What can I do about my fear of driving over bridges?

Driving over bridges can be a major source of stress for anxious adults. Psychologist Tamar Chansky, DO, who specializes in anxiety, shares steps to making bridge travel more manageable.

Transcript

00:00

So lots of adults have fears about driving, and some have a specific fear about driving over bridges.

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As with any anxiety problem, what you want to do is get to the heart of the matter, get to your core fear.

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Find out what it is, and then look at it and evaluate it and see is it really realistic.

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So you may have a fear of the bridge not being safe, or you don't like looking at the water

00:34

because you get a dizzy feeling. Well, what you need to do is to realize that the engineers who build the bridges

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have the same feeling that you do. They don't want the bridge to fail either. And there's a whole network of people responsible for making

00:50

sure that the bridge is safe. If you have a fear about looking over at the water, well, what you can do is you can keep your sight line straight

01:00

ahead until you practice little by little maybe when you're not the driver looking at the water and seeing, oh, maybe

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I can manage that. It feels a little uncomfortable seeing it, but I'm OK. So you want to dose yourself to that experience.

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Another thing to do is to change the tone about bridges. You're feeling that they are a very negative thing,

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and they're very frightening. But you want to look at the other side of it. Why do you want to overcome your fear of bridges?

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What's on the, literally, the other side of that for you? What are the places that you can go? What are the things that you can do if you're

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able to get over bridges? Finally, what you need to do is practice.

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Don't start on the bridge but start in your imagination. Take your good, positive, and accurate thoughts

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that you have generated from correcting your negative worry thoughts and think those as you're

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picturing yourself competently driving over a bridge. Choose different bridges. You can look at pictures of them to make it more realistic.

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But you want to practice thinking more accurately, staying in the present, to say I can be afraid,

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but I can still do this. What I'm afraid of is not happening now. I need to stay in the present and do

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some really good deep breathing as you are looking at that picture. Breathing helps send the all-clear signal

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to your anxiety system in your body. And so if you're doing that good breathing, then that's going to help along with your accurate thoughts

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to help turn off the anxiety switch because driving over a bridge is really no different than driving