the patient is in a relaxed trance, the therapist will talk to them to learn more about what causes their fears.
Often, patients don’t know why they are stressed or what type of trauma has caused their symptoms because it is hidden in their unconscious mind. Once the problem points are identified during hypnotherapy analysis, they can be addressed in direct psychotherapy.
All About Driving Anxiety
Now that you know more about hypnosis and hypnotherapy in general, let’s talk more specifically about driving anxiety hypnosis and how that may or may not be the right choice for you.
What Is Driving Anxiety?
Before we talk any more about hypnotherapy, let’s more clearly define what we mean when we refer to driving anxiety. Driving anxiety is when anxiety symptoms happen when they need to drive or think about driving. Those symptoms include:
- Heart palpitations
- Disorientation
- Confusion
- Dry mouth
- Shortness of breath
- Sweaty palms
- Sweating
- Panic attacks
This type of extreme stress and anxiety can make people feel as if they aren’t going to be able to survive driving, but the truth is that the tension is just a feeling that is caused by specific thoughts about driving. We can call this type of reaction driving anxiety.
What Causes Driving Anxiety?
There is no single answer to what causes driving anxiety. Often, the person who suffers from this anxiety has been through a scary or traumatic incident involving cars, and their mind has now associated that experience with driving.
Usually, driving anxiety is caused by accidental conditioning. Whether you avoid driving because you don’t know how to drive well or you don’t like the risks of driving, avoiding driving gradually teaches your brain that driving is scary. That can cause driving anxiety.
Hypnosis for Driving Anxiety
A lot of people have heard that hypnosis is the best way to treat phobias and bad habits. While it is impossible to say if that is true or false, many have found hypnotherapy to be a good treatment option for their driving anxiety.
How Hypnosis Is Used for Treatment
To treat your driving anxiety with hypnosis, you need to enter a hypnotized, trance state and then work on the base level of your fear towards driving. This process of entering a trance can be done with a trained therapist, or you can do a simple version at home with online podcasts.
Generally, we believe that working with a trained therapist is a better option as they have the experience necessary to efficiently and carefully pick apart your driving anxiety. Using online resources, though, can help you to meditate on your driving anxiety and may be useful for some who suffer from the fear of driving.
Regardless of what setting you enter the trance state in, the key is going to be remaining focused on driving, what makes driving scary, and what you can do to lessen those fears.
The point of hypnosis is to help you identify those root problems. Outside of the hypnosis, you can then address the root problems. Once treated, you will experience anxiety less frequently.
If you decide to try hypnotherapy at home, make sure that you use the same audio recording multiple times a week as the trance state will not be as deep or relaxed as it is when working with a trained professional. For that reason, it could take more time for the lessons of the hypnosis to become lodged in your subconscious mind.
The Benefits and Risks of Hypnotherapy
As mentioned, we don’t believe that hypnosis is the right choice for everyone who is dealing with driving anxiety. In fact, hypnotherapy is becoming a less and less common way of addressing phobias.
There are both benefits and risks to using hypnotherapy to address your driving fears. Ultimately, it will be up to you to decide if you believe that this type of therapy is worth a try or not.
Perceived Benefits
The most significant benefit of hypnotherapy is that it has been shown to be an effective part of treatment plans when addressing:
- Fears
- Anxiety
- Sleep problems
- Stress problems
- Depression
- PTSD
- Grief
- Overcoming bad habits like smoking
In combination with traditional psychotherapy, using hypnosis has been effective for some people in kick-starting their recovery process.
Perceived Risks
There are some situations in which using hypnosis as a therapeutic tool isn’t always a good idea. In particular, hypnosis can be dangerous in treating patients:
- Psychotic symptoms
- Drug addictions
- Hallucinations
- Psychiatric disorders
In these cases, the process of hypnotherapy could put both the patient and the therapist at risk.
There is also some evidence that hypnotherapy can create false memories or uncover information that is not true but simply believed. While hypnotherapists do their best to remain impartial and not accidentally create any false memories, the susceptible state of hypnosis makes this risk possible.
Driving Fear Program Alternative
Hypnotherapy is not going to be the right solution for all drivers who suffer from driving anxiety. Many will find the prospect of being in a trance state so intimidating that it becomes impossible to relax and learn from the experience. This is especially true if you are a person who has many anxieties.
Thankfully, hypnosis is far from the only way that you can address your driving fears. Many find other solutions to be more effective than hypnotherapy, and we find that the Driving Fear Help Program is the best alternative to hypnosis.
What Is Driving Fear Help?
Driving Fear Help is a program that helps you to figure out why you are afraid of driving and how you can make changes in your life to reduce the anxiety and fear that results from driving. The program is done completely through self-study, but it has been recommended by many trained therapists as a great coping tool.
The Program’s Goals
The goal of Driving Fear Help is to help you get over your fear and anxiety related to driving. Learn Regardless of why you are afraid or how that fear affects you, the program’s only goal is to help you learn how to overcome those fears by working on your perception of the world.
Driving anxiety doesn’t need to keep you from living your life freely. Many who live with a fear of driving find it to be restrictive, but this program can help you to learn that driving is a tool of freedom, not of fear.
Many have even found that the techniques of addressing fear and anxiety that they were able to learn through the program itself helped them to overcome stress in other areas of their life. While the program focuses explicitly on driving, it is possible to learn more about your body’s natural reactions so that you have more control over all areas of your life.
How to Use Driving Fear Help
Driving Fear Help focuses on the ways your body reacts to the fear of driving to help you understand why your body is having those types of reactions. Essentially, your body has a specific conditioned response to driving. When you drive or think about driving, it reacts in a particular way due to past experiences and stress.
Through this program, you will be working on unlearning those reactions. Conditioned responses to driving like fear and anxiety do not need to be permanent reactions, so the goal of the program is to help you break free of those reactions. When your body stops having those responses, it will be easy to replace the adverse reactions with positive ones.
The program itself is a series of guides and activities that you will work through. Each step is clear and actionable so that you can practice driving without anxiety in a very non-threatening and natural way. In the end, you may even love driving!
Solving Your Driving Anxiety
For many, using hypnosis when trying to solve their driving anxiety seems like a great option. It is a solid choice for many who feel they need to be able to relax into a completely stress-free trance to begin to unwind their fears about driving.
Still, hypnotherapy is not for everyone, and it does come with its own set of risks. An option that is mostly risk-free is to try a program like Driving Fear Help instead. Like hypnotherapy, this program breaks down why you have anxious reactions to driving and how to improve them. The method of teaching these lessons differs.
Regardless of how you decide to address your phobia of driving, know that you have the power to change how you perceive the world! Driving anxiety will only stop if you don’t find a way to fight it, and we believe that you have the power to change your course.
