Unlearning anxiety: What a panic attack on the motorway taught me

Clichés exist for a reason. Keep calm and carry on. Get back in the saddle. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. In therapy, they can feel like a double-edged sword.

When your mind is racing and you have constant self-doubt, these phrases can land more like "just stop feeling that way," which isn't helpful.

When I had therapy, I would often have this inner dialogue where I'd ask myself, "What is wrong with me?" So much conflict was taking place in my head, where I would spiral into berating myself for not being able to "pull it together."

I recently saw an interview with Mel Robbins where she said something that stuck with me:

"You don't have anxiety - you're feeling anxious."

It made me think about how powerful it is to create that distance. You're not defined by anxiety. You're experiencing it - and that means it can shift.

That perspective alone may very well be the first step toward change.

So what does this have to do with 'getting back in the saddle' - cliché as it may be?"

When I experienced my first panic attack on the motorway, I did everything (and I mean everything) to avoid driving on a motorway again. I resigned myself to the fact that from now on, maybe I’d nip to the shop, go to a friend's house for a coffee, but long trips? Forget it.

Cognitive behavioural therapy techniques helped me explore my thoughts, specifically, why my brain had decided that motorway driving was now a trigger, while local driving wasn’t.

That insight gave me the first step toward changing how I responded to the fear. The two weren’t all that different, really - except that one was faster, and now felt scarier because of the deep-rooted association with the loss of control I'd experienced during the panic attack.

However, for anyone who has experienced CBT, exploring the thoughts and debunking your beliefs in counselling is one thing. Putting them into practice and recounting what you’ve learnt in the moment a fear strikes, is another.

In response to this, my therapist said, “Do not pull off the motorway.” I thought she was mad. No way! Too painful, too scary.

I think of cognitive behavioural therapy as a dance with logic. That is not to say that our fears, whatever they may be, are not logical. Fear is natural, it’s a protective instinct. I remember once reading about someone who, even though they would pour bleach down the kitchen sink and her cups were in her cupboard, that somehow that tiny splash of bleach made its way onto the cups and she was convinced she was going to ingest the bleach. There were five feet and a cupboard door between them, and she had carefully poured the bleach, but that fear felt real regardless. Logic doesn’t come into fear, but CBT attempts to unpick that.

I was determined to move through the dance between logic and fear with my driving.

There is a strong body of evidence from neuroscience and psychology supporting the idea that the brain can relearn or rewire its response to anxiety-inducing stimuli. Studies suggest that repeated exposure to feared situations can help reshape anxious responses by building new associations (Bear, 2003; Marin, 2010).

A study by Milad and Quirk (2002) offers fascinating evidence that returning to feared activities allows the brain to update its internal model, replacing anxiety with new learning. It all comes down to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is remarkably pliable and can be your best ally in overcoming fear.

Armed with the knowledge that my brain could relearn how it responded to driving, I did what my therapist told me. Whenever a wave of panic swept over me - my heart racing, my throat tightening - I told myself, “Keep going,” trusting that maybe the science was right. To this day, whenever I feel a flicker of anxiety or a memory surfaces while I’m driving, I ride it out, knowing that every journey helps chip away at the fear that took root that first day.

The heart of this article is this: we are not defined by our anxiety - and we often forget just how capable we are. If you can learn an unhelpful thought or fear, then you also have the power to unlearn it.

“Keep going” might sound like a cliché, especially when fear and anxiety feel so real. But reminding yourself - regularly and gently - that this isn’t your new normal, and that your brain is just as capable of unlearning what it fears (even if not quite yet), can provide a potent and transformative light at the end of the tunnel.