Dreadless: What is Fear?

If you are new to this blog series, please begin here: Dreadless: An Introduction.

Six months after I started learning how to drive for the umpteenth time–and made more progress with it than ever before–I had mastered the basic skills, but I was also still making dangerous mistakes. Something strange was happening to my attention. I would be driving along ok, and then I would miss something important. For example, I once stopped behind a turning car, then thought I saw a line of cars ahead of me in the lane after that car had turned. They were actually parked cars, but my brain registered them as being in my lane. Another time, I started to turn left into oncoming traffic even though the light was clearly red.

Every time Ace (my boyfriend/driving instructor) pointed something like this out to me, the realization of what I had done ratcheted up my anxiety to an overwhelming level. The old false story gained strength–what if there is something neurologically wrong with me that I’m making these mistakes? And the voice of self-hatred berated me for these dangerous failings, further overwhelming my ability to focus on the task at hand.

As I’ve said several times in this blog, I’m not a psychologist. I’m not trying to be. I’m relating my story here and drawing strategies from my experiences that might be useful to other people facing the same struggles. While I make several factual statements here about anxiety, I don’t intend this post to be a scientific paper on the nature of anxiety. If you disagree with the information I’ve presented here, please feel free to pursue your own research into the topic.

One important distinction that I haven’t really been making in this blog is the difference between fear and anxiety. Fear, according to Wikipedia, is an appropriate response to a perceived threat. Anxiety, which is what I was suffering from when I drove, is a response to an unrealistic threat. David Barlow, director for the Center of Anxiety at Boston University, defines anxiety as “a future-oriented mood state in which one is ready or prepared to attempt to cope with upcoming negative events.”

When one is focused on the future, they don’t have much attention for what is happening in the present. Through a great deal of conversation with Ace, we unravelled the fact that often when I made one of these major oversights in driving, it was because I was upset from anticipating an upcoming part of the driving experience that would take me out of my comfort zone. For example, perhaps I was driving at 25mph in moderate traffic, but I knew we were about to approach a busy part of town where the speed limit was 35mph. I would be so focused on how I would perform that I would lose contact with what was actually happening around me in the moment. This was happening over and over again, but I didn’t understand at the time that it was a natural reaction to the overwhelming anxiety I was still facing.

Here’s a quote from Wikipedia, since I can’t really put it any better than they do: “In positive psychology, anxiety is described as the mental state that results from a difficult challenge for which the subject has insufficient coping skills.”

Coping, in psychological terms, is any strategy used to master, minimize or tolerate stress or conflict. The coping strategy I had been using all my life in regards to my driving-related anxiety was avoidance. Now that I was no longer using avoidance, I was face to face with the anxiety, but I hadn’t replaced avoidance with new coping skills. My inability to cope with the anxiety while I learned to drive was leading to an even higher level of anxiety. Even though I had escaped one cycle by ceasing to avoid my issues, I had only traded it for another cycle. This is most likely why, after six months of success, I still failed, at that time, to master driving safely and get my license.

There was another factor here as well: stress. I was under a lot of stress at that time in my line of work and in life in general. I couldn’t find a reference for this, but I recall hearing at some point that stress is cumulative–meaning that stresses pile on top of each other until they become overwhelming. In my own experience, I know that stress can complicate and exacerbate anxiety. So, for example, if I have a functional stress cap of 100%, and my job was giving me 80%, other factors in my life were giving me 19%, then practicing driving ramps my stress level up by even 5 or 10%, it’s too much. We noticed that if I did my practice after work, I would reach an non-functional level of anxiety much sooner than if we did it in the morning, or on the weekend.

I mention this only because I was fortunate enough to have a period in my life where the job stress completely went away, because my job ended and I took an extensive period of time off before seeking another job. You could say I was at below 50% stress for the first time in years. Simply put, I had the space to add enough stress from driving to my life without becoming completely overwhelmed. The practice could be the only really stressful thing I did in a day, not another stressful thing tacked onto an already stressful day. I could practice as long or as short of periods as I needed, to, in as busy or light of traffic as I wished to find.

But even having this open space wasn’t enough. I was 3/4 of the way through this period of time off before I made a final push, spent a month practicing every day, and finally got my license. What made all the difference, in the end, was finding the right coping methods.

Approaching the problem, as I covered in the first part of this blog, was only half the solution. Identifying and disproving the false story, becoming aware of the impact of negative self-talk, and noticing the cycle of emotions and stopping that cycle by ceasing to avoid the problem, those steps only got me so far. Carefully riding my comfort zone got me a little bit farther. But now I would need to replace avoidance with constructive coping skills.

Find out how I did this in the next installment of Dreadless: Healthy Coping Methods.

In case you want to take something away from these posts other than just my story and some advice, here are a couple of activities you can use to apply the strategies I learned while overcoming my fear of driving. Please refer to the disclaimer in Dreadless: An Introduction.

Storytelling: What is your main character’s relationship with fear? Does he or she tend to flee conflict or stand and fight? What kind of deep fears and anxieties might contribute to his motivations in the story? Are the things your character fears real, or imagined? Does he or she have nightmares? If your character is forced to face her fears, how does she cope with them? Most importantly, how does your main character’s relationship to fear change over the course of the story? Fear can be an important point of growth for any character. Take some time to brainstorm and free-write about your character’s relationship with fear.

Personal Growth: Make a list of the stress factors in your life. Keep in mind that some of them might be positive factors as well as negative; for example, pregnancy can be a positive life event but can still be stressful. My list might have looked something like this: Job, relationship, family, cat has asthma, home projects, writing projects, learning to drive, getting ready for the holidays. Leave some space under each item. Now, for each item on the list, note the emotions associated with the stress of each factor. For example, “job” and “learning to drive” would be associated with anxiety, while “cat has asthma” might be associated with something more mild, like concern, and “getting ready for the holidays” might actually be anticipation.

Next, focusing on the stress factors for which you have strong negative emotional reactions, make a list of the methods you use to cope with each of these stressors. For me, this might have looked like “avoidance” for “learning to drive” and “hot baths” for “job.” Be honest with yourself, even if the coping methods are not healthy or effective ones, it’s important to know what you are currently doing to cope. In the next post, we’ll work on changing unhealthy coping methods into healthy ones.