This program has been designed to get you back on the road with confidence and comfort as fast as possible. In order for the program to be effective, you must follow the plan as described and not skip the exercises or pick and choose the information you implement. Even if you don’t feel that the exercises are working, it’s important that you do them regardless and trust that on an unconscious level they are doing what they’re supposed to do.
Feel free to review the program to get an overview, but re-read the entire program from start to finish and stop and do the exercises to get the best results. The techniques given in this program have helped countless people with the same difficulties as you and if you trust the program and put them into practice in your life, you too will soon find yourself with a new world opening up to you.
The program is centered on several very powerful techniques that are being used by professional therapists and others who work with phobic clients. We have read and researched virtually every authoritative source on overcoming fears and phobias written over the last 100 years to determine the most common principles that have stood the test of time in helping individuals overcome their anxieties. We have combined those principles with breakthrough modern research to bring what we feel is the single most effective tool to help you quickly and easily conquer your fear of driving. As you follow the program, you may find that what is presented may not be entirely new to you. Keep in mind that the spectacular results of the program are due not only to the ideas presented on their own, but in the synergistic effect of their combined use. Clinical psychologists and former driving phobia sufferers alike have had input into the program’s creation to ensure it covers the necessary topics and is structured to get you back on the road as quickly as possible. If you have any suggestions or feedback on the program, or if you would like to share your success story (we love those!), please email us at
service@drivingfear.com.
I want to congratulate you on making the choice to face your fear and overcome something in your life that is challenging. Whether you feel it or not, you’re a very brave individual and you should be proud of yourself for taking steps to better yourself, most people do not.
Exercise
Find a blank notebook or go buy one. You’re going to be doing some writing throughout the program and I want you to have a single source devoted to the program. If you keep things documented on scraps of loose paper you’ll end up misplacing some and it doesn’t treat the program and your recovery with the respect it deserves. This is going to be your personal Driving Fear journal, keep it someplace safe and private. If you want to share the contents with someone when the program is over and you’re back on the road comfortably, that’s fine, but for now only you can view what’s inside.
© DrivingFear.com All Rights Reserved 9
What is Your Fear?
Where did your fear come from? Most people with a fear of driving have a history of anxiety or panic attacks, or have had a bad experience while driving, or while driving in a particular situation, such as highways, bridges, or long distances. How or why you have the challenge is irrelevant for this program to be useful to you. What is important is that you take the time to understand what it is specifically you fear about driving. Is it a fear of having a panic attack? Losing control?
Passing out? This program is not designed to determine the cause of your anxiety; that is the job of your therapist if you choose to visit one. I don’t care what the cause is; I’m focusing on the solution. What this program WILL do is give you the tools to overcome the fear.
The good news is that virtually everything you’re afraid of, no matter how seemingly strange, is more than likely very common and a fear shared by many others. Your fears are the result of your anxiety, your focus on your physical feelings, and your lack of understanding about what is happening to your body when you feel this fear. It doesn’t mean you’re weird, crazy, losing your mind, or sick. It just means you’re anxious in a situation that has no danger and don’t know how to respond to your irrational feelings.
I also want to be clear that I am in no way underestimating the severity of your fear. I am fully aware that many programs that market themselves as programs to ease fear are geared towards individuals with what is considered relatively normal anxiety about a bothersome situation. If your discomfort with driving is mild, this program will help you as well and will do so quickly and effectively, but it is designed for those with moderate to severe anxiety.
Exercise
Grab your journal. Sit down someplace quiet and private for a bit and think about what it is you’re really afraid of when you’re driving. Is it losing control? Dying? That you’ll jerk the wheel and drive off the bridge? That you can’t get off the highway or pull over easily and you feel trapped? All of the above? Really put some thought into it and write it down. This should be at least a half page to one page description. Don’t just write “dying” or “losing control”. Write down what would happen, as if you’re telling a story for actors to play out on stage. Picture your worst case scenario in your mind and write it down as if someone had to recreate it. It doesn’t matter how strange it seems at this point, trust me, I’ve heard them all and you’re not the first. As a matter of fact, if thinking about and writing down your fear makes you realize it’s a bit silly, that’s a good thing. In a couple of weeks, it’s going to be a wonderful feeling to look back at what you write today and know that it’s a chapter in your life you can close. Don’t rob yourself of that feeling and the realization of how far you’ve come, write it down.
Understanding Anxiety and Panic
When you do feel fearful or anxious, or even have a panic attack in response to something you fear, it’s important for you to realize exactly what is actually happening. This is often greatly different from what you fear may be happening. In many cases, simply being aware of and understanding what is happening to you physically, and that it’s predictable and not unique to you, is enough to drastically reduce your symptoms.
A panic attack is a very individual experience, but one typically described as a feeling of overwhelming terror. Some of the more common symptoms are listed below:
Heart palpitations
A feeling of choking or not being able to swallow
Sweating
Dizziness
Numbness or tingling in the extremities
Inability to take a deep breath
Trembling
Feelings of unreality (depersonalization)
Fear of losing control, dying, or going crazy
You may have additional symptoms and thoughts that come on during a panic attack; the important thing to realize is that although they’re scary, they really don’t present any danger. Regardless of what you think, you WON’T lose control, die, or go crazy. The fact that you’re concerned about going crazy is strong evidence that you’re not since genuinely crazy people generally don’t realize they’re irrational or slip in and out of their mental illness. You’re not going to die from a panic attack, I know you feel like you will, but it’s just a thought, not reality. Your heart won’t explode or quit working; it can beat very, very fast for a lot longer than a panic attack lasts. Think about how long a person can exercise vigorously, it’s a long time and the heart is capable of sustaining that level for a lot longer than people exercise. You WON’T lose control
from a panic attack. You won’t run from your car across the highway and embarrass yourself, it just won’t happen.
When you get anxious and panicky, your body is going through what you’ve probably heard described as the flight or fight response. During that response, your body is preparing itself to either fight off a predator or run away from one. This is a reaction that goes back to caveman days and something that often keeps us safe, you wouldn’t want to eliminate it if you could. The problem is that you’re having those thoughts and feelings when there’s no appropriate reason. A vicious animal isn’t chasing you and no one is breaking into your house, you’re just driving down the road. You need to remember what this reaction means to your body however, it’s taking serious internal action to save itself. The fact that there’s nothing to truly be saved from is inconsequential, the reaction is the same. There are many aspects of this self preservation response, but let’s take a look at just one and see how it causes symptoms. When you get this anxious, your body takes blood from your extremities like your fingers and toes and shuttles it to your internal organs. After all, your organs are going to need blood to fight off that saber toothed tiger and your fingers are relatively expendable in that situation. But wait, there’s no tiger, you’re just driving to the store. Well, that prehistoric reaction is why your fingers tremble and tingle or go numb. You wouldn’t question it at all if a tiger was actually chasing you, you’d be focused on running away. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere to run to in your car (that’s why you get the trapped feeling) and nothing to run from (no tiger). There’s very little to take your attention away so your focus becomes “what’s happening to me!” (scary thoughts). All these feelings and thoughts that scare the daylights out of you are normal reactions to a stressful event, real or imagined; it’s what you do with these reactions that bring on a panic attack.
Exercise
What are the symptoms you feel when you’re in your fearful situation? Write them down and study them a bit. Have they ever hurt you? Next time you feel them, remember that you know what they are, they shouldn’t surprise you, and they won’t hurt you. When you start to practice driving again, do this again in your notebook as soon as you complete your practice session while it’s fresh in your mind. Then when you’re feeling calmer you can go back and analyze what you were feeling and how your flight or fight response was the cause. Some people find it very helpful to bring an audio recorder with them on their practice sessions so they can describe what they’re
feeling in real time, I think it’s a great idea!
Your Fear Cycle
Although the danger you feel when you’re driving is not real, the fear is. There is an easily recognized cycle you go through when you’re under anxiety and fearful about driving. Let’s look at what happens to get you anxious and keep you anxious.
Step 1
You remember a bad experience you had when you were in the situation you fear. These thoughts bring on a round of minor physical sensations such as an increased heart rate, sweaty palms, or trembling. Be aware that the bad experience does not even have to have been real, but merely an imagined event that has been habitually replayed in your mind enough times to trick your brain into believing it. Some of you can easily trace the origins of your fear back to a particular distressing event while driving such as an accident, but most have not had any difficulty while driving except those created in your own mind (this includes panic attacks in the car).
Step 2
You notice these physical changes that happen in response to your fearful thoughts and you begin to increase your awareness of your body and get afraid that the sensations will escalate. Your increased attention on your bodily sensations makes them appear more significant than they actually are and you become even more afraid of your feelings. You may become worried that you will pass out, go crazy, or lose
control as a result of your fear.
Step 3
Your fear of having more physical sensations increased your body’s stress response and the result is a self fulfilled increase in bodily symptoms. At this point you may have a panic attack or leave/avoid the situation.
Step 4
If you avoid or leave the situation you experience a decrease in your body’s symptoms which you perceive as evidence that your fears were based in reality. You have taught yourself that the way to decrease your fear is to avoid driving. The more you avoid driving the more ingrained into your mind the lesson is. Like Pavlov’s dog, each time you feel the relief of symptoms that accompanies avoidance, you give your mind another false lesson that the fear was real and the way to eliminate the feelings is to escape.
Before we get to what you can do to break this cycle, make sure you really understand the above. The next time you get anxious, you’ll be able to actually notice yourself going through the cycle and that alone can help tremendously. Just taking the mystery out of your response can make you feel more in control. Let’s look at an example:
Katarina has had a history of panic attacks while driving on highways for 15 years. When she approaches an entrance ramp for a highway where she always gets anxious, she feels her heart start to beat faster, her hands get clammy on the steering wheel, and she gets a little lightheaded. She takes those feelings, which are all normal body responses to something we’re fearful of, and takes them as evidence that something is definitely dangerous. She focuses on her
heart rate and lightheadedness and wonders what is happening to her and if it will get worse. She wonders if she’s going to have a heart attack and if she does, will her car go off the ramp? Does her lightheadedness mean she will pass out and crash? Maybe she’ll just lose control and run out of the car and across the highway, putting herself and others at risk and being terribly embarrassed and ashamed. Now she feels herself getting more dizzy and her chest feeling tight, certainly this means all the things she is afraid of happening are going to come true, maybe even all at once! She gets more scared and moves into panic as she focuses even more intently on her body and tries desperately to control it. As she nears the entrance ramp, she keeps right on going, she can’t possibly bring herself to get on the highway, not today, not like this. As she drives past the ramp, she notices an almost immediate reduction in all her symptoms and she’s
learned that avoiding that highway is the way to feel better. She feels exhausted, depressed, and like a failure. Sound familiar? See the pattern in action?
Katarina started the cycle by mentally reliving her past anxiety as she came upon the entrance ramp to the highway. Just as remembering getting burned the last time we touched a hot stove is enough to make us yank our hand away, her memory of past negative experiences is enough to induce the initial symptoms of anxiety prior to even turning onto the ramp. Her body begins its reaction to what she has classified as a danger and appropriately prepares to defend or save itself. She feels her body taking these actions but since there is no real danger, she interprets her body’s symptoms as evidence that she will pass out or lose control and her fear increases.
Her focus is now not on the driving, but on the fear of how she feels physically. As her attention moves to her body’s symptoms her fear increases and her body increases the reaction to her false danger signal. As her physical symptoms increase in response to this, she views it as evidence that she is losing control and decides that if she feels this terrible BEFORE going on the highway, she’ll certainly lose control if she turns onto the ramp. She decides to avoid that situation and as she does she tells herself that the danger has passed. In response her body breathes a sigh of relief, decreases its preparations to defend itself, and the physical symptoms dissipate. The next time she approaches the exit ramp she will go through a similar reaction but now she will remember what she did last time to bring quick relief and the desire for avoidance will be even stronger.
Exercise
Try to do the best you can at remembering the last time you were anxious or panicky
in a car and write down in your journal what it was like. Get as detailed as you can, it’s
ok if you get a bit anxious doing it. Do you see the pattern at all in the experience?
Interrupt the Fear Cycle
What should Katarina have done? Ideally, she would never have had the physical reaction to her false thoughts and imagination to begin with and that’s the first thing you’re going to learn. Since it’s naive to think that there will never be any anxiety you also need to learn how to break the pattern that feeds and escalates the fear if it does show itself. Once you know that you can limit how intense your feelings get and that they won’t get unmanageable and that there’s truly nothing to be concerned about, the road to not having the initial burst of fear is far quicker and easier.
What you have is a bad habit that needs to be broken. You’ve conditioned yourself to react in a certain way when you drive or think about driving. The first, most effective thing you’re going to do is start associating thoughts about driving with something positive instead of the thoughts of anxiety or panic that you now have associations with.
The first exercise is done when you are not driving, but when you are relaxed and feeling comfortable. Its goal is to recondition your mind from thinking scary, anxious thoughts to thinking peaceful thoughts whenever you imagine driving. It’s what we call “thought popping”.
Think of when you have felt very relaxed, secure, and at peace in the past. Perhaps it was lying on the beach with your significant other, with sound of the waves and gulls gently soothing away all your cares. Maybe it was when you first held a baby and felt a warmth and innocence in that connection. It will be unique for everyone; the key is that you take the time to remember it vividly. What did you see, hear, feel, touch, or even smell. If your scene is the beach scene, feel how
relaxed your muscles felt as they sunk into the cool, soft sand. Hear the waves and the gulls, or the breath of whoever is with you. Smell the ocean and the coconut suntan lotion. Feel the peace in your body.
You may have heard this called your “safe place”. It doesn’t matter to me what you call it, as long as you
understand the purpose. Some people call it their island, others their room, it doesn’t matter. If safe place sounds silly, call it something different. Since I have to call it something, I’ll call it your safe place.
When you’re able to pull that mental image up in your memory with all the details, I want you to think of sitting in a car in your driveway for no more than 2 seconds and then go back to the mental image of your safe place. Relax into the memory and focus on the joy you feel just being there. Now imagine you’re sitting in your car again in your driveway for no more than 2 seconds and then immediately go back to your safe place image in your mind. Continue this pattern, never staying with the fear producing image long enough to build up significant anxiety. You should be able to pop back and forth between the two about every minute. This “popping” is key and why we’ve named it thought popping, you should be popping from one mental image to another quickly. Do this for 20 minutes a day.
What’s going to happen during these sessions is that you’re going to retrain your brain to not follow the same mental path it always has when you think about driving. We’re going to teach your mind to stop taking the same path to a fear response it always has and instead to go to a more peaceful feeling.
You’ll be working up gradually to more challenging images, spend at least a day on each, and don’t rush to the next image until you’re able to think about it in relative peace. You’ll actually train your brain to feel relaxed and at peace instantly whenever you think about driving. After 14 days of performing this exercise, you should feel a dramatic reduction in your anxiety about the situations you’ve been using in the process. If you still feel uncomfortable in a driving situation, there’s an anxiety producing image you haven’t worked with enough.
Start with images that are relatively easy for you and be sure to always focus on the details of your safe place, all the smells, feelings, and sounds as possible. Make it real to you. If you’re very anxious about driving, maybe your beginning image is just walking to the driveway or holding your car keys. If you can drive fine in the city but get panicky on highways, perhaps you start imagining yourself approaching an entrance ramp to a highway.
Exercise
Write down in your journal what your safe place is like. The key here is to get as detailed as possible and not let anything slip by. Go through all your senses and try to get a few memories for each. What did you smell? What did you touch? Did you taste anything? The more real the memory is, the easier and faster this will be, and details are what make the memory real. If you were lying on the sand, don’t just write, “I touched sand”. Write, “I touched the cold, damp sand. It was grainy and fell through my fingertips.” See how you can picture the second in your mind?
Once you have it written down, practice it in your mind. In the beginning, spend much more time in your safe place than in your car. It’s important that you train yourself to remember the safe, peaceful feelings quickly and intensely. Once you can truly get in touch with those emotions and feelings at will, you can start incorporating the images that you find fearful. Don’t rush the second part.
Red Sock Relaxation™
It is virtually impossible for the mind to be anxious while the body is relaxed. Unfortunately, many people who are anxious while driving don’t realize how tense they’re making themselves through unnecessary muscle tension. Chronically anxious individuals may even make that tension their norm. We need to practice letting our muscles go and loosen so we can realize when we’re tense while driving and have a point of reference for what it feels like to be physically relaxed.
The Red Sock Relaxation™ exercise helps to relax your body while driving and give you a mental image to aid in that muscular letting go. As you drive, it helps you let go of the tension in the muscles you’re not actively using to drive the vehicle. You can steer without overly tense shoulders, and you certainly don’t need to squeeze the wheel with all your strength. Envision in your mind a loose, dangling, red sock, that’s how your body should be, no unnecessary tension. Some people have even gone out and bought a red sock to keep in their car to remind them to let go of their tension whenever they see it, it’s a great idea!
Periodically as you drive, and especially if you feel yourself getting anxious, scan your muscles for undue stress and systematically let it go, picturing yourself as loose and relaxed as your red sock. Traffic signals are the perfect time to be sure and practice this.
Red Sock Relaxation™
First, concentrate on the muscle of the face.
1. Don’t squint, relax your eyes. You may be surprised how the act of relaxing your eyes affects your whole body. Always start here. Tell yourself to “Let go and relax”.
2. Feel your forehead loosen, don’t furrow your brow. Tell yourself “It’s ok to relax here”.
3. Focus on your jaw. Are you clenching your teeth? Relax your jaw. Your teeth should be parted, if your mouth sags open a bit, all the better. How would the muscles of your face behave if they were imitating your red sock? Let them go and relax.
Now go down to the neck and shoulders.
1. Roll your head around a bit (if you can do so safely). First clockwise, then counter clockwise.
2. Roll your shoulders around a few times, first forward, then backwards.
3. Bend your shoulder blades back and try to touch them together. Hold this tense position for a few seconds, then release. Often overly tensing a muscle prior to relaxing it helps it relax more deeply.
4. Remember to picture your red sock. Drop your shoulders so they’re loose and limp, no more effort than is necessary to drive. Exhale with a sigh as you let go of all that extra effort.
Concentrate on your arms and chest.
1. Squeeze and contract the muscles of your arms and then release.
2. Clench your fists, squeezing your fingers, hold, and let go. Make sure your arms are relaxed and you’re no longer gripping the wheel with more effort than you need to.
3. If you’re stopped, wrap your arms around yourself in a ‘hug’ position and contract your chest muscles, hold, and release.
Move your focus down to your thighs and buttocks.
1. Relax your thighs and make sure you’re not clenching your buttocks. Sit deeply in your seat and relax, don’t hold yourself up, let the seat do that for you. Scan your whole body again for tension and when you find some, exhale with a sigh, visualize your loose and relaxed red sock, and let it go.
The R.O.A.D. Technique™
The key to eliminating your fear of driving, or really any other fear for that matter, is to no longer have anxiety about your fear. When you are at a point where you no longer place great importance on whether you feel the discomfort of fear or not, you will feel far less anxiety because as we’ve seen, you’re not feeding your fear cycle. The technique you’re about to learn is the single most important aspect of the entire program, but one that takes some initial courage. If you can find it in yourself to use the R.O.A.D. Technique™ as you’ll be shown, you can do almost nothing else and still end your phobia. However, if you skip over this technique, you’re likely to have continued difficulty regardless of how well you perform all the other supportive exercises.
The technique consists of 4 clear steps that you can easily remember by the acronym:
R - Release
O - Observe
A - Accept
D - Demand More
Release
The first step of the technique is to release. When you find yourself getting anxious, even a little bit, release and let go of all tension and resistance. Maybe you start to get irrational thoughts, perhaps you get that familiar anxiety in your stomach, whatever it is, don’t push it away, release your grip over it. Stop trying to hold everything response, observe it, become a student of it. What do you feel exactly? Don’t just together. All you’re doing is creating more tension and resistance.
You want to allow whatever you feel in without ignoring it or denying it. Cease all effort to control it.
Observe
Now that you’re not resisting your fear settle for, “I feel anxious” or “I feel like crap”. It may help to get a little detached from yourself and examine your body like a scientist, just data, not judgment.
You may observe that you’re thinking that your fear will continue to escalate and take you over, making you lose your mind and never come back. Wow, that’s interesting, make a note of it. There it is again. And again. Wait a second, here’s a new one…now you’re thinking that the tingling in your legs means you’re going to lose control and run out of the car.
Is your heart pounding? What’s it like? Do you hear it or feel it? What does your stomach feel like?
Observe everything. Don’t let it be general, figure out just what you’re experiencing.
Accept
Now that you have a better understanding about how your fear gets started and escalated, as well as what is occurring physiologically in your body when you go through your flight or fight response, you should be better prepared to accept your feelings of fear, despite them being uncomfortable. It’s important that you do the previous exercises so you become aware that whatever bodily sensations you feel can be attributed to your stress response and that they’re not indicative of any immediate danger.
Your overall mindset needs to shift dramatically from wanting to stop or avoid your symptoms, to one of accepting however you feel at the moment and knowing that you NEED to experience the temporary discomfort to gain the knowledge that it won’t hurt you.
The more anxious you become, the more symptoms that present themselves, and the more you desire to escape, the more you need to stop and accept whatever you’re feeling. Accept the sensations that are scaring you, accept the thoughts, and remember that you know what it is, a stress response. You’ve been afraid of what you may be feeling every time you’ve felt it, but it’s never resulted in any of what you fear coming true has it? Have you ever REALLY lost control? Ever REALLY driven off the bridge? There’s NOTHING there but your thoughts. Nothing to hurt you. You’re no less in control in your car or on the bridge than you are in your kitchen. There’s NO THING to fear.
Demand More
This can be a hard step for many, but after you’ve released your controlling grip on yourself, observed what you’re feeling, and accepted those feelings, now I want you to demand more of those feelings. Make it worse.
I’m not kidding. I know you may be thinking that if you do that you’ll certainly go off the deep end never to return, or some other terrible thing will happen. It won’t. If your thoughts are racing, try to get them to race faster. If your legs are shaking, make them shake more.
This will help you in two ways. First, it will show you that you really can’t make it significantly worse and that your fear of it becoming worse is really unfounded. Second, it puts you back in control over your feelings.
When you start to truly try to make it worse, you’ll see a reduction in your symptoms and you’ll realize that you brought the fear on and can take it away. The key is that you honestly try to make them worse, and that will take some trust and time. Just saying you want them to get worse when you know full well that underneath that you’re praying they don’t doesn’t work. You need to understand what’s happening to your body and trust that it won’t hurt you before you can really open up to it. Once you do though, you’ll be well on your way to feeling better and no longer being afraid of your anxiety or panic. You’ll know that you carry your own cure inside you.
*Some of you reading may notice that there are similarities in the above and with other programs such as Panic Away by Joe Barry. There will be overlap with foundational concepts such as these in any successful program.
Scary, Irrational Thoughts
It should be comforting for you to know that you’re not the only one that has scary and irrational thoughts when you’re under high anxiety and panic, in fact, it’s often described as one of the most difficult aspects of the fear condition. Focusing on, trying to suppress, and getting scared of your thoughts is a major reason why you get stuck in your fear cycle.
Do you get afraid that your heart will suddenly stop if you don’t pay attention to it? Maybe you can’t stop thinking about going insane and running out across the road and getting hurt. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy or odd, and it doesn’t mean that you’re going to do any of those things. It only means you’re anxious and scaring yourself and need to find a way to stop reacting to these thoughts. The truth is EVERYONE has irrational thoughts like this. The difference is that non-anxious people realize they’re just thoughts that don’t pose any danger or significance and ignore them without becoming upset, so the thought goes away quickly of its own accord. Whenever you get an anxious thought, it’s important that you remind yourself that it’s just internal chatter, just a meaningless reaction to your stress that doesn’t need or deserve a
reaction.
Sometimes you may read about thought stopping techniques, such as visualizing a stop sign in your head or even snapping yourself with a rubber band. This is the worst thing you could do and like we talked about, these types of thoughts are common, so denying them completely is a losing proposition. Instead of trying to push your thoughts away (which as you know, only creates more of the bothersome thoughts), why not recognize the silly thoughts for what they are and let them run their course? Once you aren’t upset by your thoughts and know that they’ll go away as your anxiety dissipates, you’ll not only have fewer scary thoughts, but you’ll be much better prepared to interrupt your fear cycle and have less overall anxiety.
With anxiety, ‘what we resist persists”. The more emotion we associate with something, positive or negative, the more we foster it. The more upset you get by your thoughts and the more you try to stop them, the more of them you’ll have and the closer to your consciousness they’ll be. Don’t take my word for it, look at your own life. Think back to a memorable event that occurred at least 5 years ago. Maybe a vacation, birthday, or birth of a child. Can you remember who was there and some details about the event? Can you pull up a mental image of it? Maybe you recall
someone’s smile, or what you were wearing, or some recognizable smell. Why do you remember that? Because you have a large amount of positive emotion attached to it in your memory. It works with negative emotions too unfortunately, I’m sure you can remember vividly a traumatic event that happened long ago as well, such as where you were when you found out a loved one passed away or on 9/11. Whether the emotion is good or bad is irrelevant, that memory is chiseled deeply into our memory. Now try to think of the next time you went shopping for socks after that event you pictured. You can’t because unless you’re exceedingly dull, buying socks isn’t a very big deal for us with any emotion behind it. You can’t remember. We’re going to make those anxious, scary thoughts a lot more like buying socks.
The very act of trying not to think about something guarantees failure when it’s looked at logically. Try this. For the next 30 seconds, don’t think of a blue banana. Think of whatever else you want, just not a blue banana. Only thirty short seconds. Go.
What’s the first thing you thought of? Of course, the dreaded blue banana! You had to think of what you weren’t supposed to think about! Then every time you thought of it, you reminded yourself not to think about it so you had to think of it again! It’s a vicious circle that is not only impossible, but perpetuates the thought.
We’ve had great success with people imagining their scary thoughts coming from some comical non-threatening character. Settle on a character you know with a distinctive voice, and every time you find yourself having one of your thoughts, instead of saying “Oh, no! Here it comes!” let the thought come into your head as often as it wants to, but mentally visualize your character saying it to you. It’s hard to react too strongly to Elmer Fudd warning you to not drive the car off the road. It puts the thought where it should be, in a silly place that you control. Take your creative visualization powers that you use to dream up scary images to frighten yourself with and use it to create a comical image to associate to your irrational
thoughts.
Avoid Anxiety and Panic with Proper Breathing
Have you ever watched a child breathe? How about a dog? They both breathe perfectly. Watch them and you’ll see their bellies moving slowly up and down with each breath. Now watch yourself. Probably your chest is moving a lot more than your belly. I’ll fix that.
When you’re in a relaxed state, your natural tendency is to breathe into your diaphragm and lower lungs, which will expand your belly much more than your chest. When you’re running down the street or anxious about something, your rate of breathing picks up and it moves into the upper chest. It’s fine to breathe that way when you’re exercising, but not so great when you’re driving your car.
The relaxation coin has two sides, either you change your thoughts and emotions to bring about a relaxed state physically, or you change your physical response to bring about a relaxed state emotionally. We’re going to do both in this program. If you’re breathing as an anxious, uptight person, it will translate into those types of thoughts and feelings. It will be difficult to almost impossible to properly relax while you’re behaving (physically) as someone being chased by an angry mob.
Sit back in your chair, drop your shoulders, and try to let things go a little. Put one hand on your chest and another on your abdomen, and notice which hand is moving. Inhale slowly through your nose and visualize the breath flowing in through your nose and into your lower lungs. As you do so, notice your lower hand moving up in response to the breath and the upper staying relatively still. When you’ve filled your lungs, pause a moment, and release the breath slowly through your nose. Your nose is
for breathing; your mouth is for eating. Practice inhaling to a count of 5, hold for 3 seconds, and then exhale for a count of five, then another 3 second pause. Take 10 breaths like this.
You may find it difficult to sit still and do that for 10 breaths. You don’t need me to tell you that means you’re too wound up. That makes repeating the exercise throughout the day that much more important. Every hour, on the top of the hour, check your breathing. Where is it? Wherever it is, bring it back to your belly and slow it down. You’ve been breathing wrong for a long time, so don’t be surprised if this is difficult.
Don’t get angry at yourself for having trouble, that’s all part of it. Be patient with yourself. If you practice and check on yourself often, you’ll eventually retrain yourself to breathe the right way.
When you’re feeling anxious, take 10 breaths like you just learned to. Sometimes you’ll be stressed that you’ll have trouble breathing slowly and you’ll find yourself gulping your breath. If you find yourself that anxious or in the midst of panic, you can use Balloon Breaths™ to help you to slow your rate of breathing. Take your thumb and finger and use your thumb to pinch closed one nostril. Breathe in to a count of 5 through the open nostril, pause and swap the nostrils you’re closing. Then exhale through the other side. Inhale again for a 5 count through the open side, pause, swap nostrils again, and exhale. As you breathe, envision a balloon beneath your bellybutton that expands with each inhalation and contracts with each exhalation. As you breathe in slowly through your nostril, feel your balloon expand in your stomach, out to your sides, and behind you. As you exhale, feel the balloon slowly let the air escape back out. This visualization will not only help you keep your breath in your belly where it should be, but it will encourage you to let your exhalation out slowly andnot forcefully. It should be a very natural and soothing breathing rhythm. The balloon fills, and then deflates all on its own. You don’t need to force the air out of it, let it empty itself. Repeat that for 10 exhalations.
After some practice, you’ll learn how to better control your breathing and you’ll be able to take the knowledge from your living room or bedroom into your car. Whenever you’re driving and feeling anxious, one of the first questions to ask is “Where am I breathing from?” If it’s your chest, slow it down and bring it back into your diaphragm. You’ll now not only relax yourself from doing the proper breathing, but you’ll give your mind something to pay attention to other than your anxious feelings.
Exercise
Every day, on the top of every hour, check where you’re breathing from. Spend 5-10 minutes each morning or evening just sitting and easing into a nice, peaceful, belly breath. Relax and feel how nice it is to take a few moments for yourself and slow down. Get in touch with the feelings of relaxation. When you know them, you can more easily recreate them at will.
Eat the Elephant
There’s an old saying that the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. That’s how you’re going to approach overcoming your fear. It’s far too much and too intimidating to do all at once. We’re going to eat away at your fear one small bite at a time, each one easy to chew and swallow, until we look back and see that we’re all done.
What you don’t want to do is ignore working on your fear for as long as possible, until you can’t avoid it anymore. Don’t wait until you HAVE to drive to that wedding or until your boss tells you that you MUST attend the out of town conference. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can overcome this fear if you just give it some effort for a few weeks.
I’m going to take you through a series of steps you would take on the road to success. You can look at them as rungs on a ladder, each one a little bit harder than the last, let’s call it your “recovery ladder”. I’m going to start at the very smallest thing you could do to work on your fear for those with a severe phobia, and go all the way to driving comfortably over bridges on highways. You should start at the place that begins to bring you discomfort. Please note that I said the place that BEGINS to give you discomfort. Not the place that overwhelms you with terror. You’re going to beat the smaller challenges first and gain confidence in the tools I’m teaching you and then you’ll be more prepared to overcome the bigger tasks. Of course your list may be different since everyone’s fears and needs are somewhat unique, but by reviewing the below you should have a good understanding of how to structure your “bites “or “rungs”.
1. Stand on the driveway and look at the car with the keys in your hand.
2. Put the keys in the door and open the lock.
3. Sit in the car.
4. Sit in the car with the engine idling.
5. Drive the car down the driveway to the street.
6. Drive the car around the block.
7. Drive the car ½ mile away.
8. Drive the car 1 mile away.
9. Drive the car 5 miles away.
10.Drive the car 10 miles away.
11.Drive the car 20 miles away.
12.Drive the car to a highway entrance ramp.
13.Drive the car onto the highway and drive to the next exit.
14.Drive the car onto the highway and drive for 5 miles.
15.Drive the car onto the highway and drive for 10 miles.
16.Drive the car over a highway overpass bridge.
17.Drive the car over a short bridge a city block or so long.
18.Drive the car over a major bridge.
19.Drive the car over a bridge spanning water.
You’ll know when to move onto the next item when you’re able to perform the step before it in relative comfort. You don’t wait until you feel ready to perform the next task, because you won’t feel ready until it’s accomplished. As soon as you’re able to drive around the block without high anxiety or panic, you should proceed to driving ½ mile, even if it still scares you.
Life Strategies
What you have learned thus far will be incredibly helpful to you for coping with your anxiety while driving. Unfortunately, often your anxiety is caused by your overall patterns of thinking and lifestyle habits. The tools you’ve been exposed to so far will put out the fire, but changing your life to be less stressfull overall will prevent future flare-ups.
Time Management
What do you, Donald Trump, your neighbor, Lance Armstrong, and an unemployed actor all have in common? You all have 24 hours in a day. No more, no less. I can say with virtual certainty that no matter how busy you think you are at this point in your life, there’s someone who’s busier. What determines your stress level is how well you manage the time we’re all given each day.
Why is this topic in a book about overcoming fear? Because it’s not in any other ones and it’s absolutely critical. If you manage your time poorly you’ll end up “out of time” before you’ve been able to take care of yourself, or practice the techniques the program teaches.
Want to know what I most often hear when I ask why someone didn’t do the exercises or the self care we prescribe? “I didn’t have time to do my breathing.” “I’m too busy at work to practice.” “You don’t understand, I have two kids and a full time job.”
Loads and loads of crap. We all have 24 hours and need to take responsibility over how we chose to spend them. Start managing your life and not just responding to it. Feel free to read all you can get your hands on regarding the subject because it will do nothing but help, but I’ve outlined the basics below and like most fundamentals, they’ll get you 90% of the way to where you need to be. Keep reading, this will change your life.
Make a mission statement
You’ve probably seen a mission statement for a business. If you haven’t, they’re very short descriptions of why the company exists and what it desires to accomplish. Do they make these up because they have so much extra time on their hands? Sometimes it seems so, but really they’re supposed to be used so everyone in and out of the organization knows what it stands for. So when the company faces a difficult decision they can refer to their mission statement and ensure it is in line with their core values and long term goals.
What if you had one of those? How much easier would life be if you could reference a piece of paper that had what your life was all about on it and when the going got tough or you were unsure about what to do you could look at it and use it to decide what was the right choice given what you decided your values and purpose would be? Boy, that would be a load off.
Hey, wait a second.
We probably could do a mission statement couldn’t we? We could call it a personal mission statement and use it just like we said, to drive the rest of our decisions. This is so crazy it just might work….
Take the time necessary to really think about what you want your life to be about from all different aspects. Imagine what you’d like people to say about you at your funeral. What would you like your spouse and children to say? What about your friends? Your coworkers? When you’re done doing this and really reflecting on it seriously you should have a nice list of your values. From that brief statement, we can design your life.
Maybe your mission statement is something like, “To be a loving and caring Mother who teaches my children to be responsible for themselves and selfless. To be a loyal and supportive wife. To never stop growing intellectually or spiritually. To be courageous and not limited by anxiety or fears so I’m a role model for my children. To take care of my body and health so I live a long time for my family.” Let’s say this is have the choice to go out with the girls for a breakfast of pancakes or go get your yours and you have the chance to teach your child to do their science project by themselves which would take 2 hours, or do it for them, which would take 30 minutes but not teach them anything. Looking at this you would know that you should help them do it themselves so they learn responsibility. What if you workout in? Well, you decided you wanted to stay healthy for you and your family, but not necessarily be remembered a lover of pancakes, so there you go.
This is supposed to be all inclusive of every possible activity or role you could possibly play, but should center around your core values. It should be no more than several sentences, shorter is usually better.
A mission statement is also meant to help you remember the big picture to help you make choices, not to be used as the sole method for making a decision. If you had the above mission it doesn’t mean you never go for pancakes, just that you would keep your larger goal in mind when determining your best option. A mission defines your values, now we’re going to talk about managing the activities that will support your values.
Get it out of your head
What if you got on a plane to take a trip and you found out the pilot wanted very badly to get you to your destination but no one would tell him where it was or how to get there, what the weather was along the way, or any other information? Sounds pretty silly, right? Well, it sounds equally senseless to me that most people live their lives in the same oblivion.
If you don’t know where you want to go (your goals), how do you plan to get there? How will you know when you’re getting closer or further away? How will you know what to expect? How will you hit a target you can’t see?
You need to know what you want, not just as it relates to overcoming your fears, but everything, career, personal, and relationships too. Take your relationships for example. Let’s say one of your goals from your mission is to be a great father. Fine and dandy, but what does that mean? Maybe it means spending 2 hours more a week with your children, maybe it means another 15 minutes. I don’t know and I don’t need to know, you do.
Do you trudge through your day at work just watching the clock waiting for the end of the day or, God forbid, retirement in 20 years? Maybe if you had some direction it wouldn’t seem so meaningless and boring. Maybe if you set some goals on how to improve on whatever it is you do you’d finally get that promotion you’ve been hoping would be handed to you.
So what do your career goals and relationship goals have to do with the fear of driving? Everything. When you think of someone who’s courageous and confident, what do you think of? Picture it in your mind. Do you think the “healthy” person in your mind can run real fast but neglects their children? Do they play tennis very well but sleep in their car in abject poverty? Not likely. Probably they seem confident, successful, happy, energetic, balanced. Isn’t that what you want to be?
Now we’re going to work progressively backwards. Using your mission statement to help guide you, write down what you want to accomplish in the next 10 years. Want to start your own company and have it grow to 10 million annual sales? That can be done in 10 years, write it down. Want to complete the Ironman triathlon? You can do that in 10 years if you wanted to, write it down.
This should be fun, you’re the director over your own life, figure out what you want to be and get it on paper.
Now, using both your mission and 10 year plan as a guideline, write down where you want to be in 5 years. Using the above as an example maybe you need to have your business at 4 million sales by then and have completed a half Ironman event. Additionally, you’ll have goals on here that won’t take 10 years to accomplish, ones that should be done in around 5. Maybe you want to get your Masters degree, no need to wait a decade for that, write it down here.
By now you’re getting good at this, pretty exciting how your life is going to go isn’t it? This time do 3 years, just like the others. Maybe you want to go to Europe but you’re booked this year, write it on this list.
Every year you’re going to do yearly goals. You need a list for these too. Don’t shoot too short on these, most people have a list they couldn’t possibly accomplish each day but go too easy on themselves on longer term lists. You’ll be surprised what you can do in a year once you get things organized and how much easier your days will be simultaneously.
I like to do quarterly goals that further subdivide my yearly goals because I’ve found that I can
push activities off too much if I have a whole year. Doing a quarterly list lets me take a substantial yearly goal and break it into a manageable chunk.
Every month you need goals.
Every week you need a list and every day you should have a list of what you want to accomplish.
That sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it. If you thought you had a lot to do now, wait till you spend half your day writing all these various lists.
Not really. Every month, I probably spend a half hour tops on my monthly list. My weekly list takes me about 10 minutes or so, and I end each day with 5 minutes or so of planning my next day. I’m telling you, it’s the best use of my time I can imagine. As soon as I start my day, I know exactly what I need to do. I don’t need to spend the first hour trying to figure out what I need to do, how to do it, and getting buried in things. I know if I’m on track or not and what I need to do if I’m not. I’m not going to lie and say the list always gets done and that it never changes, but I will say that’s not the point. The point is to keep me on track and headed in the direction I want to go.
Sometimes I scratch things off my weekly list, sometimes I add things to my weeks or months or years list. It’s ok, they’re not tattoos, you can change them.
You also don’t need a high tech gadget to do this either, all you need is a datebook with enough room to make a daily list on.
Eliminate wasted effort
Now that you’ve got your list of what you want to accomplish, you have to get into the habit of saying no to things.
It may sound easy enough, but believe me, for most people it takes a LOT of effort and discipline. Other people are very often going to ask you to do things that you don’t have any interest in or don’t quite mesh up right with your overall mission and priorities. When that happens, you have to say no. Whether you like to, or whether you don’t. Whether they like you at that moment, or whether they don’t. Chances are they’re going to get over it, and if they don’t, trust me, you’re not missing out. You owe it to yourself to live your life in the way you want to, not based on what everyone else wants you to do. If someone will only be civil to you if you do what they tell you, they’re taking advantage of you and you need to nip that in the bud because you’re too important and have far too much dignity to allow that.
Every time you say ‘Ok’ to something, you say ‘No’, to something else. If you’re ever going to get a handle on things, you need to say ‘Yes’ to what’s important to you first. There’s always a cost, even if the cost is less time sitting around looking at the trees and feeling the breeze on your face, if that’s an activity that you enjoy and you want to partake in, you have an obligation to yourself to engage in it. don’t owe anyone an explanation. You don’t need to provide everyone with a big drawn out explanation every time you say no either. Just say, “No, sorry.” If you feel you need to say, “No, sorry. I’ve got too many things to get done”. If that thing is soaking your feet, it’syour business.
Every once in a while, someone will ask you what you have to do that prohibits you from accomplishing one of their tasks instead of yours. Don’t play that game. Just tell them you wish you could help but unfortunately can’t. You Isn’t this selfish? Not at all. It’s self preserving. Don’t confuse all this to mean that you’re never going to help anyone out, that you’re only going to do for you and that’s it and everyone else can go scratch. Quite the opposite. You’re going to take care of yourself first so you can help other people without resentment or other negative emotions. If you don’t take care of yourself you won’t be able to assist anyone effectively. It’s why they tell you on a plane if the masks come down and you’re with a child to put yours on first, then the child’s. Why is that? The airlines must despisechildren! Obviously it’s because if you fumble around trying to take care of the child and in the process you pass out, there’s no one left to help them. So it’s not selfish to take care of yourself first, it’s actually in their best interests. Same principle.
When you’re taking care of yourself, you can certainly choose to help people, as a matter of fact, I’m sure you’re a good person and will choose to a lot. You’ll find that once you start managing your time and saying no to the low priority items you’ll be able to really start helping people if that’s what you choose to do since you’ll have more time. Maybe you’ll want to show your wife how much you appreciate her by taking over some chores she typically does. Perhaps you’ll have the time to pick up groceries for grandma or talk to your mom on the phone or volunteer at a food pantry, it doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s not selfish and you won’t say no all the time,
only when you choose to.
You’ll realize you have choices.
Keep in mind something called the Rule of Distant Elephants when saying yes to requests from others. This rule reminds you that an elephant looks small from far away but when you get right up on top of it, it’s huge. When someone asks you to do something sometime down the road in the future, you may be tempted to say okay just because it’s too far away to concern yourself with. Don’t do that, decide as if they were asking for you to do it tomorrow or right now. That elephant is going to grow every day until it arrives and you might find yourself looking at a huge task you have no time or desire for, but have already committed yourself to.
You won’t only have to say no to requests from others that don’t fit into your plan, but you’ll need to say no to yourself regarding activities that aren’t meaningful, which brings us to prioritization.
Prioritize
Now that you’ve determined what’s important to you and eliminated the unnecessary, you have a list of activities to do, some for you, probably some for others. You need to identify a rough order in which to accomplish things otherwise you’ll end up either darting from task to task and actually doing very little, or getting trapped in analysis-paralysis trying to decide what you should spend time on.
This can be as simple or complicated as you like, but I like simple, so that’s what you’re going to do. All you really need to do is list every item on your monthly, weekly, and daily list as high, medium, or low priority. You can use 1,2,3’s, or A,B,C’s, or whatever, it doesn’t matter.
Tackle the high priority items first, and then the mediums, and the low priority items should either get done when those are all complete, or when they fit logically best in your day.
What do I mean by fitting logically in your day? Well, if your high priority item is getting in your driving practice for that day and your low priority item is going through yesterdays mail, but you only have 5 minutes between meetings, then you do the lower priority item because that’s what you have time for. Sometimes you need to disqualify higher priority items based on external factors like time or available energy.
Your task priorities don’t stay static. Just because going through the mail on Monday is a low priority item doesn’t mean that you don’t perhaps reanalyze it on Friday and make it a high priority item. Maybe your new time management skills are working so well that you don’t have a lot to do Friday and you only have what were once low priority items (this will actually happen believe it or not). What you don’t do is blow off all those little items until they become big ones, you get ahead of them. You’ll never be free of high priority items, you just decide which of your low priority items are most important and those become high priority. If the 10 pieces of yesterday’s mail onMonday was low item and not really any big deal, by the time Friday rolls around if you’ve put off the mail every day, you may now have 50 pieces of it spilling over your desk, bills growing late, etc. Not such a low item anymore, huh? So every day you’re going to take a look at the next day’s items and quickly organize them, not based on what they were today, but on what they will be tomorrow in priority.
There are other things to consider besides urgency as well when deciding priorities. In fact, the better you get at this, the less urgent things are going to sneak into your life. You’ll take care of them before they get urgent. So if tasks aren’t screaming to get accomplished, what to do?
In 1848, one of my favorite people was born. Was it Robert Eakin, the 19th century Chief Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court you may ask? No, but good guess. It was Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto was the first person to notice what is now referred to as the80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle. What it basically means is that 80% of your gains will be from 20% of your efforts.
You need to determine what your biggest area of need is and attack that. What will you get the most results from? If you’re deciding between washing your cat and going to your yoga class, ask yourself which is in the 20% of your efforts that will bring about the most positive change. Maybe if you have an hour it’s better to spend 50 minutes of doing some of the techniques from the program rather than flipping around the gossip blogs on the net.
Here’s a big secret. If you do just the important 20%, you can pretty much ignore a lot of other stuff, or at least not waste excessive time on it. Your job is to figure out what you need to do in order to have the biggest effect and attack those things immediately. Thanks Vilfredo.
Small bites
You’re going to have tasks that can’t be completed in a single step or a single day, or maybe even year. Sometimes they seem overwhelming because of their enormity. There’s an expression that the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time (not to be confused with the Rule of Distant Elephants). So if you have a big task, break it down into small chunks and keep chewing one up every day until you eat your elephant. When you’re finished most everyone else will still be looking wide eyed at their elephant before them, too afraid to even begin. Sounds familiar right? (hint, it’s the same way you should be approaching overcoming your fear of driving).
Big bites
On the other hand, once you’ve broken down a large task into manageable chunks, you need to set aside blocks of time so you can work on it, if it’s an activity that will have a dramatic effect on your life.
Let’s look at a client, Ted, for instance. Ted is a 43 year old client who has a goal of writing a book about his area of expertise in his business. At first, it seemed overwhelming, but once he took it apart and looked at it one chapter at a time, he had a much more attractive list of milestones to shoot for. Now that he had the small bites, he needed to set aside some time to make some real progress towards these goals, since their completion would give him a significant career boost and a large dose of needed self esteem. If he had only set aside 10 minutes a day to work on his book, he would never get anywhere and would quickly become discouraged. Instead, a few times a week he carved out a couple hours to set aside and really attack his goal.
So realize that you need to devote the time needed for the big, impactful items, even if it comes at the expense of the smaller, less important ones. Using the techniques I showed you it should be relatively easy to tell one from the other.
Recognize that “good enough” is often good enough
Trust me, I’m a big believer in striving for excellence and the thought that what’s worth doing is worth doing right. Despite that, perfectionism is rarely the answer, proper allocation of effort to maximize results always is.
Let’s remind ourselves of the Pareto Principle again, 80 percent of the results come from 20% of the effort. That’s easy enough. But it works the other way too, 80% of the effort is responsible for a mere 20% of the results!
Like we talked about earlier, the goal is to find the 20% of high result activities and bang away on it. If a task takes you an hour to be “perfect”, 12 minutes of that time will yield you 80% of your results and the remaining 48 minutes will generate only an extra 20%. If we can agree that perfection is virtually universally unobtainable, then it’s more like the 48 got you an extra 10% since that last 10 or so will be always elusive.
Am I suggesting you do things sloppily? Not at all, I’m telling you that good enough is just that, good enough. If you’re washing your car and you get it 80% clean but there’s a spot here and a spot there that’s still a bit smudgy, do you know what we call that?
A clean car.
If you spent the extra time to go over it again and again, getting in every nook and cranny with a little toothbrush and chamois to ensure every last bit of grime is wiped away so it looks showroom fresh do you know what we end up calling that?
A clean car that took 80% longer to wash.
Hmmmm. Almost seems like the latter is a complete waste of time. Seems like that extra time could have been spent getting in your yoga or meditation, or some other high value task. Seems like it….
Something else you’ll notice is that often that extra effort for the 20% is very fleeting. In the above example, even if you do get it sparkly clean, as soon as you drive a mile down the road it will be dirty enough to negate your results. Heck, even if you let it sit in the driveway so you can admire it from the porch while you drink a lemonade, a bird is guaranteed to poop on it. Same with people who spend all kinds of time perfecting their hairdo in the morning as if wind and humidity didn’t exist or take half their Saturday to perfect the edging of their lawn.
Not only does this save you a ton of time when it’s added up across your day, but it takes away a lot of pressure and disappointment you feed yourself by striving for something you’ll never reach or maintain anyway. It’s a surefire recipe to make certain you constantly disapprove of yourself and your efforts. It doesn’t need to be that hard.
Stress Management
Now you’ve got some tools to remove the excuses regarding why you’re too busy to take care of yourself, the next step is to help you eliminate some of the stress you face and how to better handle what’s left over. Being able to cope with a panic or anxiety attack is great, but not having the accumulated stress that leads to those extreme reactions is even better. Let’s look at what we can do every day to help lower your stress:
Actually apply the time management skills
Like everything else in the program, just reading about time management techniques doesn’t do anything, you need to actually put them to use. Once you have more focus in your day and life, and the time to devote to taking better care of yourself, you’ll feel a great reduction in your stress levels by not running around needing to decide what to do all the time. Once you chuck half your daily activities that aren’t really meaningful or beneficial you’ll have a lot more time and less stress in your life.
If you’ve only read the previous Time Management section and haven’t taken any steps to implement them into your life, stop here, go back, and get to work on those first.
Cut yourself some slack
If you’re looking for a quick way to be miserable, keep beating yourself up over ever slip and variance from your plan. If feeling lousy isn’t enough, don’t worry, it will also lead you away from your goal faster than anything else.
Everything you read about here, or any kind of process, is a series of zig zags to the end. A plane doesn’t fly straight to LA from New York, it’s almost constantly off course and making small corrections until it touches down on a runway 100 feet wide 2400 miles away. In the same manner, anyone who has been successful at transforming their lives or overcoming a fear has made many mistakes along the way and learned from them and made corrections. It’s part of the process. Don’t fight it. It never ends.
There will never be a time when you’re so perfect that you always do exactly what you should. There will be no point when every day is better and more productive than the last. Progress is a series of zigs and zags towards the end result, and your aim is to be pointed towards your target more often than you are not.
Everyone has bad days and gets anxious, you’re not alone. Everyone gets angry at themselves, you’re not alone. Failure is an event, not a person. It’s not important that you made a mistake, it’s important that you learn from it. Use your mistakes to build yourself stronger.
Many successful people do their chosen relaxation activity in the morning before the rest of the neighborhood has rolled out from under the covers. Do you know why? Insomniacs? No. They tried to do it during lunch but missed their yoga too often because meetings got scheduled. Then they tried to meditate after work and found out that they made excuses and were too tired. Now they listen to relaxation tapes in the morning when it’s too early to have meetings or as many excuses. They failed. They analyzed why they failed. They adapted. They learned.
The only time to really chastise yourself is when you make a mistake and don’t learn from it.
“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison
Find a routine
You probably don’t brush your teeth every morning cursing the mirror that you have to waste so much time with dental care. You likely don’t pace the floor deciding whether you should brush your teeth that morning, or if yesterday and the day before were plenty. I’m willing to bet you just brush your teeth the same time and way every morning and don’t put in that much thought. Why is that?
Because it’s part of your routine. It’s habitual. You can use that.
Want to stop eating coffee cake for breakfast every morning? Well then make your healthy breakfast part of a routine. Don’t walk down into the kitchen every morning scratching your head and trying to figure out what you’re going to have. Have the same thing every day, stop thinking about it. In a few weeks it will become a habit to have whatever your healthy breakfast is. You won’t have to think about it. You’ll drop the toast on the toaster, grab a plate, break the eggs, turn on the stove, and shake out your vitamins, without even thinking about it.
Sure, change is good, variety is the spice of life, all that stuff. But you can choose to use routine to your benefit, it’s another tool in your arsenal.
A routine of negative, boring, or mindless activity can be a horrible thing, but used properly in a productive manner it can be used to form great habits that beeline you to your goal.
Reward yourself
There’s really only two ways to get yourself or anyone else to do anything: the carrot or the stick. Either you’re doing something to achieve something you want or you’re doing it to avoid something you don’t. That’s it. Period. It gets no more complicated.
If you’re sticking to a nutrition and exercise plan maybe it’s because you want to avoid the pain of embarrassment at the beach. Perhaps it’s because you want to be able to feel the pride of rubbing cocoa butter on your rippled abs in the Caribbean sun, whatever it is, you’re doing it to move forward or away from something. Negative or positive reinforcement is the name of the game and it’s best to have some of each.
I’ll bet you’ve got the negative down cold. You hate the way your fear makes you feel and that motivates you. Good. But that’s only half the equation. Why not toss some positive stuff into the mix too? How about when you’re able to drive 5 miles, you go get a massage or buy a new CD or whatever it is that you’re into. You can toss a dollar or two into a jar for every practice session and spend the money on something when you reach a target distance. You can think of something. Don’t be afraid to treat yourself well, if you don’t no one else will either.
Chances are you may not think all that highly of yourself right now. You’ve got to start viewing yourself as a worthy person of value and the easiest way to start doing that is to start acting like you believe it. Be kind to you.
Quit complaining
Try to go a whole day without complaining or criticizing anything, trust me, it’ll be like ice skating uphill. Really make an effort to focus on all that you have and what’s going right with your life rather than constantly moaning and complaining about everything. When you really pay attention to it you’ll see how often your conversations, thoughts, and feelings are centered around these two negative activities. Sure everything isn’t perfect, you’ve got a fear to overcome, but you’ve got great things to be appreciative of. You live in an era where we understand phobias better. You have the Internet and were able to find a program that will help you.
You had the financial means to pay for it. You’ve probably got a car. Many people don’t have cars, or medical care, or enough food to eat. If you look at it through different lenses, you can view yourself as a very lucky and fortunate person and you’ll end up a lot happier.
Simplify
This is a huge one for removing unnecessary stress from your life. Quit making things so darn complicated all the time. Don’t spend so much time focusing on the next ‘thing’ that’s going to make you happy, it won’t. It doesn’t matter if your neighbor got a new car and an addition to their house, it doesn’t mean you have to. Your kids don’t need every single toy as soon as it hits the shelves, it doesn’t matter what the other kid in his class has. I think you’ll survive summer without 5 new pairs of sandals, 1 or 2 should do.
Is your house all full of knick knacks and stuff that needs dusting but doesn’t really have any value and clutters everything all up? A messy, busy, cluttered environment is very stressful whether you realize it or not. Box it up.
This ties into the 80/20 principle we went through earlier. Put away or get rid of everything you don’t use 80% of the time. My family and I cook almost every meal we eat for ourselves, every single week, year in and year out. Know how many pans I have in my drawer? Two. A small one and a large one. Sure, I’ve got a drawer that’s out of the way that has a few others for things I make much less frequently, but those two are all I need unless it’s an exceptional circumstance. I’ve got a drawer with the dozen most often used tools like a spatula and tongs and another for things I pull out once a year like a turkey baster. It may not seem like a big deal, but getting all that useless stuff out of your way, if not out of your life, makes things a lot more organized and less stressful by not having to dig around and look for things all the time. Plus it just feels good to be clean and in order. You don’t need to live like a hermit and not own anything, but just put the unusual items out of the way till you need them.
Don’t be afraid to get rid of things. Sell them online or in your local paper if you don’t use them or could do without them. Give them to someone else that will use it. Donate it to charity. Toss it to the curb. Don’t be a packrat and hold onto junk just because you made a mistake purchasing it sometime in the past. It’s not doing you any good and it’s probably even doing you some harm. Cut your losses and learn to think before you get needless garbage.
Recognize your faulty patterns of thinking
Lots of people fall into the bad habit of thinking in ways that just aren’t healthy or true. Like any other habit, we can change it once we become aware of it. Here’s a few of the common negative thinking patterns, you’ll probably have some unique to you as well:
Catastrophizing- Catch yourself making a big deal out of small things and correct your thinking until you stop doing that. Making a mistake in a report probably won’t get you fired, and even if you were you probably wouldn’t end up homeless. Not everything is a disaster.
Overgenralizing-“I always blow my diet” or “People never like me” is self talk that just isn’t true. Certainly you at least sometimes stick to your diet, maybe not as often you like, but you don’t always stray. I’m sure some people like you, no reason you shouldn’t give yourself credit for those that do. These types of negative generalities make things seem hopeless and futile even when they’re often things to be expected.
You shouldn’t have the expectation that you’ll never have a moment of weakness and go off your diet. Everyone doesn’t like me either. It’s no big deal! That’s life.
Ignoring the Positive-There’s been more than a handful of clients that do great with practice sessions for a week or two and then they have a day or a week when they don’t make as much progress as they wanted to or have an anxiety attack while driving again. Oh how they beat themselves up and cry and hang their heads in failure, never once thinking that overall, they’re doing fabulous. Don’t just criticize yourself, look for what you’re doing right and factor that in too. Maybe you’re doing great but had a bad moment, or day, or week. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it or haven’t had successes, or should quit and not even try. day themselves. Fact is, you don’t know, so don’t make assumptions. Black and White Thinking-Rarely are things right or wrong, black and white. keep telling yourself you’ll only be happy when you’re “over this fear”. Clairvoyance- Don’t pretend to know what everyone is thinking. Don’t assume people don’t like you, or talk behind your back, or that they feel such and such a way without some pretty good evidence. Just because someone rolls their eyes or honks their horn or ignores you doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. Maybe their contact slipped or they’re trying to work on their own assertiveness skills or they’re having a bad error at work it doesn’t mean you’re ‘bad’ at what you do. There’s a whole lot in between that is probably a much better assessment of the situation. Maybe you’re not whatever you consider “over this” but you’re doing a lot better and the fear doesn’t stand in your way as much. Maybe you’re not a hotshot at the TPF report for your boss but you do everything else really well. This either/or thinking sets you up to be perpetually disappointed in yourself since being absolutely perfect is short lived at best.
Surround yourself with positivity
As you change your life for the better you may unfortunately need to cast away some people or circumstances that are holding you back. This is a tough one, but it’s necessary sometimes. You owe it to yourself to surround yourself with people that lift you up and make you feel good, that enhance your life. If someone is making you feel bad and trying to prevent you from being a better person, you’re going to have to take some action. Usually, all you have to do is have the courage to talk to the person about it. Tell them that what they’re doing or how they’re treating you isn’t helping in what you’re trying to achieve. Tell them how important they are in your life (if they are) and that you would really like their support. Far more often than not, they’ll feel like a complete jackass, apologize, and you’ll have an even stronger relationship for having had the conversation. But sometimes not…
Some people are hell bent on keeping you down, especially if they’re in a position of power of you because of your fear or you’re reliant on them currently. Don’t be surprised if that person isn’t exactly eager to see you change. It alters how they relate to you and most people resist change. They may also feel better about themselves being in your company the way you are and will have to own up to some of their own issues if you change for the better. Maybe they’re not ready to do that and are rebelling.
Whatever the reason, try to help them see your perspective and relate to you in a positive manner. If that fails, and sometimes with some people it will, you’ll have to sever that relationship, at least for the time being until they are ready to accept the new you, or at the very least minimize your interaction. I don’t care if it’s your friend, husband, mom, or next door neighbor, if you let people drag you down into the dirt, they will.
Accept people or let them go
Want to know who I wish were different? Everyone in one way or another. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not my job to roam the world changing people to meet my expectations or desires. If there’s someone who does something that irritates or angers you, that’s not their problem, it’s yours. Take responsibility for your own reaction and emotions. That’s them at this moment in time. Maybe they’ll change, maybe not. Accept them or don’t. If you don’t, walk away.
Know someone who’s selfish? Me too. Know someone that supports a different political party than you? Me too. Can you accept that about them and have a beneficial relationship with them anyway? Notice that nowhere am I saying “like that about them” or “enjoy that”, only if you can accept it. You can accept what you don’t like. When you first start out practicing your driving you’ll feel a racing heart, maybe scary thoughts, and your brain will try to get you to stop. Accept that even if you don’t like it. Same with people, they are who they are at this moment in time, either you can handle that or you can’t. If you can’t, that’s ok too.
On a related note, you don’t need to try and understand everyone. You don’t need to convince people to agree with your choices. People don’t understand why I do things the way I do or have certain opinions. It’s ok, they don’t have to. I sure the heck don’t agree with or understand everyone I come in contact with, I don’t try to. Trying to see another person’s perspective is fine, but trying to truly understand their motivations and logic is often impossible and almost always unimportant. You have no way to really put yourself in their shoes and understand them without having gone through their experiences. It works the same in reverse too, no matter how hard you try to convince others that what you think is valid and get them to understand you, they can’t since you both have gone through and perceived the world in an entirely different way. Give up on it. Live and let live.
Journal
You’ve heard of journaling, it’s nothing new. I’ll even bet that sometime in school one of your teachers had the class keep a journal for a bit. Chances are you didn’t keep up with it, I know I didn’t. I knew all about journaling too and never did it. It just seemed like a waste of time and silly, writing down my thoughts. I mean, the fact that I thought them was evidence that I knew them and therefore didn’t need to write them down, right? Well, not really.
If you read a bit about journaling, you’ll be quick to come across someone who says something like the act of putting what you want down on paper ‘releases it into the universe’ and will make it come true. They may also say that writing out negative thoughts and feelings draws them out of your subconscious mind and puts them into your journal so you won’t be bothered by them again. Hmmmmm.
As much as I wish it were that simple, I think that’s mostly nonsense. But hold on a second, does that mean I think journaling is quackery? Not at all.
Journaling does do a few important things. First, it forces you to slow down and pay attention to what you’re thinking about. Doesn’t sound like much does it? Well, it’s HUGE. What do you think meditation does? Same thing, slows you down, puts your attention on one thing, and makes you aware of your thoughts. Why do you go to therapy? A big part of it is that the therapist helps you become aware of your thought patterns and how you respond to them. Any activity that accomplishes these things will help you. Journaling actually makes you write your thoughts down so it requires that you evaluate the thought at least as long as it takes for you to write it down. The act of writing down your thoughts means that some of those thoughts will be things you would like to accomplish or change in your life, namely your goals. We know that writing down your goals clarifies them and makes them far more likely to be realized. This is the reason that writing down your goals makes it so much more likely it comes true, not so much the releasing into the universe thing.
Now that you have it written down, you’re going to have it staring back at you for the remainder of your journaling session. This will make you evaluate it to some degree. If you journal with any frequency, you’ll end up at least occasionally writing something down and then a few seconds or minutes later looking back at it and telling yourself how ridiculous it is to be concerned or worried, or angry about whatever it was that you wrote. Congrats, self-therapy. Could this be the reason negative feelings are often eliminated by writing them out and it’s not so much the drawing out of the subconscious mumbo jumbo? I think it is. Either way, same result, so believe whatever you want as far as I’m concerned, just do it.
Having a journal allows you to see progress over time. It’s very often hard for us to see the changes we make, or at least how dramatic they are, because the changes happen so incrementally over time. It’s like when you see a child that you aren’t around much and every 6 months it’s like meeting someone new. The parents don’t recognize the changes as easily because they see the children change so subtly on a daily basis. You just see the cumulative effects all at once and it’s much more apparent. When you have a ‘log’ you can go back 6 months and see what you were thinking about, or had problems with, and often be very happy that you’ve grown to see the world so much differently and that the things that used to give you so much trouble no longer do.
Journaling can help you postpone stress. When dealing with individuals with phobias, some therapists recommend something called ‘worry time’. It seems goofy, but in a nutshell the therapist gives the person one or two specific times during the day during which they are supposed to force themselves to worry about whatever is troubling them. This reduces the amount of stress and rumination throughout the day since the person knows that they aren’t supposed to be using the time to worry yet, and that they will have the opportunity later. So it doesn’t say ‘don’t worry’, it just says ‘worry later’. There’s a big difference. Simply telling yourself not to worry about something that’s bothering you is likely to fail, but teaching yourself that you’re in control of it will empower you. When you keep a journal you’ll find something bothering you during the day and you’ll be able to tell yourself to move on and let it go, knowing that you’ll journal about it later.
How often should you journal? It’s hard to say, but probably as often as possible without the journaling itself causing stress. I wouldn’t start out trying to journal every day if you haven’t gotten good at managing your time yet, that’s self defeating. Try to start with once a week for a month, then go to twice or three times a week. If you can do it every day for a short duration, that would be optimal.
Caffeine, Sugar, and Nicotine
Every morning I wake up, pour my dog 16 ounces of strong coffee into his bowl , toss a glazed donut onto the floor for him to chow down on, and then blow cigarette smoke into his face.
Ok, not really, but I bet some of you treat yourself that way, worse than you’d treat a dog.
You and I both know that what you put into your body effects how you feel and your tolerance to stress. Don’t think so? You’re the exception and you feel the same no matter how much junk you take in? If I’m having a hard time convincing you of this then chances are you’ve abused yourself for so long you don’t remember what it was like to run clean.
All the more reason to keep reading.
Anxious? Stressed? Overwhelmed? Maybe a grande frappasomething isn’t the smartest move. While we’re at it, that candy bar should go. Cigarettes too.
Caffeine and sugar are two culprits you need to watch out for when you’re under stress; the last thing you need when you’re under pressure is to pump more into yourself. If you’re smoking, you’re really making life harder than it needs to be. You may think that smoking relaxes you, but it’s another stimulant that you should be avoiding. Quit if you can of course (I used to smoke, I know it’s tough), but until you do, don’t smoke for an hour before and none during your practice sessions.
The sugar you’re used to eating puts your blood sugar and insulin levels on a roller coaster ride, that’s why it’s tough to stop eating it and why you crave it. I’m usually not a big proponent of stopping things cold turkey, since life is tough enough as it is, but with sugar I’ve found that it’s much easier to just quit it for a couple weeks and before you know you’ll break that cycle and won’t even want it.
Caffeine is another story. Unless you’re extremely anxious and need immediate relief, it’s better to taper off what you’re used to over a week or so. If you don’t, you’ll get a pretty mean headache, but hey, buy some aspirin. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever have a cup of coffee again, once in a while I like a cup of coffee too. It just means that you should limit it to a cup or two of caffeine a day, tops. And I’m talking about a mug of coffee, 12 ounces or so. Not the enormous vat of java they wheel out to you on a dolly you find at many of the coffee shops now. Those sometimes have 4 or 5 times the amount of caffeine you’d have in a regular sized cup. And you can’t pump it all full of sugar and whipped cream or drop a Butterfinger in there or whatever else you may have been considering. While you’re actively trying to overcome your fear, I would
highly encourage you to stop the caffeine for a bit, in a week you’ll be amazed at how much more relaxed you feel when you’re not pumping yourself full of a stimulant.
The Biggest Mistakes in Overcoming Your Fear of Driving
Testing Instead of Practicing
When you go out and starting working on the rungs of your ladder, you need to resist the temptation to look at your progress in terms of black and white. Many people have a very rough time because they make themselves feel like they MUST do whatever their goal is for that day and that they HAVE to do it perfectly. They’re testing themselves when what they should be doing is practicing. When you practice, the goal is to get better, not to do it perfectly, and that’s the outlook you need to have. Testing brings anxiety, tension, and the possibility of failure, all the things you should be avoiding. The only failure is in not attempting. If you try to accomplish one of your driving goals and fall short, but make it further than you did last time, did you fail? Not in my eyes. What if you don’t make it as far as the time before, do you fail then? Not as long as you learn WHY you didn’t do as well. Maybe you had a big cup of coffee right before and the anxiety got hold of you easier. If you learn to curb your caffeine intake prior to driving and that makes you more successful down the line, then it’s still a success. Whenever you feel down about the progress you may be making, sit down someplace quiet and try to determine what the cause is, what you may be doing (or thinking) wrong. In that answer lays success.
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." – Samuel Beckett
Practicing In Traffic
Everyone gets stressed, frustrated, and has a difficult time driving in traffic. That’s why it always amazes me that so many people with a fear of driving try to do their practicing when the roads are full of other motorists. There’s a time and place to practice your skills in traffic, but early in your recovery is not the time. Find an out of the way place if you can and practice. Make it easier on yourself at first. If you live in an urban location where traffic is constant during the day, then for the first week or two perhaps you need to do your practicing early in the morning or late in the evening. Just don’t set yourself up for failure by putting yourself in a situation that’s more difficult than need be. I’ve never been on a highway with traffic at 2AM, you can find a way to avoid it.
“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Not Letting Go Of Physical Tension
When you try to relax and fall asleep do you clench your fists and expect to ease off into dreamland? Of course not, there’s no way to relax while you’re under physical tension. You need to keep that in mind while you’re driving. When you start to feel anxious or tense, use the Red Sock Relaxation™ method to let go of unnecessary tension. Practice it at home often, the more easily you can relax yourself when you’re calm the easier it will be when you’re under stress. You need to teach yourself what being relaxed feels like, so do it frequently. The more you practice it the more it will become second nature to you and the better you’ll be. After a little practice you can go through your whole body very quickly looking for and releasing tension.
Don’t wait to be in a panic while driving to start the relaxing, you need to use it preventatively until being a relaxed driver physically is your new normal behavior. Waiting until you’re anxious to use this skill is like digging a well when you’re already thirsty, it’s too late.
After this exercise you should be much more relaxed then you were when you were holding all that tension. Remember that just like your thoughts can influence your body, your body can influence your thoughts.
Not Taking Baby Steps
While I understand and applaud the desire to overcome your fear as quickly as possible, you need to be cautious and not bite off too much too quickly. Oftentimes you’ll find yourself doing really well following the program as we dictate and you’ll decide to skip a rung or two on the ladder and jump right into something you’re not ready for. Then you inevitably have a difficult time with it and end up discouraged and more susceptible to further setbacks than you were to begin with. The worst situation where this occurs is with individuals that don’t practice or use the program at all and instead chose to wait until they HAVE to drive for work, wedding, etc. Then they have an absolutely horrible time of it and it deepens and perpetuates their fear. Work on it slowly and steadily now and in no time at all you’ll be back on the road comfortably.
“Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.” – Bernadette Devlin
Not Understanding Your Body’s Response To Anxiety
We’ve already talked about this, but it’s so critical it bears repeating. You need to be aware of what’s happening to your body when you go through a stress response so you know it’s predictable and normal. Let’s take another look at what you can expect during an anxiety provoking situation so there’s no need to fear it.
You may feel a rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, or chills. This is all due to changes in the cardiovascular system and do not signal a heart attack, assuming you’ve seen a doctor and have no medical reason for thinking otherwise. Your breathing may become rapid, you may even have symptoms of hyperventilation, or over breathing. When you hyperventilate you don’t process oxygen in the same manner as normal and you can feel lightheaded, dizzy, or “unreal”. On the other side, you may find yourself holding your breath which can cause similar symptoms or a choking sensation.
The extra oxygen in your blood may make you have vision disturbances such as tunnel vision. The stress reaction also makes your hearing become heightened so sounds that would normally go unnoticed can seem quite pronounced. Keep in mind, that’s great if we’re escaping a predator, but not good when we’re not in danger. Your body will stop all unnecessary activities to focus on the “threat” at hand, including digestion, which can cause gastrointestinal issues.
When you get anxious and have bodily symptoms, it’s crucial you keep in mind that you understand what’s happening to your body, it’s not dangerous, and there’s a reason for it. Your
feelings really are nothing to be afraid of. “You can observe a lot just by watching.” – Yogi Berra
Rushing
The key to overcoming your fear is to learn to relax yourself despite your anxiety. If you drive onto the highway and try to get to the next exit as fast as possible, not only is it dangerous, but it’s not in keeping with the spirit of the program. You have to regardless. Whenever you feel like escaping away, it’s time to take your breaths, scan teach yourself that whenever you feel anxious, you want to SLOW DOWN, not speed up. We tend to want to get through the stressful event as fast as possible, in other words, escape it. By continually reinforcing to ourselves that there’s something to escape, we dig a deeper trench into the fear and tell ourselves that there is something to run away from. You need to practice experiencing the feelings you have, know they
won’t hurt you, and go about your task your body for tension, and start letting go. Paradoxically, you need to do exactly the opposite of what your body is telling you. When you want to run, sit. When you want to clench, relax. When you want to hold your breath, exhale and breathe.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” – Marcus Aurelius
Being Overly Concerned With What Others On The Road May Be Thinking
As you practice your skills, you may come across others on the road who are less than understanding of what you’re doing. They may tailgate you if they feel you’re not driving fast enough, honk if you don’t react to a traffic signal quickly, and generally act aggressively. I hope that you don’t have to experience this, but if you do, the best thing you can do is ignore it. As long as you’re abiding to the rules of the road and driving in a safe manner, you’re under no obligation to modify your driving style to suit the desires of other motorists.
You may feel that others on the road are being affected by your driving even if you have no reason to think so. Chances are far more likely that others on the road are so preoccupied with their own lives and problems that they’re not even paying attention to you. Even if they do honk or otherwise get irritated, you’ll surely be forgotten by the next traffic signal. It helps to keep in mind that just as you’re going through a personal challenge while driving, perhaps they are too. Perhaps they recently lost a loved one or were fired from a job. If they’re acting out aggressively, there’s a laundry list of possibilities as to why, don’t take it personally or let it derail your progress. And really, they’re not paying attention to you, are you that concerned about them?
“We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.” – Helen Keller
Waiting To Feel Better Before Practicing
You’re probably never going to feel completely “ready” to move to the next rung of your ladder. It’s always going to be a bit scary, and that’s ok. You’re going to learn that the fear diminishes AFTER you do the task you fear, not before. If you’re afraid of driving over bridges, no amount of driving around town will make you feel any better about your ability to handle that situation. You need to drive over that first bridge, even though you’re scared and don’t feel completely ready yet, and as you practice you’ll get better and more comfortable.
This isn’t different than any other skill. You can read about hitting a baseball and think about it, but until you grab a bat and take a swing, you’ll never know how close you are to being able to hit it. You have to always be pushing a bit. The key is finding the balance between pushing hard enough to be challenged and grow, and not so hard that you set yourself up for failure. Take the baby steps, climb your ladder, eat that elephant.
People get stuck waiting to feel ready for years and decades. Don’t let it happen to you. You won’t know if you’re ready until you take a swing. Go swing.
“You must do the things you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Inaccurately Comparing Yourself to Others
It’s disappointing to me when I speak to someone who’s doing great on the program and making great gains, yet constantly feels frustrated, depressed, and inadequate because they don’t quite measure up to everyone else in their own minds. For instance, Ken was someone who couldn’t drive more than a few blocks from his home for over 5 years. As he used the program, in a short time he was able to drive up to an hour from home and even use the highway. Despite these tremendous and life altering accomplishments, he still described himself as “weak” because he still had limitations around his driving and others he knew could drive wherever and whenever they wanted without giving it a second thought. No matter how quickly he made improvements in his situation, in that comparison to others he always felt woefully behind.
Was Ken really “weak”? Of course not! He made substantial progress in a very short time and was able to do a LOT more than he ever used to. As he keeps following the program, he’ll eventually have no limitations at all. He was unable to see that however, since he was constantly comparing himself to those that didn’t have the same challenge as him, which is an inaccurate comparison. If he had compared himself to others that had fears about driving but weren’t practicing the program as diligently as he was, he would have seen how phenomenally he was doing.
Everyone has challenges and fears. Just because some people, or even most people you know don’t have fears about driving doesn’t mean you’re any less of a person than they are and certainly not weaker. They have their own fears and anxieties and chances are they’re not doing anything about them, you are. They don’t have the courage to admit and face their fears, you do and you are. You’re MORE courageous than they are, not less. Perhaps they’re deathly afraid of spiders or clowns or heights, and you feel fine with those things. Does that make you better than them? No, it just makes you different. Neither one of you is fearless, you’re just anxious about different things.
Don’t compare apples to oranges. And don’t ever think you’re weak because you have a fear; you’re strong for facing it.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain
Avoiding Your Fear
As much as we try throughout the program to make you feel less afraid, your real progress will come when you’re no longer afraid of being afraid and can accept your fear. The more you avoid your feelings or anxiety or panic the more they will ultimately control you and the larger the effect they’ll have on your life.
It’s ok to have clammy hands and it’s ok to have your heart beat faster than normal. Don’t be afraid of yourself, you know what’s happening now. There’s no more mystery. You can drive across town, or over the bridge, or on the interstate, whether you have fear or whether you don’t. The less you care about how you’ll feel in the situation, the less fear will present itself. The power of the anxiety is in your reaction to it. In and of itself, it’s very, very small and rather insignificant. It tries to intimidate you by making you believe it’s something it isn’t, a threat. It’s not a threat, it’s just a feeling. Don’t run from it, stop, breathe, relax, and look at it. There’s nothing there. Turn the lights on in the room and the boogie man disappears, you have the information to turn the lights on now. Flip the switch.
“I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.“ – Louisa May Alcott
Doing It Alone
Not telling anyone that you’re trying to improve yourself is often done so there’s no Having difficulties with anxiety or panic, especially regarding driving, can be an embarrassing thing for many people. There’s certainly no shame in it, but it’s something that is often kept private. If you have a friend or spouse that you can discuss your challenge with, it can be a source of encouragement that will make the process of recovery substantially easier.
shame in failing. Like we discussed, the only failure is in not attempting. The more people that you tell about your involvement in the program, the more accountability you’ll have to stick with it and the sooner you’ll emerge successful.
I would caution you against involving anyone who has a history of ridiculing you about your fear or is otherwise generally not empathetic. Unfortunately, the very people closest to you are the ones that have the most to lose if you are able to drive in comfort. You may no longer be as reliant on them as you were, or your new independence may be threatening. Regardless of the reasons, this is a time to surround yourself with support and positivity, so tell people that you trust can handle your recovery and have your best interests at heart.
I wish I could say that everyone that undertakes the program has a wealth of supportive people in their lives with whom to share their journey, but that’s not always the case. If that’s the case for you, please feel free to write your instructor with any questions you have, or if you just need some encouragement. They’ll check in with you periodically over the two weeks of the program. Whether you realize it or not, the fact that you purchased this program means that you have people somewhere cheering you on, who want to see you do well. Let us know how we can help.
“To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.” – Theodore White
The Seven Principles of Overcoming Anxiety
In the following pages, we’re going to take a look at what I’ve found to be the seven key principles in overcoming anxiety, panic, and phobias such as the fear of driving.
Read and study them until they’re part of your life. Reflect on them, even if they seem not to apply to you, and try to figure out how you may have been breaking from the principle in your own life and the possible negative consequences it may have had. Then determine how you can do it differently and better in the future.
Ready? Let’s go…
The Seven Principles
The Illusion of the Horizon
Every ship’s Captain can see the horizon, and sail towards it, but only a fool would expect to reach it. It’s never gets any closer, it’s an illusion.
In the same way, many people with anxiety or phobias like driving anxiety struggle because they’re foolishly chasing the horizon. In this case, the horizon is the day they’re “free from anxiety”. I hate to burst your bubble, but that day won’t ever come. The good news is, you can stop chasing it and get on to better things.
See, anxiety is an emotion, like any other. You wouldn’t try to NEVER be angry again, or NEVER be sad again, right? It’s futile, impossible, and all you would do is frustrate yourself and set yourself up for failure.
When you chase the impossible goal of never having anxiety again, you’re guaranteed to forever have a “problem” with anxiety.
As long as you’re living life, there will be some anxiety; it’s a question of degrees. Just like you can have days where you’re angry, but not have an anger management problem. You can, and should, allow yourself to have moments or days when you’re anxious, but not tell yourself that means you have an “anxiety management” problem. It’s not whether you have anger or anxiety, or whatever emotion is on the table, but how you choose to handle it.
Sometimes people will say they had a day when they were anxious and they’ll call it a “relapse”. I’ll ask if they had a panic attack like they used to and they’ll say no. I’ll ask if they avoided whatever situation made them anxious like they used to and they’ll say no. So I’ll ask them what makes them think they “relapsed” and they say, “Oh, I just was anxious again. I thought I was OVER that…”
You’re NEVER “over” anxiety. There’s nothing to be “over”. Just like the horizon, there’s no real finish. It’s all about how you learn to react to your feelings of anxiety, not whether you have them or not. There are days when I get anxious. There’s days when EVERYONE gets anxious. It’s all part of life.
If your criterion for overcoming your problem with anxiety is to never be anxious again, you’re going to have a long road ahead of you. Just like if a ship’s Captain told the crew they could only stop rowing when they reached the horizon, it’s going to be miserable journey.
Make your goal one of handling your anxiety better, not eliminating it completely. Give yourself the possibility of success instead of the inevitability of failure by picking the wrong goal. Stop chasing the horizon so you can truly put your trouble with anxiety behind you.
The Mirroring Principle
The Mirroring Principle simply states that you get more of whatever it is you focus on…like a reflection. It can be your best friend of worst enemy; it depends on how you choose to use it.
Don’t you already know this to be true? If you’re depressed, it’s easy for everything to be miserable and very tough for things to seem positive, so it’s easy to get even more depressed. When you’re happy, isn’t it a lot easier to laugh than when you’re sad? Have you ever seen a funny movie in a bad mood? Was it as good as it would have been if you weren’t in that negative
state of mind?
The same is true with your anxiety.
You need to know the fundamentals of how to cope with your anxiety and feelings ofpanic, and to have a plan, but once you have that plan, you’re NOT going to rid yourself of anxiety by making it the central theme of your life! One of the big problems is that you’re paying your symptoms of anxiety much more attention than most people do and that’s a big reason why you have such a problem with it. You need to focus LESS on it, not MORE. I admire the desire to attack it with both barrels, but it’s not the way out. The more you attack it, the more you reinforce to yourself
that it’s NOT ok to have anxiety, and the more you feed it. And what happens to things you feed? Right, they grow. It’s counterintuitive, I know.
I knew I was well on my way to recovery from my anxiety when I was able to tell it, “Not now, I’ll deal with you later, I’m busy” when I felt my anxiety surface. Life needs to take priority over your fear.
When you’re trying something new, and you feel a twinge of anxiety, what do you do now that gets you in trouble? You watch it. Focus on it. See if it grows or if there’sany other sign that it’s getting worse. When you watch anything that closely you get more of it.
I bet that every once in awhile when you’re anxious you’ll get distracted by something, maybe you have to focus on something for work, or someone starts up a conversation with you, or you have to attend to something important, and you find your anxiety dissipates or leaves entirely. Why did that happen? You stopped watching it. You started paying it the attention it deserves, which is none.
But before you chalk all of this up as a negative trait, if you think about it, we can use this to our advantage right? What if instead of focusing on anxiety, we purposely focused on something different, something better…
That’s why learning relaxation skills and doing visualization is so powerful.
Just like what you focus on and mentally” practice” can be harmful, if you start focusing positive circumstances and feelings you’ll see things start to swing the other way.
Have you ever read any self-improvement books that tell you to start your day with a period of gratitude? You’re supposed to write out or at least think about all you’re grateful for that day…your health, family, job, home, etc. What’s that REALLY doing? It’s helping you start your day with POSITIVE thoughts and focus as opposed to waking up and saying to yourself, “Am I
anxious again? Oh, no, this is going to be another terrible day!”
What about the book, “The Secret” that tell you about the Law of Attraction and how powerful visualizing what you want can be. Have you read or seen that movie? If not, it’s pretty good and inspiring, go get it. The reason the Law of Attraction has gotten so much attention lately is simple…it works! Does it work by sending out instructions to the universe like some people claim? I don’t think so. I think it works because it forces you to really FOCUS on good things, and not bad.
Think I’m full of beans? Well don’t trust me, trust yourself…
Have you ever gotten a new car and all of a sudden it seems like they’re all over the road?
Do you think that you’re so cool everyone ran out and bought one right after you did so they could be like you? I’m sure you’re cool…but not THAT cool.
What changed was your focus. Now that you have that type of car, you’re paying attention, looking for it, focusing on it.
I hear from women who are pregnant that it seems like there’s three times the number of pregnant women walking around when you’re expecting - same principle at work.
So if you’re focusing on your anxious feeling, what do you think you’ll find three times or ten times as much of? Bingo! More anxious feelings.
What if you started your day with feelings or gratitude and how great it would feel to accomplish your goals, how proud of yourself, you’d be, all you could accomplish….
Right again! You’d feel terrific!
There are some important strategies to visualizing so it’s most FAR more effective, but that’s beyond the scope of this report. For now, just be aware that you get more of whatever you focus on, so be careful where you place your attention.
The Golden Rule
Now I want you to learn the “Golden Rule of Fear.”
Now you’re probably already familiar with the other Golden Rule, you know, “treat others how you would want to be treated”.
What makes that the “Golden” rule? Well, I guess because so many questions can be answered by it. It’s kind of like your “go-to” rule. Don’t know what to do in a situation? Golden Rule time. Confused about what’s right or wrong? Golden Rule time. It’s a very simple sentence that you could spend a lifetime trying to live by. Its power is in its simplicity.
Like the other Golden Rule, The Golden Rule of Fear is deceptively simple, yet it contains all you really need to know about how to conquer your anxiety, panic attacks, or phobias. Now living by it, just like the other Golden Rule, is a different story, but this one sentence I’m about to tell you should be your “go-to” question whenever you feel anxious, panicky, or fearful.
Ok, ready? Here it is…
“What would I do if I WASN’T afraid?”
I told you it was simple. That’s the point, but let’s look at it a little deeper…
The Golden Rule of Fear helps you think more clearly when anxiety makes it difficult. Let’s say you’re asked to go to an event that requires you to drive on the highway, maybe over a bridge, etc. Your brain screams to not go, make an excuse and avoid it, but another part of you isn’t so sure. It’s just so darn hard to think straight when you’re anxious and conflicted…
But wait.
The Golden Rule.
If you weren’t anxious, what would you do? Go to the event or avoid it?
That’s right, you’d go.
So you get closer to the event and you start to feel anxious…your stomach gets queasy, you start to sweat, your thoughts race…so you start to tighten your grip on the wheel of the car as you drive there, breathe fast and shallow, and hope to get it over with quickly.
Hold on a second…what about the Golden Rule? You remember the rule and think what you would do if driving didn’t scare you. You relax your grip on the wheel, slow your breathing, and slow down -just like it didn’t bother you a bit. You stop all those anxious physical symptoms from making you feel worse.
Do you shut off the radio to focus on your anxiety and monitor your body for signals itwill get worse? Grab a cell phone to distract yourself and hide from your feelings? Snap at the kids? Feel weak or less than everyone else because of how you feel? Not if you’re living by the Golden Rule. Someone who’s not anxious doesn’t need to be hyper vigilant about a sensations in their body, they don’t need to distract themselves from their thoughts…just do whatever you think you would do if you weren’t anxious.
Simple? Yes. Easy? Not so much. But I guarantee you this, it will help you more than you could believe. There’s a lot you can do about your anxiety, but a lot of it comes “What would I do if I
WASN’T afraid?” back to that simple sentence. The problem with a lot of techniques for controlling anxiety is that in the middle of an anxious episode, it’s hard to remember and do. The
Golden Rule is eight words that can change your life. Go tattoo them someplace.
Oh yeah, the other Golden Rule is a pretty good idea too.
Learning from Chinese Handcuffs
Have you ever seen those Chinese handcuffs, they look like a tube, and you stick your fingers in them and it appears like it would be very easy to get out of, but when you attempt to pull your fingers out, the tighten up and make it impossible. So you pull harder and the handcuffs grip your fingers even tighter. The more you struggle against the handcuffs, the more secure they grip you and less chance you have of escaping. If you struggle long enough, you’ll eventually give up and realize that only by STOPPING the struggle could you free yourself. You had the ability to free yourself the whole time, but it was by relaxing, not fighting.
Yesterday I spoke to someone who told me they’ve been “fighting” their phobia for years and just couldn’t get themselves to “push through it”. Later on in the day someone else told me how they’d been “trying like hell” and just couldn’t get past a particular hurdle.
It made me think back to when I still was battling anxiety and one of the many things that brought my fear was traveling far from home. I’d white knuckle the steering wheel, grit my teeth through the panic, and somehow sweat and claw my way from stoplight to stoplight, wondering why I was never getting any better. I looked at myfear like an opponent, like something I had to beat. I can even remember thinking if I could just outlast it maybe it would ‘die’.
Boy, was I wrong.
You CAN’T out fight it. You can’t do it because it’s not real, it’s like a mirage. It’s like those Chinese handcuffs , the harder you try to pull yourself free from them the tighter their grip gets, but if you relax and stop fighting them they slip right off…
Your fighting is what feeds your fear. When you stop fighting, there’s no more momentum. That doesn’t mean you’ll be totally fear free right away, but it does mean that you’ll take away its ability to grow.
The next time you get anxious, instead of tensing, let go. Instead of fighting harder, relax.
You can’t fight anxiety with MORE anxiety.
The Rewinding Method
I love my dog more than most people I meet. He’s big and strong, but gentle as could be, he wants nothing more than to be pet and lick your face. As you can see from his picture to the right, he doesn’t even mind being dressed up my daughter.
One of his favorite pastimes is to play catch. I toss one of his toys in the yard, he takes off like a rocket and brings it back to me, and then the cycle starts all over again. He never tires of it. There’s something I need to admit though, as much as I love him and wouldn’t trade for anything, he’s not the brightest bulb, as a matter of fact, he’s pretty dumb, maybe that’s what makes him so lovable.
For instance, when we play catch, sometimes I won’t REALLY throw the toy, I’ll just kind of make the motion with my arm and he’ll take off running assuming I threw it and then he’ll wander around a little bit looking for it and pretty soon he’ll realize he’s been tricked and come jogging back ready for me to throw it again. Don’t tell me you’ve never done this…
Sometimes, I can do this for a LONG time, like I said, he’s lovable, but not winning any prizes for his intellect. If he were Scooby, there wouldn’t be too many mysteries solved, believe me.
So I’ll fake toss the ball again, and he’ll go running, look around, and come back.
And again.
And again.
And again.
He never learns. Every throw is like the first one. Like he’ll just never realize that what he THINKS is about to happen ISN’T. No matter how many times he gets fooled, he doesn’t learn from the past. Doesn’t learn he’s getting tricked.
Are YOU anything like him?
How many times have you been anxious or had a panic attack and feared you would lose control, go craget deathly ill, stop breathing, embarrass yourself, freak out, be put in an asylum, or whatever your fear of the day is?
Me? Oh, when I was anxious I probably worried about that stuff only several thousand times or so.
So let’s dust off what I like to call The Rewinding Method.
How many times did any of those things you THOUGHT were going to happen ACTUALLY happen? How many times have you ACTUALLY contracted a deadly illness? How many asylums have you been put into for ACTUALLY losing control of your body and mind? How many times have you ACTUALYY fainted? Oh…none, huh?
So let me get this straight…you’ve gotten tricked into thinking these things were going to happen a hundred or a thousand times, but they never do, yet every time you react the same way and never seem to learn that your anxiety is just tricking you. That there’s nothing REALLY that’s about to happen. Do I have it right? Sounds a lot like my dog doesn’t it? “You’re never OVER anxiety, there’s nothing to be
The Rewinding Method is simple. Just rewind in your memory and think of all the things you typically fear happening and compare it to what has ACTUALLY happened. I think you’ll see that the list of what has really happened is pretty small, and a heck of a lot different than all you feared would happen. Then you know that you’ve been getting tricked, your anxiety has been throwing a stick that wasn’t real and you’ve been continually chasing it without learning from your past…pretty silly, huh?
So the next time your anxiety tries to fool you, you’ll know what it’s doing, and can ignore it. Stop chasing a stick that isn’t there.
And yes, that’s really my dog in the picture.
The Law of Elephant Training
Do you know how they train elephants for the circus? When the elephant is very young, they attach a chain on their leg to a stake in the ground. They pull and tug on the chain to try and free themselves, but they’re too small and not yet strong enough to break away from the little chain.
Quickly, the come to believe that it’s impossible to break the chain and free themselves. They tell themselves they can’t do it so they quit trying. As a matter of fact, they never try again, even when they grow into powerful animals that could snap the chain without a second thought.
When you see an enormous elephant being held in place by a small little chain, it looks silly, and it is. There’s no way that little chain or stake could hold them if they wanted to escape.
But it’s not the CHAIN that holds them.
It’s the BELIEF that they cannot break free that keeps them captive. If they would just pull on that chain they would change their belief and would be free. We’re not so different, we’re chained in place by our beliefs as well.
When you have anxiety problems or fears, you probably have made negative self talk your norm. You tell yourself over and over in your mind that you can’t drive far from home, over the bridge, on the highway, alone (pick your fear), without anxiety or panic. You’ve CONVINCED yourself that that’s who you are. You’ve talked yourself into believing that you have those limitations. You’ve tied your own chain to your leg and have given up trying to free yourself. Is it any surprise that when you attempt to do what you’ve feared in the past you have anxiety? How could it be any different?
This is why anxiety can take some time to completely overcome. It’s more than just the physical symptoms…it’s your view of yourself. What you’ve told yourself over and over and over and over and over that you are.
But you know what?
Come here…let me whisper it…
You’re wrong.
That doesn’t HAVE to be who you are. If you can convince yourself that you’re anxiety riddled and have panic attacks every time you think about the possibility of driving, you can also “teach” yourself that you enjoy the feelings of excitement that come with trying new things and that you’re a very relaxed person generally. What do you think the difference is between adrenaline junkies that jump off cliffs and race motorcycles and someone that gets afraid of being more than 20 miles from home?
How they’ve told themselves they view the sensations.
The first loves the feeling all those brain chemicals bring, they get addicted to it and chase it. The latter fears the same sensations and runs away from them.
The sensations are the same, the difference is the interpretation.
I’m not saying you have to start loving skydiving. What I’m trying to get across is that your limiting self beliefs are a large part of your problem, and once you really start trying to do the things you fear, the things you’re CONVINCED will break you, you’ll find you’re capable of much more than you ever thought possible and you were being held in place all along by a flimsy little chain that was put in place long ago.
It’s time to give your faulty beliefs a tug and set yourself free.
The Rule of the Stubborn Hamster
I ’ve never had a hamster, not even as a kid. I couldn’t think of anything more mind numbing than watching it run in place in one of those wheels for hours on end, too stubborn to get off and actually go someplace.
How many hours does a hamster have to run on a wheel for it to finally learn that what it’s doing isn’t getting them anywhere? Do they think if they just keep doing the same
thing a little faster they’re get someplace? Maybe they think if they just hang in there and do the same thing a little longer they’ll see some progress. Maybe if they HOPE harder…
I don’t know why hamsters are so stubborn and don’t learn that what they’re doing is useless and that they should try doing something different.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know why you do it either.
A lot of the stress and pressure we put on ourselves is self created. It’s not even that hard to identify where the problem is when we think about it. The real problem is that most of us refuse to do anything about it and just hope that if we try doing the same things HARDER or FASTER or LONGER that it will be resolved. Just like the hamster running in its wheel, doing MORE of the same things that aren’t helping isn’t going to help. You need to get off the wheel and try something new.
If every day you wake up, have a huge cup of coffee because you stayed up late, and rush around because you hit snooze 5 times and are now almost late for work, it doesn’t come as a big shock to me that you’re going to start things out a little anxious. Maybe that’s the wheel you need to get out of.
If you’re married and you and your spouse fight all the time and going home is miserable and makes you nervous on the drive home, maybe that’s a wheel you need to get out of.
If every time you feel that twinge of panic in your stomach start to creep up, you stopwhat you’re doing and leave the situation or go home where you feel safe, I’m betting that’s a wheel you need to step out of too.
It’s time to do some honest self reflection and see if what you’re doing and how you live your life is getting you closer to where you want to be or further away. Are the activities, thought patterns, relationship, and careers, helping you or hurting you? Are you making progress or running on a wheel? If you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, that doesn’t make too much sense does it? As much as anxious people don’t like change (as bad as things may be right now, at least there’s some comfort in the known), it’s exactly what’s needed. Hey, don’t pat me on the back for that advice, it’s hardly a revelation. Just like the hamster on the wheel, if you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.
The only way to a different result is to do things…well…differently. If you had a recipe for a cake, and it turned out dry and tasted like baking soda, would you make it again using the exact same recipe and cooking technique? I would hope not, it seems pretty obvious that the result would be the same unless some of the variables changed. You have to change the recipe in some form to have a different result.
So you have to set aside some time to thinking about what part “If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” of your life recipe isn’t working for you. Then change it, even if it’s scary.
I’m going to bet that the figuring it out part is pretty easy. Most of us know what we’re doing wring, we just hope we can continue doing it anyway and still get where we want to go. We don’t want to change. That’s the stubborn hamster. You need to change what isn’t working. When you remove those barriers to success, you’ll be surprised how quickly you start making progress once you stop running on the wheel.
Your Cheat Sheet
Here is a “cheat sheet” you can cut out and call upon when it’s difficult to remember the principles. Keep it in your purse or wallet, or tape it to your dashboard in your car. Especially in the beginning, don’t try to rely on your memory to recall the principles you learned, when you’re under anxiety it’s difficult to think clearly, much less remember something you may have read days or weeks ago.
Cut out and place where you can see it easily.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve read the program, please don’t let it end there. You now have information, when you actually put it to use, you’ll have knowledge. As difficult as it may seem to believe right now, you can overcome your fear of driving if you follow the program, I can say this confidently because others have. It will seem extraordinarily difficult at times, exhilarating at other times, and you will certainly have setbacks. When these times present themselves, you must push on. You must keep going forward. It is always right after people come close to the point of quitting that breakthroughs occur. When you feel it’s too tough or more than you can handle, let that be a signal to you that you’re about to take a giant leap forward and let it encourage you. You CAN get better. Remember that whether you believe that you can, or that you can’t, you’re right.
Please take the time to email us your story and your experience with the program at service@drivingfear.com, by taking this small action you can affect the lives of many others with your feedback.
I leave you with my favorite quote of all time, remember it throughout your journey:
Resolve says, ‘I will.’ The man says, ‘I will climb this mountain. They told me it is too high, too far, too steep, too rocky and too difficult.
But it’s my mountain. I will climb it. You will soon see me waving from the top or dead on the side from trying.’
Your Friend,
Feel free to review the program to get an overview, but re-read the entire program from start to finish and stop and do the exercises to get the best results. The techniques given in this program have helped countless people with the same difficulties as you and if you trust the program and put them into practice in your life, you too will soon find yourself with a new world opening up to you.
The program is centered on several very powerful techniques that are being used by professional therapists and others who work with phobic clients. We have read and researched virtually every authoritative source on overcoming fears and phobias written over the last 100 years to determine the most common principles that have stood the test of time in helping individuals overcome their anxieties. We have combined those principles with breakthrough modern research to bring what we feel is the single most effective tool to help you quickly and easily conquer your fear of driving. As you follow the program, you may find that what is presented may not be entirely new to you. Keep in mind that the spectacular results of the program are due not only to the ideas presented on their own, but in the synergistic effect of their combined use. Clinical psychologists and former driving phobia sufferers alike have had input into the program’s creation to ensure it covers the necessary topics and is structured to get you back on the road as quickly as possible. If you have any suggestions or feedback on the program, or if you would like to share your success story (we love those!), please email us at
service@drivingfear.com.
I want to congratulate you on making the choice to face your fear and overcome something in your life that is challenging. Whether you feel it or not, you’re a very brave individual and you should be proud of yourself for taking steps to better yourself, most people do not.
Exercise
Find a blank notebook or go buy one. You’re going to be doing some writing throughout the program and I want you to have a single source devoted to the program. If you keep things documented on scraps of loose paper you’ll end up misplacing some and it doesn’t treat the program and your recovery with the respect it deserves. This is going to be your personal Driving Fear journal, keep it someplace safe and private. If you want to share the contents with someone when the program is over and you’re back on the road comfortably, that’s fine, but for now only you can view what’s inside.
© DrivingFear.com All Rights Reserved 9
What is Your Fear?
Where did your fear come from? Most people with a fear of driving have a history of anxiety or panic attacks, or have had a bad experience while driving, or while driving in a particular situation, such as highways, bridges, or long distances. How or why you have the challenge is irrelevant for this program to be useful to you. What is important is that you take the time to understand what it is specifically you fear about driving. Is it a fear of having a panic attack? Losing control?
Passing out? This program is not designed to determine the cause of your anxiety; that is the job of your therapist if you choose to visit one. I don’t care what the cause is; I’m focusing on the solution. What this program WILL do is give you the tools to overcome the fear.
The good news is that virtually everything you’re afraid of, no matter how seemingly strange, is more than likely very common and a fear shared by many others. Your fears are the result of your anxiety, your focus on your physical feelings, and your lack of understanding about what is happening to your body when you feel this fear. It doesn’t mean you’re weird, crazy, losing your mind, or sick. It just means you’re anxious in a situation that has no danger and don’t know how to respond to your irrational feelings.
I also want to be clear that I am in no way underestimating the severity of your fear. I am fully aware that many programs that market themselves as programs to ease fear are geared towards individuals with what is considered relatively normal anxiety about a bothersome situation. If your discomfort with driving is mild, this program will help you as well and will do so quickly and effectively, but it is designed for those with moderate to severe anxiety.
Exercise
Grab your journal. Sit down someplace quiet and private for a bit and think about what it is you’re really afraid of when you’re driving. Is it losing control? Dying? That you’ll jerk the wheel and drive off the bridge? That you can’t get off the highway or pull over easily and you feel trapped? All of the above? Really put some thought into it and write it down. This should be at least a half page to one page description. Don’t just write “dying” or “losing control”. Write down what would happen, as if you’re telling a story for actors to play out on stage. Picture your worst case scenario in your mind and write it down as if someone had to recreate it. It doesn’t matter how strange it seems at this point, trust me, I’ve heard them all and you’re not the first. As a matter of fact, if thinking about and writing down your fear makes you realize it’s a bit silly, that’s a good thing. In a couple of weeks, it’s going to be a wonderful feeling to look back at what you write today and know that it’s a chapter in your life you can close. Don’t rob yourself of that feeling and the realization of how far you’ve come, write it down.
Understanding Anxiety and Panic
When you do feel fearful or anxious, or even have a panic attack in response to something you fear, it’s important for you to realize exactly what is actually happening. This is often greatly different from what you fear may be happening. In many cases, simply being aware of and understanding what is happening to you physically, and that it’s predictable and not unique to you, is enough to drastically reduce your symptoms.
A panic attack is a very individual experience, but one typically described as a feeling of overwhelming terror. Some of the more common symptoms are listed below:
Heart palpitations
A feeling of choking or not being able to swallow
Sweating
Dizziness
Numbness or tingling in the extremities
Inability to take a deep breath
Trembling
Feelings of unreality (depersonalization)
Fear of losing control, dying, or going crazy
You may have additional symptoms and thoughts that come on during a panic attack; the important thing to realize is that although they’re scary, they really don’t present any danger. Regardless of what you think, you WON’T lose control, die, or go crazy. The fact that you’re concerned about going crazy is strong evidence that you’re not since genuinely crazy people generally don’t realize they’re irrational or slip in and out of their mental illness. You’re not going to die from a panic attack, I know you feel like you will, but it’s just a thought, not reality. Your heart won’t explode or quit working; it can beat very, very fast for a lot longer than a panic attack lasts. Think about how long a person can exercise vigorously, it’s a long time and the heart is capable of sustaining that level for a lot longer than people exercise. You WON’T lose control
from a panic attack. You won’t run from your car across the highway and embarrass yourself, it just won’t happen.
When you get anxious and panicky, your body is going through what you’ve probably heard described as the flight or fight response. During that response, your body is preparing itself to either fight off a predator or run away from one. This is a reaction that goes back to caveman days and something that often keeps us safe, you wouldn’t want to eliminate it if you could. The problem is that you’re having those thoughts and feelings when there’s no appropriate reason. A vicious animal isn’t chasing you and no one is breaking into your house, you’re just driving down the road. You need to remember what this reaction means to your body however, it’s taking serious internal action to save itself. The fact that there’s nothing to truly be saved from is inconsequential, the reaction is the same. There are many aspects of this self preservation response, but let’s take a look at just one and see how it causes symptoms. When you get this anxious, your body takes blood from your extremities like your fingers and toes and shuttles it to your internal organs. After all, your organs are going to need blood to fight off that saber toothed tiger and your fingers are relatively expendable in that situation. But wait, there’s no tiger, you’re just driving to the store. Well, that prehistoric reaction is why your fingers tremble and tingle or go numb. You wouldn’t question it at all if a tiger was actually chasing you, you’d be focused on running away. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere to run to in your car (that’s why you get the trapped feeling) and nothing to run from (no tiger). There’s very little to take your attention away so your focus becomes “what’s happening to me!” (scary thoughts). All these feelings and thoughts that scare the daylights out of you are normal reactions to a stressful event, real or imagined; it’s what you do with these reactions that bring on a panic attack.
Exercise
What are the symptoms you feel when you’re in your fearful situation? Write them down and study them a bit. Have they ever hurt you? Next time you feel them, remember that you know what they are, they shouldn’t surprise you, and they won’t hurt you. When you start to practice driving again, do this again in your notebook as soon as you complete your practice session while it’s fresh in your mind. Then when you’re feeling calmer you can go back and analyze what you were feeling and how your flight or fight response was the cause. Some people find it very helpful to bring an audio recorder with them on their practice sessions so they can describe what they’re
feeling in real time, I think it’s a great idea!
Your Fear Cycle
Although the danger you feel when you’re driving is not real, the fear is. There is an easily recognized cycle you go through when you’re under anxiety and fearful about driving. Let’s look at what happens to get you anxious and keep you anxious.
Step 1
You remember a bad experience you had when you were in the situation you fear. These thoughts bring on a round of minor physical sensations such as an increased heart rate, sweaty palms, or trembling. Be aware that the bad experience does not even have to have been real, but merely an imagined event that has been habitually replayed in your mind enough times to trick your brain into believing it. Some of you can easily trace the origins of your fear back to a particular distressing event while driving such as an accident, but most have not had any difficulty while driving except those created in your own mind (this includes panic attacks in the car).
Step 2
You notice these physical changes that happen in response to your fearful thoughts and you begin to increase your awareness of your body and get afraid that the sensations will escalate. Your increased attention on your bodily sensations makes them appear more significant than they actually are and you become even more afraid of your feelings. You may become worried that you will pass out, go crazy, or lose
control as a result of your fear.
Step 3
Your fear of having more physical sensations increased your body’s stress response and the result is a self fulfilled increase in bodily symptoms. At this point you may have a panic attack or leave/avoid the situation.
Step 4
If you avoid or leave the situation you experience a decrease in your body’s symptoms which you perceive as evidence that your fears were based in reality. You have taught yourself that the way to decrease your fear is to avoid driving. The more you avoid driving the more ingrained into your mind the lesson is. Like Pavlov’s dog, each time you feel the relief of symptoms that accompanies avoidance, you give your mind another false lesson that the fear was real and the way to eliminate the feelings is to escape.
Before we get to what you can do to break this cycle, make sure you really understand the above. The next time you get anxious, you’ll be able to actually notice yourself going through the cycle and that alone can help tremendously. Just taking the mystery out of your response can make you feel more in control. Let’s look at an example:
Katarina has had a history of panic attacks while driving on highways for 15 years. When she approaches an entrance ramp for a highway where she always gets anxious, she feels her heart start to beat faster, her hands get clammy on the steering wheel, and she gets a little lightheaded. She takes those feelings, which are all normal body responses to something we’re fearful of, and takes them as evidence that something is definitely dangerous. She focuses on her
heart rate and lightheadedness and wonders what is happening to her and if it will get worse. She wonders if she’s going to have a heart attack and if she does, will her car go off the ramp? Does her lightheadedness mean she will pass out and crash? Maybe she’ll just lose control and run out of the car and across the highway, putting herself and others at risk and being terribly embarrassed and ashamed. Now she feels herself getting more dizzy and her chest feeling tight, certainly this means all the things she is afraid of happening are going to come true, maybe even all at once! She gets more scared and moves into panic as she focuses even more intently on her body and tries desperately to control it. As she nears the entrance ramp, she keeps right on going, she can’t possibly bring herself to get on the highway, not today, not like this. As she drives past the ramp, she notices an almost immediate reduction in all her symptoms and she’s
learned that avoiding that highway is the way to feel better. She feels exhausted, depressed, and like a failure. Sound familiar? See the pattern in action?
Katarina started the cycle by mentally reliving her past anxiety as she came upon the entrance ramp to the highway. Just as remembering getting burned the last time we touched a hot stove is enough to make us yank our hand away, her memory of past negative experiences is enough to induce the initial symptoms of anxiety prior to even turning onto the ramp. Her body begins its reaction to what she has classified as a danger and appropriately prepares to defend or save itself. She feels her body taking these actions but since there is no real danger, she interprets her body’s symptoms as evidence that she will pass out or lose control and her fear increases.
Her focus is now not on the driving, but on the fear of how she feels physically. As her attention moves to her body’s symptoms her fear increases and her body increases the reaction to her false danger signal. As her physical symptoms increase in response to this, she views it as evidence that she is losing control and decides that if she feels this terrible BEFORE going on the highway, she’ll certainly lose control if she turns onto the ramp. She decides to avoid that situation and as she does she tells herself that the danger has passed. In response her body breathes a sigh of relief, decreases its preparations to defend itself, and the physical symptoms dissipate. The next time she approaches the exit ramp she will go through a similar reaction but now she will remember what she did last time to bring quick relief and the desire for avoidance will be even stronger.
Exercise
Try to do the best you can at remembering the last time you were anxious or panicky
in a car and write down in your journal what it was like. Get as detailed as you can, it’s
ok if you get a bit anxious doing it. Do you see the pattern at all in the experience?
Interrupt the Fear Cycle
What should Katarina have done? Ideally, she would never have had the physical reaction to her false thoughts and imagination to begin with and that’s the first thing you’re going to learn. Since it’s naive to think that there will never be any anxiety you also need to learn how to break the pattern that feeds and escalates the fear if it does show itself. Once you know that you can limit how intense your feelings get and that they won’t get unmanageable and that there’s truly nothing to be concerned about, the road to not having the initial burst of fear is far quicker and easier.
What you have is a bad habit that needs to be broken. You’ve conditioned yourself to react in a certain way when you drive or think about driving. The first, most effective thing you’re going to do is start associating thoughts about driving with something positive instead of the thoughts of anxiety or panic that you now have associations with.
The first exercise is done when you are not driving, but when you are relaxed and feeling comfortable. Its goal is to recondition your mind from thinking scary, anxious thoughts to thinking peaceful thoughts whenever you imagine driving. It’s what we call “thought popping”.
Think of when you have felt very relaxed, secure, and at peace in the past. Perhaps it was lying on the beach with your significant other, with sound of the waves and gulls gently soothing away all your cares. Maybe it was when you first held a baby and felt a warmth and innocence in that connection. It will be unique for everyone; the key is that you take the time to remember it vividly. What did you see, hear, feel, touch, or even smell. If your scene is the beach scene, feel how
relaxed your muscles felt as they sunk into the cool, soft sand. Hear the waves and the gulls, or the breath of whoever is with you. Smell the ocean and the coconut suntan lotion. Feel the peace in your body.
You may have heard this called your “safe place”. It doesn’t matter to me what you call it, as long as you
understand the purpose. Some people call it their island, others their room, it doesn’t matter. If safe place sounds silly, call it something different. Since I have to call it something, I’ll call it your safe place.
When you’re able to pull that mental image up in your memory with all the details, I want you to think of sitting in a car in your driveway for no more than 2 seconds and then go back to the mental image of your safe place. Relax into the memory and focus on the joy you feel just being there. Now imagine you’re sitting in your car again in your driveway for no more than 2 seconds and then immediately go back to your safe place image in your mind. Continue this pattern, never staying with the fear producing image long enough to build up significant anxiety. You should be able to pop back and forth between the two about every minute. This “popping” is key and why we’ve named it thought popping, you should be popping from one mental image to another quickly. Do this for 20 minutes a day.
What’s going to happen during these sessions is that you’re going to retrain your brain to not follow the same mental path it always has when you think about driving. We’re going to teach your mind to stop taking the same path to a fear response it always has and instead to go to a more peaceful feeling.
You’ll be working up gradually to more challenging images, spend at least a day on each, and don’t rush to the next image until you’re able to think about it in relative peace. You’ll actually train your brain to feel relaxed and at peace instantly whenever you think about driving. After 14 days of performing this exercise, you should feel a dramatic reduction in your anxiety about the situations you’ve been using in the process. If you still feel uncomfortable in a driving situation, there’s an anxiety producing image you haven’t worked with enough.
Start with images that are relatively easy for you and be sure to always focus on the details of your safe place, all the smells, feelings, and sounds as possible. Make it real to you. If you’re very anxious about driving, maybe your beginning image is just walking to the driveway or holding your car keys. If you can drive fine in the city but get panicky on highways, perhaps you start imagining yourself approaching an entrance ramp to a highway.
Exercise
Write down in your journal what your safe place is like. The key here is to get as detailed as possible and not let anything slip by. Go through all your senses and try to get a few memories for each. What did you smell? What did you touch? Did you taste anything? The more real the memory is, the easier and faster this will be, and details are what make the memory real. If you were lying on the sand, don’t just write, “I touched sand”. Write, “I touched the cold, damp sand. It was grainy and fell through my fingertips.” See how you can picture the second in your mind?
Once you have it written down, practice it in your mind. In the beginning, spend much more time in your safe place than in your car. It’s important that you train yourself to remember the safe, peaceful feelings quickly and intensely. Once you can truly get in touch with those emotions and feelings at will, you can start incorporating the images that you find fearful. Don’t rush the second part.
Red Sock Relaxation™
It is virtually impossible for the mind to be anxious while the body is relaxed. Unfortunately, many people who are anxious while driving don’t realize how tense they’re making themselves through unnecessary muscle tension. Chronically anxious individuals may even make that tension their norm. We need to practice letting our muscles go and loosen so we can realize when we’re tense while driving and have a point of reference for what it feels like to be physically relaxed.
The Red Sock Relaxation™ exercise helps to relax your body while driving and give you a mental image to aid in that muscular letting go. As you drive, it helps you let go of the tension in the muscles you’re not actively using to drive the vehicle. You can steer without overly tense shoulders, and you certainly don’t need to squeeze the wheel with all your strength. Envision in your mind a loose, dangling, red sock, that’s how your body should be, no unnecessary tension. Some people have even gone out and bought a red sock to keep in their car to remind them to let go of their tension whenever they see it, it’s a great idea!
Periodically as you drive, and especially if you feel yourself getting anxious, scan your muscles for undue stress and systematically let it go, picturing yourself as loose and relaxed as your red sock. Traffic signals are the perfect time to be sure and practice this.
Red Sock Relaxation™
First, concentrate on the muscle of the face.
1. Don’t squint, relax your eyes. You may be surprised how the act of relaxing your eyes affects your whole body. Always start here. Tell yourself to “Let go and relax”.
2. Feel your forehead loosen, don’t furrow your brow. Tell yourself “It’s ok to relax here”.
3. Focus on your jaw. Are you clenching your teeth? Relax your jaw. Your teeth should be parted, if your mouth sags open a bit, all the better. How would the muscles of your face behave if they were imitating your red sock? Let them go and relax.
Now go down to the neck and shoulders.
1. Roll your head around a bit (if you can do so safely). First clockwise, then counter clockwise.
2. Roll your shoulders around a few times, first forward, then backwards.
3. Bend your shoulder blades back and try to touch them together. Hold this tense position for a few seconds, then release. Often overly tensing a muscle prior to relaxing it helps it relax more deeply.
4. Remember to picture your red sock. Drop your shoulders so they’re loose and limp, no more effort than is necessary to drive. Exhale with a sigh as you let go of all that extra effort.
Concentrate on your arms and chest.
1. Squeeze and contract the muscles of your arms and then release.
2. Clench your fists, squeezing your fingers, hold, and let go. Make sure your arms are relaxed and you’re no longer gripping the wheel with more effort than you need to.
3. If you’re stopped, wrap your arms around yourself in a ‘hug’ position and contract your chest muscles, hold, and release.
Move your focus down to your thighs and buttocks.
1. Relax your thighs and make sure you’re not clenching your buttocks. Sit deeply in your seat and relax, don’t hold yourself up, let the seat do that for you. Scan your whole body again for tension and when you find some, exhale with a sigh, visualize your loose and relaxed red sock, and let it go.
The R.O.A.D. Technique™
The key to eliminating your fear of driving, or really any other fear for that matter, is to no longer have anxiety about your fear. When you are at a point where you no longer place great importance on whether you feel the discomfort of fear or not, you will feel far less anxiety because as we’ve seen, you’re not feeding your fear cycle. The technique you’re about to learn is the single most important aspect of the entire program, but one that takes some initial courage. If you can find it in yourself to use the R.O.A.D. Technique™ as you’ll be shown, you can do almost nothing else and still end your phobia. However, if you skip over this technique, you’re likely to have continued difficulty regardless of how well you perform all the other supportive exercises.
The technique consists of 4 clear steps that you can easily remember by the acronym:
R - Release
O - Observe
A - Accept
D - Demand More
Release
The first step of the technique is to release. When you find yourself getting anxious, even a little bit, release and let go of all tension and resistance. Maybe you start to get irrational thoughts, perhaps you get that familiar anxiety in your stomach, whatever it is, don’t push it away, release your grip over it. Stop trying to hold everything response, observe it, become a student of it. What do you feel exactly? Don’t just together. All you’re doing is creating more tension and resistance.
You want to allow whatever you feel in without ignoring it or denying it. Cease all effort to control it.
Observe
Now that you’re not resisting your fear settle for, “I feel anxious” or “I feel like crap”. It may help to get a little detached from yourself and examine your body like a scientist, just data, not judgment.
You may observe that you’re thinking that your fear will continue to escalate and take you over, making you lose your mind and never come back. Wow, that’s interesting, make a note of it. There it is again. And again. Wait a second, here’s a new one…now you’re thinking that the tingling in your legs means you’re going to lose control and run out of the car.
Is your heart pounding? What’s it like? Do you hear it or feel it? What does your stomach feel like?
Observe everything. Don’t let it be general, figure out just what you’re experiencing.
Accept
Now that you have a better understanding about how your fear gets started and escalated, as well as what is occurring physiologically in your body when you go through your flight or fight response, you should be better prepared to accept your feelings of fear, despite them being uncomfortable. It’s important that you do the previous exercises so you become aware that whatever bodily sensations you feel can be attributed to your stress response and that they’re not indicative of any immediate danger.
Your overall mindset needs to shift dramatically from wanting to stop or avoid your symptoms, to one of accepting however you feel at the moment and knowing that you NEED to experience the temporary discomfort to gain the knowledge that it won’t hurt you.
The more anxious you become, the more symptoms that present themselves, and the more you desire to escape, the more you need to stop and accept whatever you’re feeling. Accept the sensations that are scaring you, accept the thoughts, and remember that you know what it is, a stress response. You’ve been afraid of what you may be feeling every time you’ve felt it, but it’s never resulted in any of what you fear coming true has it? Have you ever REALLY lost control? Ever REALLY driven off the bridge? There’s NOTHING there but your thoughts. Nothing to hurt you. You’re no less in control in your car or on the bridge than you are in your kitchen. There’s NO THING to fear.
Demand More
This can be a hard step for many, but after you’ve released your controlling grip on yourself, observed what you’re feeling, and accepted those feelings, now I want you to demand more of those feelings. Make it worse.
I’m not kidding. I know you may be thinking that if you do that you’ll certainly go off the deep end never to return, or some other terrible thing will happen. It won’t. If your thoughts are racing, try to get them to race faster. If your legs are shaking, make them shake more.
This will help you in two ways. First, it will show you that you really can’t make it significantly worse and that your fear of it becoming worse is really unfounded. Second, it puts you back in control over your feelings.
When you start to truly try to make it worse, you’ll see a reduction in your symptoms and you’ll realize that you brought the fear on and can take it away. The key is that you honestly try to make them worse, and that will take some trust and time. Just saying you want them to get worse when you know full well that underneath that you’re praying they don’t doesn’t work. You need to understand what’s happening to your body and trust that it won’t hurt you before you can really open up to it. Once you do though, you’ll be well on your way to feeling better and no longer being afraid of your anxiety or panic. You’ll know that you carry your own cure inside you.
*Some of you reading may notice that there are similarities in the above and with other programs such as Panic Away by Joe Barry. There will be overlap with foundational concepts such as these in any successful program.
Scary, Irrational Thoughts
It should be comforting for you to know that you’re not the only one that has scary and irrational thoughts when you’re under high anxiety and panic, in fact, it’s often described as one of the most difficult aspects of the fear condition. Focusing on, trying to suppress, and getting scared of your thoughts is a major reason why you get stuck in your fear cycle.
Do you get afraid that your heart will suddenly stop if you don’t pay attention to it? Maybe you can’t stop thinking about going insane and running out across the road and getting hurt. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy or odd, and it doesn’t mean that you’re going to do any of those things. It only means you’re anxious and scaring yourself and need to find a way to stop reacting to these thoughts. The truth is EVERYONE has irrational thoughts like this. The difference is that non-anxious people realize they’re just thoughts that don’t pose any danger or significance and ignore them without becoming upset, so the thought goes away quickly of its own accord. Whenever you get an anxious thought, it’s important that you remind yourself that it’s just internal chatter, just a meaningless reaction to your stress that doesn’t need or deserve a
reaction.
Sometimes you may read about thought stopping techniques, such as visualizing a stop sign in your head or even snapping yourself with a rubber band. This is the worst thing you could do and like we talked about, these types of thoughts are common, so denying them completely is a losing proposition. Instead of trying to push your thoughts away (which as you know, only creates more of the bothersome thoughts), why not recognize the silly thoughts for what they are and let them run their course? Once you aren’t upset by your thoughts and know that they’ll go away as your anxiety dissipates, you’ll not only have fewer scary thoughts, but you’ll be much better prepared to interrupt your fear cycle and have less overall anxiety.
With anxiety, ‘what we resist persists”. The more emotion we associate with something, positive or negative, the more we foster it. The more upset you get by your thoughts and the more you try to stop them, the more of them you’ll have and the closer to your consciousness they’ll be. Don’t take my word for it, look at your own life. Think back to a memorable event that occurred at least 5 years ago. Maybe a vacation, birthday, or birth of a child. Can you remember who was there and some details about the event? Can you pull up a mental image of it? Maybe you recall
someone’s smile, or what you were wearing, or some recognizable smell. Why do you remember that? Because you have a large amount of positive emotion attached to it in your memory. It works with negative emotions too unfortunately, I’m sure you can remember vividly a traumatic event that happened long ago as well, such as where you were when you found out a loved one passed away or on 9/11. Whether the emotion is good or bad is irrelevant, that memory is chiseled deeply into our memory. Now try to think of the next time you went shopping for socks after that event you pictured. You can’t because unless you’re exceedingly dull, buying socks isn’t a very big deal for us with any emotion behind it. You can’t remember. We’re going to make those anxious, scary thoughts a lot more like buying socks.
The very act of trying not to think about something guarantees failure when it’s looked at logically. Try this. For the next 30 seconds, don’t think of a blue banana. Think of whatever else you want, just not a blue banana. Only thirty short seconds. Go.
What’s the first thing you thought of? Of course, the dreaded blue banana! You had to think of what you weren’t supposed to think about! Then every time you thought of it, you reminded yourself not to think about it so you had to think of it again! It’s a vicious circle that is not only impossible, but perpetuates the thought.
We’ve had great success with people imagining their scary thoughts coming from some comical non-threatening character. Settle on a character you know with a distinctive voice, and every time you find yourself having one of your thoughts, instead of saying “Oh, no! Here it comes!” let the thought come into your head as often as it wants to, but mentally visualize your character saying it to you. It’s hard to react too strongly to Elmer Fudd warning you to not drive the car off the road. It puts the thought where it should be, in a silly place that you control. Take your creative visualization powers that you use to dream up scary images to frighten yourself with and use it to create a comical image to associate to your irrational
thoughts.
Avoid Anxiety and Panic with Proper Breathing
Have you ever watched a child breathe? How about a dog? They both breathe perfectly. Watch them and you’ll see their bellies moving slowly up and down with each breath. Now watch yourself. Probably your chest is moving a lot more than your belly. I’ll fix that.
When you’re in a relaxed state, your natural tendency is to breathe into your diaphragm and lower lungs, which will expand your belly much more than your chest. When you’re running down the street or anxious about something, your rate of breathing picks up and it moves into the upper chest. It’s fine to breathe that way when you’re exercising, but not so great when you’re driving your car.
The relaxation coin has two sides, either you change your thoughts and emotions to bring about a relaxed state physically, or you change your physical response to bring about a relaxed state emotionally. We’re going to do both in this program. If you’re breathing as an anxious, uptight person, it will translate into those types of thoughts and feelings. It will be difficult to almost impossible to properly relax while you’re behaving (physically) as someone being chased by an angry mob.
Sit back in your chair, drop your shoulders, and try to let things go a little. Put one hand on your chest and another on your abdomen, and notice which hand is moving. Inhale slowly through your nose and visualize the breath flowing in through your nose and into your lower lungs. As you do so, notice your lower hand moving up in response to the breath and the upper staying relatively still. When you’ve filled your lungs, pause a moment, and release the breath slowly through your nose. Your nose is
for breathing; your mouth is for eating. Practice inhaling to a count of 5, hold for 3 seconds, and then exhale for a count of five, then another 3 second pause. Take 10 breaths like this.
You may find it difficult to sit still and do that for 10 breaths. You don’t need me to tell you that means you’re too wound up. That makes repeating the exercise throughout the day that much more important. Every hour, on the top of the hour, check your breathing. Where is it? Wherever it is, bring it back to your belly and slow it down. You’ve been breathing wrong for a long time, so don’t be surprised if this is difficult.
Don’t get angry at yourself for having trouble, that’s all part of it. Be patient with yourself. If you practice and check on yourself often, you’ll eventually retrain yourself to breathe the right way.
When you’re feeling anxious, take 10 breaths like you just learned to. Sometimes you’ll be stressed that you’ll have trouble breathing slowly and you’ll find yourself gulping your breath. If you find yourself that anxious or in the midst of panic, you can use Balloon Breaths™ to help you to slow your rate of breathing. Take your thumb and finger and use your thumb to pinch closed one nostril. Breathe in to a count of 5 through the open nostril, pause and swap the nostrils you’re closing. Then exhale through the other side. Inhale again for a 5 count through the open side, pause, swap nostrils again, and exhale. As you breathe, envision a balloon beneath your bellybutton that expands with each inhalation and contracts with each exhalation. As you breathe in slowly through your nostril, feel your balloon expand in your stomach, out to your sides, and behind you. As you exhale, feel the balloon slowly let the air escape back out. This visualization will not only help you keep your breath in your belly where it should be, but it will encourage you to let your exhalation out slowly andnot forcefully. It should be a very natural and soothing breathing rhythm. The balloon fills, and then deflates all on its own. You don’t need to force the air out of it, let it empty itself. Repeat that for 10 exhalations.
After some practice, you’ll learn how to better control your breathing and you’ll be able to take the knowledge from your living room or bedroom into your car. Whenever you’re driving and feeling anxious, one of the first questions to ask is “Where am I breathing from?” If it’s your chest, slow it down and bring it back into your diaphragm. You’ll now not only relax yourself from doing the proper breathing, but you’ll give your mind something to pay attention to other than your anxious feelings.
Exercise
Every day, on the top of every hour, check where you’re breathing from. Spend 5-10 minutes each morning or evening just sitting and easing into a nice, peaceful, belly breath. Relax and feel how nice it is to take a few moments for yourself and slow down. Get in touch with the feelings of relaxation. When you know them, you can more easily recreate them at will.
Eat the Elephant
There’s an old saying that the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. That’s how you’re going to approach overcoming your fear. It’s far too much and too intimidating to do all at once. We’re going to eat away at your fear one small bite at a time, each one easy to chew and swallow, until we look back and see that we’re all done.
What you don’t want to do is ignore working on your fear for as long as possible, until you can’t avoid it anymore. Don’t wait until you HAVE to drive to that wedding or until your boss tells you that you MUST attend the out of town conference. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can overcome this fear if you just give it some effort for a few weeks.
I’m going to take you through a series of steps you would take on the road to success. You can look at them as rungs on a ladder, each one a little bit harder than the last, let’s call it your “recovery ladder”. I’m going to start at the very smallest thing you could do to work on your fear for those with a severe phobia, and go all the way to driving comfortably over bridges on highways. You should start at the place that begins to bring you discomfort. Please note that I said the place that BEGINS to give you discomfort. Not the place that overwhelms you with terror. You’re going to beat the smaller challenges first and gain confidence in the tools I’m teaching you and then you’ll be more prepared to overcome the bigger tasks. Of course your list may be different since everyone’s fears and needs are somewhat unique, but by reviewing the below you should have a good understanding of how to structure your “bites “or “rungs”.
1. Stand on the driveway and look at the car with the keys in your hand.
2. Put the keys in the door and open the lock.
3. Sit in the car.
4. Sit in the car with the engine idling.
5. Drive the car down the driveway to the street.
6. Drive the car around the block.
7. Drive the car ½ mile away.
8. Drive the car 1 mile away.
9. Drive the car 5 miles away.
10.Drive the car 10 miles away.
11.Drive the car 20 miles away.
12.Drive the car to a highway entrance ramp.
13.Drive the car onto the highway and drive to the next exit.
14.Drive the car onto the highway and drive for 5 miles.
15.Drive the car onto the highway and drive for 10 miles.
16.Drive the car over a highway overpass bridge.
17.Drive the car over a short bridge a city block or so long.
18.Drive the car over a major bridge.
19.Drive the car over a bridge spanning water.
You’ll know when to move onto the next item when you’re able to perform the step before it in relative comfort. You don’t wait until you feel ready to perform the next task, because you won’t feel ready until it’s accomplished. As soon as you’re able to drive around the block without high anxiety or panic, you should proceed to driving ½ mile, even if it still scares you.
Life Strategies
What you have learned thus far will be incredibly helpful to you for coping with your anxiety while driving. Unfortunately, often your anxiety is caused by your overall patterns of thinking and lifestyle habits. The tools you’ve been exposed to so far will put out the fire, but changing your life to be less stressfull overall will prevent future flare-ups.
Time Management
What do you, Donald Trump, your neighbor, Lance Armstrong, and an unemployed actor all have in common? You all have 24 hours in a day. No more, no less. I can say with virtual certainty that no matter how busy you think you are at this point in your life, there’s someone who’s busier. What determines your stress level is how well you manage the time we’re all given each day.
Why is this topic in a book about overcoming fear? Because it’s not in any other ones and it’s absolutely critical. If you manage your time poorly you’ll end up “out of time” before you’ve been able to take care of yourself, or practice the techniques the program teaches.
Want to know what I most often hear when I ask why someone didn’t do the exercises or the self care we prescribe? “I didn’t have time to do my breathing.” “I’m too busy at work to practice.” “You don’t understand, I have two kids and a full time job.”
Loads and loads of crap. We all have 24 hours and need to take responsibility over how we chose to spend them. Start managing your life and not just responding to it. Feel free to read all you can get your hands on regarding the subject because it will do nothing but help, but I’ve outlined the basics below and like most fundamentals, they’ll get you 90% of the way to where you need to be. Keep reading, this will change your life.
Make a mission statement
You’ve probably seen a mission statement for a business. If you haven’t, they’re very short descriptions of why the company exists and what it desires to accomplish. Do they make these up because they have so much extra time on their hands? Sometimes it seems so, but really they’re supposed to be used so everyone in and out of the organization knows what it stands for. So when the company faces a difficult decision they can refer to their mission statement and ensure it is in line with their core values and long term goals.
What if you had one of those? How much easier would life be if you could reference a piece of paper that had what your life was all about on it and when the going got tough or you were unsure about what to do you could look at it and use it to decide what was the right choice given what you decided your values and purpose would be? Boy, that would be a load off.
Hey, wait a second.
We probably could do a mission statement couldn’t we? We could call it a personal mission statement and use it just like we said, to drive the rest of our decisions. This is so crazy it just might work….
Take the time necessary to really think about what you want your life to be about from all different aspects. Imagine what you’d like people to say about you at your funeral. What would you like your spouse and children to say? What about your friends? Your coworkers? When you’re done doing this and really reflecting on it seriously you should have a nice list of your values. From that brief statement, we can design your life.
Maybe your mission statement is something like, “To be a loving and caring Mother who teaches my children to be responsible for themselves and selfless. To be a loyal and supportive wife. To never stop growing intellectually or spiritually. To be courageous and not limited by anxiety or fears so I’m a role model for my children. To take care of my body and health so I live a long time for my family.” Let’s say this is have the choice to go out with the girls for a breakfast of pancakes or go get your yours and you have the chance to teach your child to do their science project by themselves which would take 2 hours, or do it for them, which would take 30 minutes but not teach them anything. Looking at this you would know that you should help them do it themselves so they learn responsibility. What if you workout in? Well, you decided you wanted to stay healthy for you and your family, but not necessarily be remembered a lover of pancakes, so there you go.
This is supposed to be all inclusive of every possible activity or role you could possibly play, but should center around your core values. It should be no more than several sentences, shorter is usually better.
A mission statement is also meant to help you remember the big picture to help you make choices, not to be used as the sole method for making a decision. If you had the above mission it doesn’t mean you never go for pancakes, just that you would keep your larger goal in mind when determining your best option. A mission defines your values, now we’re going to talk about managing the activities that will support your values.
Get it out of your head
What if you got on a plane to take a trip and you found out the pilot wanted very badly to get you to your destination but no one would tell him where it was or how to get there, what the weather was along the way, or any other information? Sounds pretty silly, right? Well, it sounds equally senseless to me that most people live their lives in the same oblivion.
If you don’t know where you want to go (your goals), how do you plan to get there? How will you know when you’re getting closer or further away? How will you know what to expect? How will you hit a target you can’t see?
You need to know what you want, not just as it relates to overcoming your fears, but everything, career, personal, and relationships too. Take your relationships for example. Let’s say one of your goals from your mission is to be a great father. Fine and dandy, but what does that mean? Maybe it means spending 2 hours more a week with your children, maybe it means another 15 minutes. I don’t know and I don’t need to know, you do.
Do you trudge through your day at work just watching the clock waiting for the end of the day or, God forbid, retirement in 20 years? Maybe if you had some direction it wouldn’t seem so meaningless and boring. Maybe if you set some goals on how to improve on whatever it is you do you’d finally get that promotion you’ve been hoping would be handed to you.
So what do your career goals and relationship goals have to do with the fear of driving? Everything. When you think of someone who’s courageous and confident, what do you think of? Picture it in your mind. Do you think the “healthy” person in your mind can run real fast but neglects their children? Do they play tennis very well but sleep in their car in abject poverty? Not likely. Probably they seem confident, successful, happy, energetic, balanced. Isn’t that what you want to be?
Now we’re going to work progressively backwards. Using your mission statement to help guide you, write down what you want to accomplish in the next 10 years. Want to start your own company and have it grow to 10 million annual sales? That can be done in 10 years, write it down. Want to complete the Ironman triathlon? You can do that in 10 years if you wanted to, write it down.
This should be fun, you’re the director over your own life, figure out what you want to be and get it on paper.
Now, using both your mission and 10 year plan as a guideline, write down where you want to be in 5 years. Using the above as an example maybe you need to have your business at 4 million sales by then and have completed a half Ironman event. Additionally, you’ll have goals on here that won’t take 10 years to accomplish, ones that should be done in around 5. Maybe you want to get your Masters degree, no need to wait a decade for that, write it down here.
By now you’re getting good at this, pretty exciting how your life is going to go isn’t it? This time do 3 years, just like the others. Maybe you want to go to Europe but you’re booked this year, write it on this list.
Every year you’re going to do yearly goals. You need a list for these too. Don’t shoot too short on these, most people have a list they couldn’t possibly accomplish each day but go too easy on themselves on longer term lists. You’ll be surprised what you can do in a year once you get things organized and how much easier your days will be simultaneously.
I like to do quarterly goals that further subdivide my yearly goals because I’ve found that I can
push activities off too much if I have a whole year. Doing a quarterly list lets me take a substantial yearly goal and break it into a manageable chunk.
Every month you need goals.
Every week you need a list and every day you should have a list of what you want to accomplish.
That sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it. If you thought you had a lot to do now, wait till you spend half your day writing all these various lists.
Not really. Every month, I probably spend a half hour tops on my monthly list. My weekly list takes me about 10 minutes or so, and I end each day with 5 minutes or so of planning my next day. I’m telling you, it’s the best use of my time I can imagine. As soon as I start my day, I know exactly what I need to do. I don’t need to spend the first hour trying to figure out what I need to do, how to do it, and getting buried in things. I know if I’m on track or not and what I need to do if I’m not. I’m not going to lie and say the list always gets done and that it never changes, but I will say that’s not the point. The point is to keep me on track and headed in the direction I want to go.
Sometimes I scratch things off my weekly list, sometimes I add things to my weeks or months or years list. It’s ok, they’re not tattoos, you can change them.
You also don’t need a high tech gadget to do this either, all you need is a datebook with enough room to make a daily list on.
Eliminate wasted effort
Now that you’ve got your list of what you want to accomplish, you have to get into the habit of saying no to things.
It may sound easy enough, but believe me, for most people it takes a LOT of effort and discipline. Other people are very often going to ask you to do things that you don’t have any interest in or don’t quite mesh up right with your overall mission and priorities. When that happens, you have to say no. Whether you like to, or whether you don’t. Whether they like you at that moment, or whether they don’t. Chances are they’re going to get over it, and if they don’t, trust me, you’re not missing out. You owe it to yourself to live your life in the way you want to, not based on what everyone else wants you to do. If someone will only be civil to you if you do what they tell you, they’re taking advantage of you and you need to nip that in the bud because you’re too important and have far too much dignity to allow that.
Every time you say ‘Ok’ to something, you say ‘No’, to something else. If you’re ever going to get a handle on things, you need to say ‘Yes’ to what’s important to you first. There’s always a cost, even if the cost is less time sitting around looking at the trees and feeling the breeze on your face, if that’s an activity that you enjoy and you want to partake in, you have an obligation to yourself to engage in it. don’t owe anyone an explanation. You don’t need to provide everyone with a big drawn out explanation every time you say no either. Just say, “No, sorry.” If you feel you need to say, “No, sorry. I’ve got too many things to get done”. If that thing is soaking your feet, it’syour business.
Every once in a while, someone will ask you what you have to do that prohibits you from accomplishing one of their tasks instead of yours. Don’t play that game. Just tell them you wish you could help but unfortunately can’t. You Isn’t this selfish? Not at all. It’s self preserving. Don’t confuse all this to mean that you’re never going to help anyone out, that you’re only going to do for you and that’s it and everyone else can go scratch. Quite the opposite. You’re going to take care of yourself first so you can help other people without resentment or other negative emotions. If you don’t take care of yourself you won’t be able to assist anyone effectively. It’s why they tell you on a plane if the masks come down and you’re with a child to put yours on first, then the child’s. Why is that? The airlines must despisechildren! Obviously it’s because if you fumble around trying to take care of the child and in the process you pass out, there’s no one left to help them. So it’s not selfish to take care of yourself first, it’s actually in their best interests. Same principle.
When you’re taking care of yourself, you can certainly choose to help people, as a matter of fact, I’m sure you’re a good person and will choose to a lot. You’ll find that once you start managing your time and saying no to the low priority items you’ll be able to really start helping people if that’s what you choose to do since you’ll have more time. Maybe you’ll want to show your wife how much you appreciate her by taking over some chores she typically does. Perhaps you’ll have the time to pick up groceries for grandma or talk to your mom on the phone or volunteer at a food pantry, it doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s not selfish and you won’t say no all the time,
only when you choose to.
You’ll realize you have choices.
Keep in mind something called the Rule of Distant Elephants when saying yes to requests from others. This rule reminds you that an elephant looks small from far away but when you get right up on top of it, it’s huge. When someone asks you to do something sometime down the road in the future, you may be tempted to say okay just because it’s too far away to concern yourself with. Don’t do that, decide as if they were asking for you to do it tomorrow or right now. That elephant is going to grow every day until it arrives and you might find yourself looking at a huge task you have no time or desire for, but have already committed yourself to.
You won’t only have to say no to requests from others that don’t fit into your plan, but you’ll need to say no to yourself regarding activities that aren’t meaningful, which brings us to prioritization.
Prioritize
Now that you’ve determined what’s important to you and eliminated the unnecessary, you have a list of activities to do, some for you, probably some for others. You need to identify a rough order in which to accomplish things otherwise you’ll end up either darting from task to task and actually doing very little, or getting trapped in analysis-paralysis trying to decide what you should spend time on.
This can be as simple or complicated as you like, but I like simple, so that’s what you’re going to do. All you really need to do is list every item on your monthly, weekly, and daily list as high, medium, or low priority. You can use 1,2,3’s, or A,B,C’s, or whatever, it doesn’t matter.
Tackle the high priority items first, and then the mediums, and the low priority items should either get done when those are all complete, or when they fit logically best in your day.
What do I mean by fitting logically in your day? Well, if your high priority item is getting in your driving practice for that day and your low priority item is going through yesterdays mail, but you only have 5 minutes between meetings, then you do the lower priority item because that’s what you have time for. Sometimes you need to disqualify higher priority items based on external factors like time or available energy.
Your task priorities don’t stay static. Just because going through the mail on Monday is a low priority item doesn’t mean that you don’t perhaps reanalyze it on Friday and make it a high priority item. Maybe your new time management skills are working so well that you don’t have a lot to do Friday and you only have what were once low priority items (this will actually happen believe it or not). What you don’t do is blow off all those little items until they become big ones, you get ahead of them. You’ll never be free of high priority items, you just decide which of your low priority items are most important and those become high priority. If the 10 pieces of yesterday’s mail onMonday was low item and not really any big deal, by the time Friday rolls around if you’ve put off the mail every day, you may now have 50 pieces of it spilling over your desk, bills growing late, etc. Not such a low item anymore, huh? So every day you’re going to take a look at the next day’s items and quickly organize them, not based on what they were today, but on what they will be tomorrow in priority.
There are other things to consider besides urgency as well when deciding priorities. In fact, the better you get at this, the less urgent things are going to sneak into your life. You’ll take care of them before they get urgent. So if tasks aren’t screaming to get accomplished, what to do?
In 1848, one of my favorite people was born. Was it Robert Eakin, the 19th century Chief Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court you may ask? No, but good guess. It was Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto was the first person to notice what is now referred to as the80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle. What it basically means is that 80% of your gains will be from 20% of your efforts.
You need to determine what your biggest area of need is and attack that. What will you get the most results from? If you’re deciding between washing your cat and going to your yoga class, ask yourself which is in the 20% of your efforts that will bring about the most positive change. Maybe if you have an hour it’s better to spend 50 minutes of doing some of the techniques from the program rather than flipping around the gossip blogs on the net.
Here’s a big secret. If you do just the important 20%, you can pretty much ignore a lot of other stuff, or at least not waste excessive time on it. Your job is to figure out what you need to do in order to have the biggest effect and attack those things immediately. Thanks Vilfredo.
Small bites
You’re going to have tasks that can’t be completed in a single step or a single day, or maybe even year. Sometimes they seem overwhelming because of their enormity. There’s an expression that the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time (not to be confused with the Rule of Distant Elephants). So if you have a big task, break it down into small chunks and keep chewing one up every day until you eat your elephant. When you’re finished most everyone else will still be looking wide eyed at their elephant before them, too afraid to even begin. Sounds familiar right? (hint, it’s the same way you should be approaching overcoming your fear of driving).
Big bites
On the other hand, once you’ve broken down a large task into manageable chunks, you need to set aside blocks of time so you can work on it, if it’s an activity that will have a dramatic effect on your life.
Let’s look at a client, Ted, for instance. Ted is a 43 year old client who has a goal of writing a book about his area of expertise in his business. At first, it seemed overwhelming, but once he took it apart and looked at it one chapter at a time, he had a much more attractive list of milestones to shoot for. Now that he had the small bites, he needed to set aside some time to make some real progress towards these goals, since their completion would give him a significant career boost and a large dose of needed self esteem. If he had only set aside 10 minutes a day to work on his book, he would never get anywhere and would quickly become discouraged. Instead, a few times a week he carved out a couple hours to set aside and really attack his goal.
So realize that you need to devote the time needed for the big, impactful items, even if it comes at the expense of the smaller, less important ones. Using the techniques I showed you it should be relatively easy to tell one from the other.
Recognize that “good enough” is often good enough
Trust me, I’m a big believer in striving for excellence and the thought that what’s worth doing is worth doing right. Despite that, perfectionism is rarely the answer, proper allocation of effort to maximize results always is.
Let’s remind ourselves of the Pareto Principle again, 80 percent of the results come from 20% of the effort. That’s easy enough. But it works the other way too, 80% of the effort is responsible for a mere 20% of the results!
Like we talked about earlier, the goal is to find the 20% of high result activities and bang away on it. If a task takes you an hour to be “perfect”, 12 minutes of that time will yield you 80% of your results and the remaining 48 minutes will generate only an extra 20%. If we can agree that perfection is virtually universally unobtainable, then it’s more like the 48 got you an extra 10% since that last 10 or so will be always elusive.
Am I suggesting you do things sloppily? Not at all, I’m telling you that good enough is just that, good enough. If you’re washing your car and you get it 80% clean but there’s a spot here and a spot there that’s still a bit smudgy, do you know what we call that?
A clean car.
If you spent the extra time to go over it again and again, getting in every nook and cranny with a little toothbrush and chamois to ensure every last bit of grime is wiped away so it looks showroom fresh do you know what we end up calling that?
A clean car that took 80% longer to wash.
Hmmmm. Almost seems like the latter is a complete waste of time. Seems like that extra time could have been spent getting in your yoga or meditation, or some other high value task. Seems like it….
Something else you’ll notice is that often that extra effort for the 20% is very fleeting. In the above example, even if you do get it sparkly clean, as soon as you drive a mile down the road it will be dirty enough to negate your results. Heck, even if you let it sit in the driveway so you can admire it from the porch while you drink a lemonade, a bird is guaranteed to poop on it. Same with people who spend all kinds of time perfecting their hairdo in the morning as if wind and humidity didn’t exist or take half their Saturday to perfect the edging of their lawn.
Not only does this save you a ton of time when it’s added up across your day, but it takes away a lot of pressure and disappointment you feed yourself by striving for something you’ll never reach or maintain anyway. It’s a surefire recipe to make certain you constantly disapprove of yourself and your efforts. It doesn’t need to be that hard.
Stress Management
Now you’ve got some tools to remove the excuses regarding why you’re too busy to take care of yourself, the next step is to help you eliminate some of the stress you face and how to better handle what’s left over. Being able to cope with a panic or anxiety attack is great, but not having the accumulated stress that leads to those extreme reactions is even better. Let’s look at what we can do every day to help lower your stress:
Actually apply the time management skills
Like everything else in the program, just reading about time management techniques doesn’t do anything, you need to actually put them to use. Once you have more focus in your day and life, and the time to devote to taking better care of yourself, you’ll feel a great reduction in your stress levels by not running around needing to decide what to do all the time. Once you chuck half your daily activities that aren’t really meaningful or beneficial you’ll have a lot more time and less stress in your life.
If you’ve only read the previous Time Management section and haven’t taken any steps to implement them into your life, stop here, go back, and get to work on those first.
Cut yourself some slack
If you’re looking for a quick way to be miserable, keep beating yourself up over ever slip and variance from your plan. If feeling lousy isn’t enough, don’t worry, it will also lead you away from your goal faster than anything else.
Everything you read about here, or any kind of process, is a series of zig zags to the end. A plane doesn’t fly straight to LA from New York, it’s almost constantly off course and making small corrections until it touches down on a runway 100 feet wide 2400 miles away. In the same manner, anyone who has been successful at transforming their lives or overcoming a fear has made many mistakes along the way and learned from them and made corrections. It’s part of the process. Don’t fight it. It never ends.
There will never be a time when you’re so perfect that you always do exactly what you should. There will be no point when every day is better and more productive than the last. Progress is a series of zigs and zags towards the end result, and your aim is to be pointed towards your target more often than you are not.
Everyone has bad days and gets anxious, you’re not alone. Everyone gets angry at themselves, you’re not alone. Failure is an event, not a person. It’s not important that you made a mistake, it’s important that you learn from it. Use your mistakes to build yourself stronger.
Many successful people do their chosen relaxation activity in the morning before the rest of the neighborhood has rolled out from under the covers. Do you know why? Insomniacs? No. They tried to do it during lunch but missed their yoga too often because meetings got scheduled. Then they tried to meditate after work and found out that they made excuses and were too tired. Now they listen to relaxation tapes in the morning when it’s too early to have meetings or as many excuses. They failed. They analyzed why they failed. They adapted. They learned.
The only time to really chastise yourself is when you make a mistake and don’t learn from it.
“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison
Find a routine
You probably don’t brush your teeth every morning cursing the mirror that you have to waste so much time with dental care. You likely don’t pace the floor deciding whether you should brush your teeth that morning, or if yesterday and the day before were plenty. I’m willing to bet you just brush your teeth the same time and way every morning and don’t put in that much thought. Why is that?
Because it’s part of your routine. It’s habitual. You can use that.
Want to stop eating coffee cake for breakfast every morning? Well then make your healthy breakfast part of a routine. Don’t walk down into the kitchen every morning scratching your head and trying to figure out what you’re going to have. Have the same thing every day, stop thinking about it. In a few weeks it will become a habit to have whatever your healthy breakfast is. You won’t have to think about it. You’ll drop the toast on the toaster, grab a plate, break the eggs, turn on the stove, and shake out your vitamins, without even thinking about it.
Sure, change is good, variety is the spice of life, all that stuff. But you can choose to use routine to your benefit, it’s another tool in your arsenal.
A routine of negative, boring, or mindless activity can be a horrible thing, but used properly in a productive manner it can be used to form great habits that beeline you to your goal.
Reward yourself
There’s really only two ways to get yourself or anyone else to do anything: the carrot or the stick. Either you’re doing something to achieve something you want or you’re doing it to avoid something you don’t. That’s it. Period. It gets no more complicated.
If you’re sticking to a nutrition and exercise plan maybe it’s because you want to avoid the pain of embarrassment at the beach. Perhaps it’s because you want to be able to feel the pride of rubbing cocoa butter on your rippled abs in the Caribbean sun, whatever it is, you’re doing it to move forward or away from something. Negative or positive reinforcement is the name of the game and it’s best to have some of each.
I’ll bet you’ve got the negative down cold. You hate the way your fear makes you feel and that motivates you. Good. But that’s only half the equation. Why not toss some positive stuff into the mix too? How about when you’re able to drive 5 miles, you go get a massage or buy a new CD or whatever it is that you’re into. You can toss a dollar or two into a jar for every practice session and spend the money on something when you reach a target distance. You can think of something. Don’t be afraid to treat yourself well, if you don’t no one else will either.
Chances are you may not think all that highly of yourself right now. You’ve got to start viewing yourself as a worthy person of value and the easiest way to start doing that is to start acting like you believe it. Be kind to you.
Quit complaining
Try to go a whole day without complaining or criticizing anything, trust me, it’ll be like ice skating uphill. Really make an effort to focus on all that you have and what’s going right with your life rather than constantly moaning and complaining about everything. When you really pay attention to it you’ll see how often your conversations, thoughts, and feelings are centered around these two negative activities. Sure everything isn’t perfect, you’ve got a fear to overcome, but you’ve got great things to be appreciative of. You live in an era where we understand phobias better. You have the Internet and were able to find a program that will help you.
You had the financial means to pay for it. You’ve probably got a car. Many people don’t have cars, or medical care, or enough food to eat. If you look at it through different lenses, you can view yourself as a very lucky and fortunate person and you’ll end up a lot happier.
Simplify
This is a huge one for removing unnecessary stress from your life. Quit making things so darn complicated all the time. Don’t spend so much time focusing on the next ‘thing’ that’s going to make you happy, it won’t. It doesn’t matter if your neighbor got a new car and an addition to their house, it doesn’t mean you have to. Your kids don’t need every single toy as soon as it hits the shelves, it doesn’t matter what the other kid in his class has. I think you’ll survive summer without 5 new pairs of sandals, 1 or 2 should do.
Is your house all full of knick knacks and stuff that needs dusting but doesn’t really have any value and clutters everything all up? A messy, busy, cluttered environment is very stressful whether you realize it or not. Box it up.
This ties into the 80/20 principle we went through earlier. Put away or get rid of everything you don’t use 80% of the time. My family and I cook almost every meal we eat for ourselves, every single week, year in and year out. Know how many pans I have in my drawer? Two. A small one and a large one. Sure, I’ve got a drawer that’s out of the way that has a few others for things I make much less frequently, but those two are all I need unless it’s an exceptional circumstance. I’ve got a drawer with the dozen most often used tools like a spatula and tongs and another for things I pull out once a year like a turkey baster. It may not seem like a big deal, but getting all that useless stuff out of your way, if not out of your life, makes things a lot more organized and less stressful by not having to dig around and look for things all the time. Plus it just feels good to be clean and in order. You don’t need to live like a hermit and not own anything, but just put the unusual items out of the way till you need them.
Don’t be afraid to get rid of things. Sell them online or in your local paper if you don’t use them or could do without them. Give them to someone else that will use it. Donate it to charity. Toss it to the curb. Don’t be a packrat and hold onto junk just because you made a mistake purchasing it sometime in the past. It’s not doing you any good and it’s probably even doing you some harm. Cut your losses and learn to think before you get needless garbage.
Recognize your faulty patterns of thinking
Lots of people fall into the bad habit of thinking in ways that just aren’t healthy or true. Like any other habit, we can change it once we become aware of it. Here’s a few of the common negative thinking patterns, you’ll probably have some unique to you as well:
Catastrophizing- Catch yourself making a big deal out of small things and correct your thinking until you stop doing that. Making a mistake in a report probably won’t get you fired, and even if you were you probably wouldn’t end up homeless. Not everything is a disaster.
Overgenralizing-“I always blow my diet” or “People never like me” is self talk that just isn’t true. Certainly you at least sometimes stick to your diet, maybe not as often you like, but you don’t always stray. I’m sure some people like you, no reason you shouldn’t give yourself credit for those that do. These types of negative generalities make things seem hopeless and futile even when they’re often things to be expected.
You shouldn’t have the expectation that you’ll never have a moment of weakness and go off your diet. Everyone doesn’t like me either. It’s no big deal! That’s life.
Ignoring the Positive-There’s been more than a handful of clients that do great with practice sessions for a week or two and then they have a day or a week when they don’t make as much progress as they wanted to or have an anxiety attack while driving again. Oh how they beat themselves up and cry and hang their heads in failure, never once thinking that overall, they’re doing fabulous. Don’t just criticize yourself, look for what you’re doing right and factor that in too. Maybe you’re doing great but had a bad moment, or day, or week. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it or haven’t had successes, or should quit and not even try. day themselves. Fact is, you don’t know, so don’t make assumptions. Black and White Thinking-Rarely are things right or wrong, black and white. keep telling yourself you’ll only be happy when you’re “over this fear”. Clairvoyance- Don’t pretend to know what everyone is thinking. Don’t assume people don’t like you, or talk behind your back, or that they feel such and such a way without some pretty good evidence. Just because someone rolls their eyes or honks their horn or ignores you doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. Maybe their contact slipped or they’re trying to work on their own assertiveness skills or they’re having a bad error at work it doesn’t mean you’re ‘bad’ at what you do. There’s a whole lot in between that is probably a much better assessment of the situation. Maybe you’re not whatever you consider “over this” but you’re doing a lot better and the fear doesn’t stand in your way as much. Maybe you’re not a hotshot at the TPF report for your boss but you do everything else really well. This either/or thinking sets you up to be perpetually disappointed in yourself since being absolutely perfect is short lived at best.
Surround yourself with positivity
As you change your life for the better you may unfortunately need to cast away some people or circumstances that are holding you back. This is a tough one, but it’s necessary sometimes. You owe it to yourself to surround yourself with people that lift you up and make you feel good, that enhance your life. If someone is making you feel bad and trying to prevent you from being a better person, you’re going to have to take some action. Usually, all you have to do is have the courage to talk to the person about it. Tell them that what they’re doing or how they’re treating you isn’t helping in what you’re trying to achieve. Tell them how important they are in your life (if they are) and that you would really like their support. Far more often than not, they’ll feel like a complete jackass, apologize, and you’ll have an even stronger relationship for having had the conversation. But sometimes not…
Some people are hell bent on keeping you down, especially if they’re in a position of power of you because of your fear or you’re reliant on them currently. Don’t be surprised if that person isn’t exactly eager to see you change. It alters how they relate to you and most people resist change. They may also feel better about themselves being in your company the way you are and will have to own up to some of their own issues if you change for the better. Maybe they’re not ready to do that and are rebelling.
Whatever the reason, try to help them see your perspective and relate to you in a positive manner. If that fails, and sometimes with some people it will, you’ll have to sever that relationship, at least for the time being until they are ready to accept the new you, or at the very least minimize your interaction. I don’t care if it’s your friend, husband, mom, or next door neighbor, if you let people drag you down into the dirt, they will.
Accept people or let them go
Want to know who I wish were different? Everyone in one way or another. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not my job to roam the world changing people to meet my expectations or desires. If there’s someone who does something that irritates or angers you, that’s not their problem, it’s yours. Take responsibility for your own reaction and emotions. That’s them at this moment in time. Maybe they’ll change, maybe not. Accept them or don’t. If you don’t, walk away.
Know someone who’s selfish? Me too. Know someone that supports a different political party than you? Me too. Can you accept that about them and have a beneficial relationship with them anyway? Notice that nowhere am I saying “like that about them” or “enjoy that”, only if you can accept it. You can accept what you don’t like. When you first start out practicing your driving you’ll feel a racing heart, maybe scary thoughts, and your brain will try to get you to stop. Accept that even if you don’t like it. Same with people, they are who they are at this moment in time, either you can handle that or you can’t. If you can’t, that’s ok too.
On a related note, you don’t need to try and understand everyone. You don’t need to convince people to agree with your choices. People don’t understand why I do things the way I do or have certain opinions. It’s ok, they don’t have to. I sure the heck don’t agree with or understand everyone I come in contact with, I don’t try to. Trying to see another person’s perspective is fine, but trying to truly understand their motivations and logic is often impossible and almost always unimportant. You have no way to really put yourself in their shoes and understand them without having gone through their experiences. It works the same in reverse too, no matter how hard you try to convince others that what you think is valid and get them to understand you, they can’t since you both have gone through and perceived the world in an entirely different way. Give up on it. Live and let live.
Journal
You’ve heard of journaling, it’s nothing new. I’ll even bet that sometime in school one of your teachers had the class keep a journal for a bit. Chances are you didn’t keep up with it, I know I didn’t. I knew all about journaling too and never did it. It just seemed like a waste of time and silly, writing down my thoughts. I mean, the fact that I thought them was evidence that I knew them and therefore didn’t need to write them down, right? Well, not really.
If you read a bit about journaling, you’ll be quick to come across someone who says something like the act of putting what you want down on paper ‘releases it into the universe’ and will make it come true. They may also say that writing out negative thoughts and feelings draws them out of your subconscious mind and puts them into your journal so you won’t be bothered by them again. Hmmmmm.
As much as I wish it were that simple, I think that’s mostly nonsense. But hold on a second, does that mean I think journaling is quackery? Not at all.
Journaling does do a few important things. First, it forces you to slow down and pay attention to what you’re thinking about. Doesn’t sound like much does it? Well, it’s HUGE. What do you think meditation does? Same thing, slows you down, puts your attention on one thing, and makes you aware of your thoughts. Why do you go to therapy? A big part of it is that the therapist helps you become aware of your thought patterns and how you respond to them. Any activity that accomplishes these things will help you. Journaling actually makes you write your thoughts down so it requires that you evaluate the thought at least as long as it takes for you to write it down. The act of writing down your thoughts means that some of those thoughts will be things you would like to accomplish or change in your life, namely your goals. We know that writing down your goals clarifies them and makes them far more likely to be realized. This is the reason that writing down your goals makes it so much more likely it comes true, not so much the releasing into the universe thing.
Now that you have it written down, you’re going to have it staring back at you for the remainder of your journaling session. This will make you evaluate it to some degree. If you journal with any frequency, you’ll end up at least occasionally writing something down and then a few seconds or minutes later looking back at it and telling yourself how ridiculous it is to be concerned or worried, or angry about whatever it was that you wrote. Congrats, self-therapy. Could this be the reason negative feelings are often eliminated by writing them out and it’s not so much the drawing out of the subconscious mumbo jumbo? I think it is. Either way, same result, so believe whatever you want as far as I’m concerned, just do it.
Having a journal allows you to see progress over time. It’s very often hard for us to see the changes we make, or at least how dramatic they are, because the changes happen so incrementally over time. It’s like when you see a child that you aren’t around much and every 6 months it’s like meeting someone new. The parents don’t recognize the changes as easily because they see the children change so subtly on a daily basis. You just see the cumulative effects all at once and it’s much more apparent. When you have a ‘log’ you can go back 6 months and see what you were thinking about, or had problems with, and often be very happy that you’ve grown to see the world so much differently and that the things that used to give you so much trouble no longer do.
Journaling can help you postpone stress. When dealing with individuals with phobias, some therapists recommend something called ‘worry time’. It seems goofy, but in a nutshell the therapist gives the person one or two specific times during the day during which they are supposed to force themselves to worry about whatever is troubling them. This reduces the amount of stress and rumination throughout the day since the person knows that they aren’t supposed to be using the time to worry yet, and that they will have the opportunity later. So it doesn’t say ‘don’t worry’, it just says ‘worry later’. There’s a big difference. Simply telling yourself not to worry about something that’s bothering you is likely to fail, but teaching yourself that you’re in control of it will empower you. When you keep a journal you’ll find something bothering you during the day and you’ll be able to tell yourself to move on and let it go, knowing that you’ll journal about it later.
How often should you journal? It’s hard to say, but probably as often as possible without the journaling itself causing stress. I wouldn’t start out trying to journal every day if you haven’t gotten good at managing your time yet, that’s self defeating. Try to start with once a week for a month, then go to twice or three times a week. If you can do it every day for a short duration, that would be optimal.
Caffeine, Sugar, and Nicotine
Every morning I wake up, pour my dog 16 ounces of strong coffee into his bowl , toss a glazed donut onto the floor for him to chow down on, and then blow cigarette smoke into his face.
Ok, not really, but I bet some of you treat yourself that way, worse than you’d treat a dog.
You and I both know that what you put into your body effects how you feel and your tolerance to stress. Don’t think so? You’re the exception and you feel the same no matter how much junk you take in? If I’m having a hard time convincing you of this then chances are you’ve abused yourself for so long you don’t remember what it was like to run clean.
All the more reason to keep reading.
Anxious? Stressed? Overwhelmed? Maybe a grande frappasomething isn’t the smartest move. While we’re at it, that candy bar should go. Cigarettes too.
Caffeine and sugar are two culprits you need to watch out for when you’re under stress; the last thing you need when you’re under pressure is to pump more into yourself. If you’re smoking, you’re really making life harder than it needs to be. You may think that smoking relaxes you, but it’s another stimulant that you should be avoiding. Quit if you can of course (I used to smoke, I know it’s tough), but until you do, don’t smoke for an hour before and none during your practice sessions.
The sugar you’re used to eating puts your blood sugar and insulin levels on a roller coaster ride, that’s why it’s tough to stop eating it and why you crave it. I’m usually not a big proponent of stopping things cold turkey, since life is tough enough as it is, but with sugar I’ve found that it’s much easier to just quit it for a couple weeks and before you know you’ll break that cycle and won’t even want it.
Caffeine is another story. Unless you’re extremely anxious and need immediate relief, it’s better to taper off what you’re used to over a week or so. If you don’t, you’ll get a pretty mean headache, but hey, buy some aspirin. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever have a cup of coffee again, once in a while I like a cup of coffee too. It just means that you should limit it to a cup or two of caffeine a day, tops. And I’m talking about a mug of coffee, 12 ounces or so. Not the enormous vat of java they wheel out to you on a dolly you find at many of the coffee shops now. Those sometimes have 4 or 5 times the amount of caffeine you’d have in a regular sized cup. And you can’t pump it all full of sugar and whipped cream or drop a Butterfinger in there or whatever else you may have been considering. While you’re actively trying to overcome your fear, I would
highly encourage you to stop the caffeine for a bit, in a week you’ll be amazed at how much more relaxed you feel when you’re not pumping yourself full of a stimulant.
The Biggest Mistakes in Overcoming Your Fear of Driving
Testing Instead of Practicing
When you go out and starting working on the rungs of your ladder, you need to resist the temptation to look at your progress in terms of black and white. Many people have a very rough time because they make themselves feel like they MUST do whatever their goal is for that day and that they HAVE to do it perfectly. They’re testing themselves when what they should be doing is practicing. When you practice, the goal is to get better, not to do it perfectly, and that’s the outlook you need to have. Testing brings anxiety, tension, and the possibility of failure, all the things you should be avoiding. The only failure is in not attempting. If you try to accomplish one of your driving goals and fall short, but make it further than you did last time, did you fail? Not in my eyes. What if you don’t make it as far as the time before, do you fail then? Not as long as you learn WHY you didn’t do as well. Maybe you had a big cup of coffee right before and the anxiety got hold of you easier. If you learn to curb your caffeine intake prior to driving and that makes you more successful down the line, then it’s still a success. Whenever you feel down about the progress you may be making, sit down someplace quiet and try to determine what the cause is, what you may be doing (or thinking) wrong. In that answer lays success.
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." – Samuel Beckett
Practicing In Traffic
Everyone gets stressed, frustrated, and has a difficult time driving in traffic. That’s why it always amazes me that so many people with a fear of driving try to do their practicing when the roads are full of other motorists. There’s a time and place to practice your skills in traffic, but early in your recovery is not the time. Find an out of the way place if you can and practice. Make it easier on yourself at first. If you live in an urban location where traffic is constant during the day, then for the first week or two perhaps you need to do your practicing early in the morning or late in the evening. Just don’t set yourself up for failure by putting yourself in a situation that’s more difficult than need be. I’ve never been on a highway with traffic at 2AM, you can find a way to avoid it.
“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Not Letting Go Of Physical Tension
When you try to relax and fall asleep do you clench your fists and expect to ease off into dreamland? Of course not, there’s no way to relax while you’re under physical tension. You need to keep that in mind while you’re driving. When you start to feel anxious or tense, use the Red Sock Relaxation™ method to let go of unnecessary tension. Practice it at home often, the more easily you can relax yourself when you’re calm the easier it will be when you’re under stress. You need to teach yourself what being relaxed feels like, so do it frequently. The more you practice it the more it will become second nature to you and the better you’ll be. After a little practice you can go through your whole body very quickly looking for and releasing tension.
Don’t wait to be in a panic while driving to start the relaxing, you need to use it preventatively until being a relaxed driver physically is your new normal behavior. Waiting until you’re anxious to use this skill is like digging a well when you’re already thirsty, it’s too late.
After this exercise you should be much more relaxed then you were when you were holding all that tension. Remember that just like your thoughts can influence your body, your body can influence your thoughts.
Not Taking Baby Steps
While I understand and applaud the desire to overcome your fear as quickly as possible, you need to be cautious and not bite off too much too quickly. Oftentimes you’ll find yourself doing really well following the program as we dictate and you’ll decide to skip a rung or two on the ladder and jump right into something you’re not ready for. Then you inevitably have a difficult time with it and end up discouraged and more susceptible to further setbacks than you were to begin with. The worst situation where this occurs is with individuals that don’t practice or use the program at all and instead chose to wait until they HAVE to drive for work, wedding, etc. Then they have an absolutely horrible time of it and it deepens and perpetuates their fear. Work on it slowly and steadily now and in no time at all you’ll be back on the road comfortably.
“Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.” – Bernadette Devlin
Not Understanding Your Body’s Response To Anxiety
We’ve already talked about this, but it’s so critical it bears repeating. You need to be aware of what’s happening to your body when you go through a stress response so you know it’s predictable and normal. Let’s take another look at what you can expect during an anxiety provoking situation so there’s no need to fear it.
You may feel a rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, or chills. This is all due to changes in the cardiovascular system and do not signal a heart attack, assuming you’ve seen a doctor and have no medical reason for thinking otherwise. Your breathing may become rapid, you may even have symptoms of hyperventilation, or over breathing. When you hyperventilate you don’t process oxygen in the same manner as normal and you can feel lightheaded, dizzy, or “unreal”. On the other side, you may find yourself holding your breath which can cause similar symptoms or a choking sensation.
The extra oxygen in your blood may make you have vision disturbances such as tunnel vision. The stress reaction also makes your hearing become heightened so sounds that would normally go unnoticed can seem quite pronounced. Keep in mind, that’s great if we’re escaping a predator, but not good when we’re not in danger. Your body will stop all unnecessary activities to focus on the “threat” at hand, including digestion, which can cause gastrointestinal issues.
When you get anxious and have bodily symptoms, it’s crucial you keep in mind that you understand what’s happening to your body, it’s not dangerous, and there’s a reason for it. Your
feelings really are nothing to be afraid of. “You can observe a lot just by watching.” – Yogi Berra
Rushing
The key to overcoming your fear is to learn to relax yourself despite your anxiety. If you drive onto the highway and try to get to the next exit as fast as possible, not only is it dangerous, but it’s not in keeping with the spirit of the program. You have to regardless. Whenever you feel like escaping away, it’s time to take your breaths, scan teach yourself that whenever you feel anxious, you want to SLOW DOWN, not speed up. We tend to want to get through the stressful event as fast as possible, in other words, escape it. By continually reinforcing to ourselves that there’s something to escape, we dig a deeper trench into the fear and tell ourselves that there is something to run away from. You need to practice experiencing the feelings you have, know they
won’t hurt you, and go about your task your body for tension, and start letting go. Paradoxically, you need to do exactly the opposite of what your body is telling you. When you want to run, sit. When you want to clench, relax. When you want to hold your breath, exhale and breathe.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” – Marcus Aurelius
Being Overly Concerned With What Others On The Road May Be Thinking
As you practice your skills, you may come across others on the road who are less than understanding of what you’re doing. They may tailgate you if they feel you’re not driving fast enough, honk if you don’t react to a traffic signal quickly, and generally act aggressively. I hope that you don’t have to experience this, but if you do, the best thing you can do is ignore it. As long as you’re abiding to the rules of the road and driving in a safe manner, you’re under no obligation to modify your driving style to suit the desires of other motorists.
You may feel that others on the road are being affected by your driving even if you have no reason to think so. Chances are far more likely that others on the road are so preoccupied with their own lives and problems that they’re not even paying attention to you. Even if they do honk or otherwise get irritated, you’ll surely be forgotten by the next traffic signal. It helps to keep in mind that just as you’re going through a personal challenge while driving, perhaps they are too. Perhaps they recently lost a loved one or were fired from a job. If they’re acting out aggressively, there’s a laundry list of possibilities as to why, don’t take it personally or let it derail your progress. And really, they’re not paying attention to you, are you that concerned about them?
“We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.” – Helen Keller
Waiting To Feel Better Before Practicing
You’re probably never going to feel completely “ready” to move to the next rung of your ladder. It’s always going to be a bit scary, and that’s ok. You’re going to learn that the fear diminishes AFTER you do the task you fear, not before. If you’re afraid of driving over bridges, no amount of driving around town will make you feel any better about your ability to handle that situation. You need to drive over that first bridge, even though you’re scared and don’t feel completely ready yet, and as you practice you’ll get better and more comfortable.
This isn’t different than any other skill. You can read about hitting a baseball and think about it, but until you grab a bat and take a swing, you’ll never know how close you are to being able to hit it. You have to always be pushing a bit. The key is finding the balance between pushing hard enough to be challenged and grow, and not so hard that you set yourself up for failure. Take the baby steps, climb your ladder, eat that elephant.
People get stuck waiting to feel ready for years and decades. Don’t let it happen to you. You won’t know if you’re ready until you take a swing. Go swing.
“You must do the things you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Inaccurately Comparing Yourself to Others
It’s disappointing to me when I speak to someone who’s doing great on the program and making great gains, yet constantly feels frustrated, depressed, and inadequate because they don’t quite measure up to everyone else in their own minds. For instance, Ken was someone who couldn’t drive more than a few blocks from his home for over 5 years. As he used the program, in a short time he was able to drive up to an hour from home and even use the highway. Despite these tremendous and life altering accomplishments, he still described himself as “weak” because he still had limitations around his driving and others he knew could drive wherever and whenever they wanted without giving it a second thought. No matter how quickly he made improvements in his situation, in that comparison to others he always felt woefully behind.
Was Ken really “weak”? Of course not! He made substantial progress in a very short time and was able to do a LOT more than he ever used to. As he keeps following the program, he’ll eventually have no limitations at all. He was unable to see that however, since he was constantly comparing himself to those that didn’t have the same challenge as him, which is an inaccurate comparison. If he had compared himself to others that had fears about driving but weren’t practicing the program as diligently as he was, he would have seen how phenomenally he was doing.
Everyone has challenges and fears. Just because some people, or even most people you know don’t have fears about driving doesn’t mean you’re any less of a person than they are and certainly not weaker. They have their own fears and anxieties and chances are they’re not doing anything about them, you are. They don’t have the courage to admit and face their fears, you do and you are. You’re MORE courageous than they are, not less. Perhaps they’re deathly afraid of spiders or clowns or heights, and you feel fine with those things. Does that make you better than them? No, it just makes you different. Neither one of you is fearless, you’re just anxious about different things.
Don’t compare apples to oranges. And don’t ever think you’re weak because you have a fear; you’re strong for facing it.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain
Avoiding Your Fear
As much as we try throughout the program to make you feel less afraid, your real progress will come when you’re no longer afraid of being afraid and can accept your fear. The more you avoid your feelings or anxiety or panic the more they will ultimately control you and the larger the effect they’ll have on your life.
It’s ok to have clammy hands and it’s ok to have your heart beat faster than normal. Don’t be afraid of yourself, you know what’s happening now. There’s no more mystery. You can drive across town, or over the bridge, or on the interstate, whether you have fear or whether you don’t. The less you care about how you’ll feel in the situation, the less fear will present itself. The power of the anxiety is in your reaction to it. In and of itself, it’s very, very small and rather insignificant. It tries to intimidate you by making you believe it’s something it isn’t, a threat. It’s not a threat, it’s just a feeling. Don’t run from it, stop, breathe, relax, and look at it. There’s nothing there. Turn the lights on in the room and the boogie man disappears, you have the information to turn the lights on now. Flip the switch.
“I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.“ – Louisa May Alcott
Doing It Alone
Not telling anyone that you’re trying to improve yourself is often done so there’s no Having difficulties with anxiety or panic, especially regarding driving, can be an embarrassing thing for many people. There’s certainly no shame in it, but it’s something that is often kept private. If you have a friend or spouse that you can discuss your challenge with, it can be a source of encouragement that will make the process of recovery substantially easier.
shame in failing. Like we discussed, the only failure is in not attempting. The more people that you tell about your involvement in the program, the more accountability you’ll have to stick with it and the sooner you’ll emerge successful.
I would caution you against involving anyone who has a history of ridiculing you about your fear or is otherwise generally not empathetic. Unfortunately, the very people closest to you are the ones that have the most to lose if you are able to drive in comfort. You may no longer be as reliant on them as you were, or your new independence may be threatening. Regardless of the reasons, this is a time to surround yourself with support and positivity, so tell people that you trust can handle your recovery and have your best interests at heart.
I wish I could say that everyone that undertakes the program has a wealth of supportive people in their lives with whom to share their journey, but that’s not always the case. If that’s the case for you, please feel free to write your instructor with any questions you have, or if you just need some encouragement. They’ll check in with you periodically over the two weeks of the program. Whether you realize it or not, the fact that you purchased this program means that you have people somewhere cheering you on, who want to see you do well. Let us know how we can help.
“To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.” – Theodore White
The Seven Principles of Overcoming Anxiety
In the following pages, we’re going to take a look at what I’ve found to be the seven key principles in overcoming anxiety, panic, and phobias such as the fear of driving.
Read and study them until they’re part of your life. Reflect on them, even if they seem not to apply to you, and try to figure out how you may have been breaking from the principle in your own life and the possible negative consequences it may have had. Then determine how you can do it differently and better in the future.
Ready? Let’s go…
The Seven Principles
The Illusion of the Horizon
Every ship’s Captain can see the horizon, and sail towards it, but only a fool would expect to reach it. It’s never gets any closer, it’s an illusion.
In the same way, many people with anxiety or phobias like driving anxiety struggle because they’re foolishly chasing the horizon. In this case, the horizon is the day they’re “free from anxiety”. I hate to burst your bubble, but that day won’t ever come. The good news is, you can stop chasing it and get on to better things.
See, anxiety is an emotion, like any other. You wouldn’t try to NEVER be angry again, or NEVER be sad again, right? It’s futile, impossible, and all you would do is frustrate yourself and set yourself up for failure.
When you chase the impossible goal of never having anxiety again, you’re guaranteed to forever have a “problem” with anxiety.
As long as you’re living life, there will be some anxiety; it’s a question of degrees. Just like you can have days where you’re angry, but not have an anger management problem. You can, and should, allow yourself to have moments or days when you’re anxious, but not tell yourself that means you have an “anxiety management” problem. It’s not whether you have anger or anxiety, or whatever emotion is on the table, but how you choose to handle it.
Sometimes people will say they had a day when they were anxious and they’ll call it a “relapse”. I’ll ask if they had a panic attack like they used to and they’ll say no. I’ll ask if they avoided whatever situation made them anxious like they used to and they’ll say no. So I’ll ask them what makes them think they “relapsed” and they say, “Oh, I just was anxious again. I thought I was OVER that…”
You’re NEVER “over” anxiety. There’s nothing to be “over”. Just like the horizon, there’s no real finish. It’s all about how you learn to react to your feelings of anxiety, not whether you have them or not. There are days when I get anxious. There’s days when EVERYONE gets anxious. It’s all part of life.
If your criterion for overcoming your problem with anxiety is to never be anxious again, you’re going to have a long road ahead of you. Just like if a ship’s Captain told the crew they could only stop rowing when they reached the horizon, it’s going to be miserable journey.
Make your goal one of handling your anxiety better, not eliminating it completely. Give yourself the possibility of success instead of the inevitability of failure by picking the wrong goal. Stop chasing the horizon so you can truly put your trouble with anxiety behind you.
The Mirroring Principle
The Mirroring Principle simply states that you get more of whatever it is you focus on…like a reflection. It can be your best friend of worst enemy; it depends on how you choose to use it.
Don’t you already know this to be true? If you’re depressed, it’s easy for everything to be miserable and very tough for things to seem positive, so it’s easy to get even more depressed. When you’re happy, isn’t it a lot easier to laugh than when you’re sad? Have you ever seen a funny movie in a bad mood? Was it as good as it would have been if you weren’t in that negative
state of mind?
The same is true with your anxiety.
You need to know the fundamentals of how to cope with your anxiety and feelings ofpanic, and to have a plan, but once you have that plan, you’re NOT going to rid yourself of anxiety by making it the central theme of your life! One of the big problems is that you’re paying your symptoms of anxiety much more attention than most people do and that’s a big reason why you have such a problem with it. You need to focus LESS on it, not MORE. I admire the desire to attack it with both barrels, but it’s not the way out. The more you attack it, the more you reinforce to yourself
that it’s NOT ok to have anxiety, and the more you feed it. And what happens to things you feed? Right, they grow. It’s counterintuitive, I know.
I knew I was well on my way to recovery from my anxiety when I was able to tell it, “Not now, I’ll deal with you later, I’m busy” when I felt my anxiety surface. Life needs to take priority over your fear.
When you’re trying something new, and you feel a twinge of anxiety, what do you do now that gets you in trouble? You watch it. Focus on it. See if it grows or if there’sany other sign that it’s getting worse. When you watch anything that closely you get more of it.
I bet that every once in awhile when you’re anxious you’ll get distracted by something, maybe you have to focus on something for work, or someone starts up a conversation with you, or you have to attend to something important, and you find your anxiety dissipates or leaves entirely. Why did that happen? You stopped watching it. You started paying it the attention it deserves, which is none.
But before you chalk all of this up as a negative trait, if you think about it, we can use this to our advantage right? What if instead of focusing on anxiety, we purposely focused on something different, something better…
That’s why learning relaxation skills and doing visualization is so powerful.
Just like what you focus on and mentally” practice” can be harmful, if you start focusing positive circumstances and feelings you’ll see things start to swing the other way.
Have you ever read any self-improvement books that tell you to start your day with a period of gratitude? You’re supposed to write out or at least think about all you’re grateful for that day…your health, family, job, home, etc. What’s that REALLY doing? It’s helping you start your day with POSITIVE thoughts and focus as opposed to waking up and saying to yourself, “Am I
anxious again? Oh, no, this is going to be another terrible day!”
What about the book, “The Secret” that tell you about the Law of Attraction and how powerful visualizing what you want can be. Have you read or seen that movie? If not, it’s pretty good and inspiring, go get it. The reason the Law of Attraction has gotten so much attention lately is simple…it works! Does it work by sending out instructions to the universe like some people claim? I don’t think so. I think it works because it forces you to really FOCUS on good things, and not bad.
Think I’m full of beans? Well don’t trust me, trust yourself…
Have you ever gotten a new car and all of a sudden it seems like they’re all over the road?
Do you think that you’re so cool everyone ran out and bought one right after you did so they could be like you? I’m sure you’re cool…but not THAT cool.
What changed was your focus. Now that you have that type of car, you’re paying attention, looking for it, focusing on it.
I hear from women who are pregnant that it seems like there’s three times the number of pregnant women walking around when you’re expecting - same principle at work.
So if you’re focusing on your anxious feeling, what do you think you’ll find three times or ten times as much of? Bingo! More anxious feelings.
What if you started your day with feelings or gratitude and how great it would feel to accomplish your goals, how proud of yourself, you’d be, all you could accomplish….
Right again! You’d feel terrific!
There are some important strategies to visualizing so it’s most FAR more effective, but that’s beyond the scope of this report. For now, just be aware that you get more of whatever you focus on, so be careful where you place your attention.
The Golden Rule
Now I want you to learn the “Golden Rule of Fear.”
Now you’re probably already familiar with the other Golden Rule, you know, “treat others how you would want to be treated”.
What makes that the “Golden” rule? Well, I guess because so many questions can be answered by it. It’s kind of like your “go-to” rule. Don’t know what to do in a situation? Golden Rule time. Confused about what’s right or wrong? Golden Rule time. It’s a very simple sentence that you could spend a lifetime trying to live by. Its power is in its simplicity.
Like the other Golden Rule, The Golden Rule of Fear is deceptively simple, yet it contains all you really need to know about how to conquer your anxiety, panic attacks, or phobias. Now living by it, just like the other Golden Rule, is a different story, but this one sentence I’m about to tell you should be your “go-to” question whenever you feel anxious, panicky, or fearful.
Ok, ready? Here it is…
“What would I do if I WASN’T afraid?”
I told you it was simple. That’s the point, but let’s look at it a little deeper…
The Golden Rule of Fear helps you think more clearly when anxiety makes it difficult. Let’s say you’re asked to go to an event that requires you to drive on the highway, maybe over a bridge, etc. Your brain screams to not go, make an excuse and avoid it, but another part of you isn’t so sure. It’s just so darn hard to think straight when you’re anxious and conflicted…
But wait.
The Golden Rule.
If you weren’t anxious, what would you do? Go to the event or avoid it?
That’s right, you’d go.
So you get closer to the event and you start to feel anxious…your stomach gets queasy, you start to sweat, your thoughts race…so you start to tighten your grip on the wheel of the car as you drive there, breathe fast and shallow, and hope to get it over with quickly.
Hold on a second…what about the Golden Rule? You remember the rule and think what you would do if driving didn’t scare you. You relax your grip on the wheel, slow your breathing, and slow down -just like it didn’t bother you a bit. You stop all those anxious physical symptoms from making you feel worse.
Do you shut off the radio to focus on your anxiety and monitor your body for signals itwill get worse? Grab a cell phone to distract yourself and hide from your feelings? Snap at the kids? Feel weak or less than everyone else because of how you feel? Not if you’re living by the Golden Rule. Someone who’s not anxious doesn’t need to be hyper vigilant about a sensations in their body, they don’t need to distract themselves from their thoughts…just do whatever you think you would do if you weren’t anxious.
Simple? Yes. Easy? Not so much. But I guarantee you this, it will help you more than you could believe. There’s a lot you can do about your anxiety, but a lot of it comes “What would I do if I
WASN’T afraid?” back to that simple sentence. The problem with a lot of techniques for controlling anxiety is that in the middle of an anxious episode, it’s hard to remember and do. The
Golden Rule is eight words that can change your life. Go tattoo them someplace.
Oh yeah, the other Golden Rule is a pretty good idea too.
Learning from Chinese Handcuffs
Have you ever seen those Chinese handcuffs, they look like a tube, and you stick your fingers in them and it appears like it would be very easy to get out of, but when you attempt to pull your fingers out, the tighten up and make it impossible. So you pull harder and the handcuffs grip your fingers even tighter. The more you struggle against the handcuffs, the more secure they grip you and less chance you have of escaping. If you struggle long enough, you’ll eventually give up and realize that only by STOPPING the struggle could you free yourself. You had the ability to free yourself the whole time, but it was by relaxing, not fighting.
Yesterday I spoke to someone who told me they’ve been “fighting” their phobia for years and just couldn’t get themselves to “push through it”. Later on in the day someone else told me how they’d been “trying like hell” and just couldn’t get past a particular hurdle.
It made me think back to when I still was battling anxiety and one of the many things that brought my fear was traveling far from home. I’d white knuckle the steering wheel, grit my teeth through the panic, and somehow sweat and claw my way from stoplight to stoplight, wondering why I was never getting any better. I looked at myfear like an opponent, like something I had to beat. I can even remember thinking if I could just outlast it maybe it would ‘die’.
Boy, was I wrong.
You CAN’T out fight it. You can’t do it because it’s not real, it’s like a mirage. It’s like those Chinese handcuffs , the harder you try to pull yourself free from them the tighter their grip gets, but if you relax and stop fighting them they slip right off…
Your fighting is what feeds your fear. When you stop fighting, there’s no more momentum. That doesn’t mean you’ll be totally fear free right away, but it does mean that you’ll take away its ability to grow.
The next time you get anxious, instead of tensing, let go. Instead of fighting harder, relax.
You can’t fight anxiety with MORE anxiety.
The Rewinding Method
I love my dog more than most people I meet. He’s big and strong, but gentle as could be, he wants nothing more than to be pet and lick your face. As you can see from his picture to the right, he doesn’t even mind being dressed up my daughter.
One of his favorite pastimes is to play catch. I toss one of his toys in the yard, he takes off like a rocket and brings it back to me, and then the cycle starts all over again. He never tires of it. There’s something I need to admit though, as much as I love him and wouldn’t trade for anything, he’s not the brightest bulb, as a matter of fact, he’s pretty dumb, maybe that’s what makes him so lovable.
For instance, when we play catch, sometimes I won’t REALLY throw the toy, I’ll just kind of make the motion with my arm and he’ll take off running assuming I threw it and then he’ll wander around a little bit looking for it and pretty soon he’ll realize he’s been tricked and come jogging back ready for me to throw it again. Don’t tell me you’ve never done this…
Sometimes, I can do this for a LONG time, like I said, he’s lovable, but not winning any prizes for his intellect. If he were Scooby, there wouldn’t be too many mysteries solved, believe me.
So I’ll fake toss the ball again, and he’ll go running, look around, and come back.
And again.
And again.
And again.
He never learns. Every throw is like the first one. Like he’ll just never realize that what he THINKS is about to happen ISN’T. No matter how many times he gets fooled, he doesn’t learn from the past. Doesn’t learn he’s getting tricked.
Are YOU anything like him?
How many times have you been anxious or had a panic attack and feared you would lose control, go craget deathly ill, stop breathing, embarrass yourself, freak out, be put in an asylum, or whatever your fear of the day is?
Me? Oh, when I was anxious I probably worried about that stuff only several thousand times or so.
So let’s dust off what I like to call The Rewinding Method.
How many times did any of those things you THOUGHT were going to happen ACTUALLY happen? How many times have you ACTUALLY contracted a deadly illness? How many asylums have you been put into for ACTUALLY losing control of your body and mind? How many times have you ACTUALYY fainted? Oh…none, huh?
So let me get this straight…you’ve gotten tricked into thinking these things were going to happen a hundred or a thousand times, but they never do, yet every time you react the same way and never seem to learn that your anxiety is just tricking you. That there’s nothing REALLY that’s about to happen. Do I have it right? Sounds a lot like my dog doesn’t it? “You’re never OVER anxiety, there’s nothing to be
The Rewinding Method is simple. Just rewind in your memory and think of all the things you typically fear happening and compare it to what has ACTUALLY happened. I think you’ll see that the list of what has really happened is pretty small, and a heck of a lot different than all you feared would happen. Then you know that you’ve been getting tricked, your anxiety has been throwing a stick that wasn’t real and you’ve been continually chasing it without learning from your past…pretty silly, huh?
So the next time your anxiety tries to fool you, you’ll know what it’s doing, and can ignore it. Stop chasing a stick that isn’t there.
And yes, that’s really my dog in the picture.
The Law of Elephant Training
Do you know how they train elephants for the circus? When the elephant is very young, they attach a chain on their leg to a stake in the ground. They pull and tug on the chain to try and free themselves, but they’re too small and not yet strong enough to break away from the little chain.
Quickly, the come to believe that it’s impossible to break the chain and free themselves. They tell themselves they can’t do it so they quit trying. As a matter of fact, they never try again, even when they grow into powerful animals that could snap the chain without a second thought.
When you see an enormous elephant being held in place by a small little chain, it looks silly, and it is. There’s no way that little chain or stake could hold them if they wanted to escape.
But it’s not the CHAIN that holds them.
It’s the BELIEF that they cannot break free that keeps them captive. If they would just pull on that chain they would change their belief and would be free. We’re not so different, we’re chained in place by our beliefs as well.
When you have anxiety problems or fears, you probably have made negative self talk your norm. You tell yourself over and over in your mind that you can’t drive far from home, over the bridge, on the highway, alone (pick your fear), without anxiety or panic. You’ve CONVINCED yourself that that’s who you are. You’ve talked yourself into believing that you have those limitations. You’ve tied your own chain to your leg and have given up trying to free yourself. Is it any surprise that when you attempt to do what you’ve feared in the past you have anxiety? How could it be any different?
This is why anxiety can take some time to completely overcome. It’s more than just the physical symptoms…it’s your view of yourself. What you’ve told yourself over and over and over and over and over that you are.
But you know what?
Come here…let me whisper it…
You’re wrong.
That doesn’t HAVE to be who you are. If you can convince yourself that you’re anxiety riddled and have panic attacks every time you think about the possibility of driving, you can also “teach” yourself that you enjoy the feelings of excitement that come with trying new things and that you’re a very relaxed person generally. What do you think the difference is between adrenaline junkies that jump off cliffs and race motorcycles and someone that gets afraid of being more than 20 miles from home?
How they’ve told themselves they view the sensations.
The first loves the feeling all those brain chemicals bring, they get addicted to it and chase it. The latter fears the same sensations and runs away from them.
The sensations are the same, the difference is the interpretation.
I’m not saying you have to start loving skydiving. What I’m trying to get across is that your limiting self beliefs are a large part of your problem, and once you really start trying to do the things you fear, the things you’re CONVINCED will break you, you’ll find you’re capable of much more than you ever thought possible and you were being held in place all along by a flimsy little chain that was put in place long ago.
It’s time to give your faulty beliefs a tug and set yourself free.
The Rule of the Stubborn Hamster
I ’ve never had a hamster, not even as a kid. I couldn’t think of anything more mind numbing than watching it run in place in one of those wheels for hours on end, too stubborn to get off and actually go someplace.
How many hours does a hamster have to run on a wheel for it to finally learn that what it’s doing isn’t getting them anywhere? Do they think if they just keep doing the same
thing a little faster they’re get someplace? Maybe they think if they just hang in there and do the same thing a little longer they’ll see some progress. Maybe if they HOPE harder…
I don’t know why hamsters are so stubborn and don’t learn that what they’re doing is useless and that they should try doing something different.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know why you do it either.
A lot of the stress and pressure we put on ourselves is self created. It’s not even that hard to identify where the problem is when we think about it. The real problem is that most of us refuse to do anything about it and just hope that if we try doing the same things HARDER or FASTER or LONGER that it will be resolved. Just like the hamster running in its wheel, doing MORE of the same things that aren’t helping isn’t going to help. You need to get off the wheel and try something new.
If every day you wake up, have a huge cup of coffee because you stayed up late, and rush around because you hit snooze 5 times and are now almost late for work, it doesn’t come as a big shock to me that you’re going to start things out a little anxious. Maybe that’s the wheel you need to get out of.
If you’re married and you and your spouse fight all the time and going home is miserable and makes you nervous on the drive home, maybe that’s a wheel you need to get out of.
If every time you feel that twinge of panic in your stomach start to creep up, you stopwhat you’re doing and leave the situation or go home where you feel safe, I’m betting that’s a wheel you need to step out of too.
It’s time to do some honest self reflection and see if what you’re doing and how you live your life is getting you closer to where you want to be or further away. Are the activities, thought patterns, relationship, and careers, helping you or hurting you? Are you making progress or running on a wheel? If you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, that doesn’t make too much sense does it? As much as anxious people don’t like change (as bad as things may be right now, at least there’s some comfort in the known), it’s exactly what’s needed. Hey, don’t pat me on the back for that advice, it’s hardly a revelation. Just like the hamster on the wheel, if you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.
The only way to a different result is to do things…well…differently. If you had a recipe for a cake, and it turned out dry and tasted like baking soda, would you make it again using the exact same recipe and cooking technique? I would hope not, it seems pretty obvious that the result would be the same unless some of the variables changed. You have to change the recipe in some form to have a different result.
So you have to set aside some time to thinking about what part “If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” of your life recipe isn’t working for you. Then change it, even if it’s scary.
I’m going to bet that the figuring it out part is pretty easy. Most of us know what we’re doing wring, we just hope we can continue doing it anyway and still get where we want to go. We don’t want to change. That’s the stubborn hamster. You need to change what isn’t working. When you remove those barriers to success, you’ll be surprised how quickly you start making progress once you stop running on the wheel.
Your Cheat Sheet
Here is a “cheat sheet” you can cut out and call upon when it’s difficult to remember the principles. Keep it in your purse or wallet, or tape it to your dashboard in your car. Especially in the beginning, don’t try to rely on your memory to recall the principles you learned, when you’re under anxiety it’s difficult to think clearly, much less remember something you may have read days or weeks ago.
Cut out and place where you can see it easily.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve read the program, please don’t let it end there. You now have information, when you actually put it to use, you’ll have knowledge. As difficult as it may seem to believe right now, you can overcome your fear of driving if you follow the program, I can say this confidently because others have. It will seem extraordinarily difficult at times, exhilarating at other times, and you will certainly have setbacks. When these times present themselves, you must push on. You must keep going forward. It is always right after people come close to the point of quitting that breakthroughs occur. When you feel it’s too tough or more than you can handle, let that be a signal to you that you’re about to take a giant leap forward and let it encourage you. You CAN get better. Remember that whether you believe that you can, or that you can’t, you’re right.
Please take the time to email us your story and your experience with the program at service@drivingfear.com, by taking this small action you can affect the lives of many others with your feedback.
I leave you with my favorite quote of all time, remember it throughout your journey:
Resolve says, ‘I will.’ The man says, ‘I will climb this mountain. They told me it is too high, too far, too steep, too rocky and too difficult.
But it’s my mountain. I will climb it. You will soon see me waving from the top or dead on the side from trying.’
Your Friend,