Driving in snow

I am a really, really REALLY nervous driver.  I hate it and I am bad at it. I have a few very specific driving phobias too – including slip roads (US = ‘on ramp’ or ‘off ramp’) and perhaps my biggest fear of all: Driving. In. Snow.

As a therapist, I have worked with anxiety in many forms. In recent times, this is primarily food-related anxiety. A few years ago, I had a word with myself and decided to apply some of the tools I use in my work, to my own fears. I began to tackle my driving anxiety and actually managed to make some real headway. I learnt to handle the dreaded slip roads and after years of being that person stuck behind a tractor and refusing to do anything about it, I learned to overtake (US = ‘passing’). I even invested in some glasses with anti-reflective coating and learnt to drive in the dark.

This weekend, I had to take my daughters to a music lesson. It had been snowing and I was not looking forward to it, but I checked the forecast and it looked okay, so (with some trepidation) I set off. To be honest, I would normally have cancelled, but my youngest daughter has a music exam soon and she needed that lesson!

A word about the UK in the snow for my readers elsewhere: Most of Britain is NOT geared up for the white stuff. We don’t have armies of snow-ploughs like parts of the US or mainland Europe where snow is a regular feature in the Winter months. We don’t even have trains that can travel in snowy conditions. And we love a bit of weather hysteria so when snow starts to fall, you can expect apocalyptic newspaper headlines about big freezes, Beasts from the East, etc. Smaller roads are often not treated so Brits end up skidding about on impacted snow and ice, mostly without suitable tyres.

So – off I set, and the main roads were fine. Then I got to where the music teacher lives and headed away from the gritted roads towards a big hill on the way to her house. It was covered in snow. Getting up the hill was kind of okay, but going down the other side was terrifying. I inched down, taking my breaks on and off, skidding every minute or so and praying that a car wouldn’t come up behind me. I was so scared and I could feel all of those tell-tale anxiety symptoms like sweaty palms, shallow breathing, nausea, and heart palpitations. When we finally made it to our destination, I was shaking like a leaf and my legs had gone to jelly.

On the way home, back on the clear roads, I was behind a tractor. I knew I should overtake, but I just couldn’t. It was as though all the confidence I had built up over the last few years had vanished. As I sat behind that tractor, doing 20 miles an hour on a wide, easy-to-overtake-on stretch of road – a queue of irate drivers building up behind me – I began to think of food-anxious children.

When we are helping a child build their eating confidence, it is so important for them to move at their own pace and take baby steps. When we push children to try something or even just to lick or sniff a food against their will, we are risking giving rise to a feeling of anxiety and being out of control – a loss of autonomy – which only serves to reinforce the initial wariness about eating.

I had lost my confidence and taken many steps back because of a scary experience. I had felt out of control – I would have given anything to have got off that snowy hill without having to drive down it, but I had no choice. That experience had increased my driving anxiety to such a degree that I felt like I was back where I started and all the progress I had made had evaporated.

The brain is always ready – it thinks – to protect us from dangerous experiences. Sometimes this is incredibly useful, sometimes, less so. When we feel anxious in relation to a particular stimulus (like driving for me) and that is paired with a negative experience, a neural groove gets carved even more clearly in the brain as it learns that cars = bad, or cabbage = scary…

When we experience something that is slightly new, or just a little bit outside our comfort zone, and we are able to autonomously (we have control – it is our choice) embrace that new experience, the neural pathway connecting a sense of fear and that stimulus weakens. We are more likely to have rational thoughts about it next time we experience it, rather than leaping straight into ‘fight or flight’.

When I  decided to slowly push my driving comfort zone at MY pace, I got braver and braver over time. When I felt forced to do something I wasn’t ready to do, I went several steps back. The moral of the story? Don’t push your child to metaphorically drive down a snowy hill when they are not ready for it. Each child’s snowy hill will be different, but by never pressuring a child to eat or interact with a food – however much you want them to learn to like it – you are paving the way for slow, gradual and most importantly, lasting progress.