Working From Home Worsens Driving Anxiety

In this new age we live in, when we seem constantly connected to the web with computers, Blackberry’s, and iPhone’s, it may seem like a wonderful idea to leave your daily commute behind and work from home on a regular basis.  As much as I like the thought of spending the time you would have been driving to work with your family, and not dealing with the stress of traffic and other motorists, it can actually be a tremendous disadvantage when you’re working on overcoming your driving anxiety.

Anxiety and driving go hand in hand for quite a few people, and many of them eventually come to me and my program for help.  What I’ve noticed in talking with them is that in many cases, when I ask about when their anxiety and driving started getting very problematic, they tell me it’s when they started working from home.

Now it would seem that the opposite should be true.  That the more they avoided driving the better they’d be, but actually being forced to drive on a daily basis to work has many benefits in that it allows you to confront your driving phobia on a regular basis.  When you give yourself the ability to only drive occasionally, it becomes all the more a “special event” and out of the ordinary, which worsens your anxiety when driving.

Let’s look another example.  If you live in San Francisco, you may have to cross the Golden Gate Bridge on a regular basis and may think nothing of it.  But if you’re visiting San Francisco on vacation from Toledo and have to cross that monster, you may have a different experience entirely! You may feel generalized anxiety about the crossing for hours or days prior, you may consider anxiety medication, have anxiety attacks about the event, or simply ruminate about having anxiety about driving over it and how terrible you’ll feel.  What is the difference between the two people?  Is one brave and the other a coward?  One weak and the other strong?  Of course not.  One is simple conditioned to think the bridge is no big deal because they cross it so frequently and other  makes it a special event and attaches thoughts of anxiety and panic attacks to it.

So it is with driving to work.  If you have the opportunity to work from home, you may want to consider the effect it will have on your fear of driving.  That doesn’t mean you have to return to the office necessarily, but maybe you need to make it a point to drive more often go someplace every day or every other day at a minimum so you continue to push yourself and not allow yourself to become too comfortable being cooped up in your home or neighborhood, that’s a dangerously good recipe for agoraphobia and one you have to avoid.  Keep yourself moving forward and make sure driving never becomes a special event, the more it is like brushing your teeth, the less negative attention you’ll pay it and your driving anxiety will lessen, or at least not spiral into other areas of your life.