Shopping at a smaller store. Never taking the elevator, just in case. Driving miles out of the way to avoid a bridge. If any of this sounds familiar, you're dealing with something Barbara Spaulding, LCSW, has seen — and lived — for decades.
In her book Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery, Barbara describes a relative who was terrified of bridges and would drive hundreds of extra miles to avoid them. It's one of the most common forms of anxiety she treats, and there's a specific reason it happens so often behind the wheel.
Why driving triggers anxiety so easily
When you first learned to drive, every action required conscious thought — check the mirror, signal, ease onto the gas. Over time, driving becomes automatic; you trust your instincts and let go. That automatic trust is exactly what anxiety interferes with. The more you think about driving instead of simply doing it, the more unnatural and threatening it starts to feel. And once anxiety shows up on the road, the instinct is to start building rules: no highways, no left turns, no bridges, no driving after dark, only familiar routes. Each rule feels protective in the moment, but it actually shrinks your world and reinforces the fear.
The comfort-zone trap
Barbara's book is candid about how far this can go. During her own fifteen years of anxiety, she developed an entire private system of grocery-store survival tactics — parking near the door, never going down the same aisle twice, leaving a full cart mid-shop if she needed to escape. None of it reduced her anxiety. It just made anxiety more comfortable to carry around. The same pattern shows up behind the wheel: comfort zones don't shrink anxiety, they just give it more territory to defend.
What actually helps: the practice schedule
Rather than forcing yourself to "just do it" and grit your way down the highway (which usually backfires and confirms the fear), Barbara teaches a practice schedule — a sequence of small, deliberately achievable steps that build confidence gradually. One example from the book, built for someone whose goal was a thirty-mile highway drive to a friend's house:
Drive to the end of the block, then return home.
Drive two blocks, then four blocks, returning home each time.
Drive to the highway entrance and back.
Enter the highway, exit at the first exit, and return home.
Drive to the second exit, then ten miles, gradually extending the distance.
Complete the full drive.
The rule that makes this work: if any step produces real anxiety, go back one step and stay there until it feels manageable — don't skip ahead just because you had one good day. This isn't about toughing it out. It's about calm becoming familiar, one small win at a time.
Reframing the moment you're anxious
Alongside the practice schedule, Barbara teaches a tool she calls the "Calm Lens vs. Anxious Lens." Picture the same highway drive two ways: through the anxious lens, your hands are shaking on the wheel, your stomach is in a knot, and you're bracing for a heart attack. Through the calm lens, your grip is loose, the windows are down, and you're actually enjoying the drive. The exercise isn't about pretending fear away — it's about consciously practicing the alternative image often enough that your brain starts to default to it.
You are not in real danger
One reassurance worth repeating from her book: anxiety while driving is not a sign that something is actually going to go wrong. It's your body reacting to a perceived threat — hypervigilance left over from anxious learning, not evidence of real risk. Feeling uneasy on the highway doesn't mean you're about to lose control of the car or have a medical emergency. You can be uneasy and still be a perfectly safe driver.
Driving anxiety is one of dozens of specific fears covered in Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery, alongside the full practice-schedule method, breathing techniques, and grounding exercises you can start using today. Barbara also runs a free biweekly Anxiety Relief Zoom group — details at anxietyandpanic.net.