How to Overcome Driving OCD
Published August 22nd, 2024
5 min read
OCD can make driving terrifying and stressful. Here’s how therapists can help you recover and get back behind the wheel.
Written by Simon Spichak
Do you have repetitive, intrusive thoughts about crashing or harming someone else while you’re driving? These thoughts can make driving scary, and some people even quit driving. In some cases, these symptoms are a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and they are treatable.
What is OCD?
OCD is a mental health condition that affects up to 2 percent of people around the world. The condition is characterized by obsessions that trigger fear, anxiety, and avoidance. To deal with these obsessions, people act out compulsions — like rumination, checking, or cleaning — that alleviate the distress temporarily but continue the overall cycle of OCD.
What is driving OCD?
Some people with OCD develop anxiety and fears about driving. Even though they may be great drivers, they experience intrusive thoughts about losing control of the wheel, hitting pedestrians, or getting into accidents.
OCD can cause you to develop compulsive checking rituals. The checking rituals can spiral into more intrusive thoughts. You might start checking the side and rearview mirrors more often and then develop intrusive thoughts that you forgot to check once and, as a result, hit something on the road.
It can also become unsafe if you’re checking the mirrors too much, and not looking at the road enough.
What is hit-and-run OCD?
Another form of driving OCD feeds off of your worst fears — after you hit a bumpy stretch of road or a pothole, intrusive thoughts start to pop up in your head, telling you that you hit a pet or a person.
These thoughts are very distressing, so you might stop the car and check to make sure. However, responding to these intrusive thoughts doesn’t make them go away. Instead, it takes up a lot of time, makes you late for work or important events, and may lead you to avoid driving altogether.
Exposure and response prevention therapy (ERP) to treat OCD
Exposure and response prevention therapy (ERP) is a first-line therapy for OCD. It helps you confront fears, intrusive thoughts, and obsessions healthily while also helping you learn to resist compulsions.
Once you find a therapist who specializes in ERP, they will work with you to break the cycle of OCD.
This first step involves learning about your specific obsessions and compulsions and assessing the severity of the symptoms. You and your therapist will set some goals and develop a treatment plan. Your therapist will expose you to driving-related situations that trigger the OCD-related anxiety to practice response prevention, where you learn to stop acting out the compulsions.
For driving OCD, this might mean practicing the urge to stop and check whether you dinged the car or hit something on the road.
ERP is a gradual process that takes place over several therapy sessions, slowly ramping up the exposure over time. Once you progress, you and your therapist will develop a strategy to maintain these successful habits and prevent relapses. You’ll learn additional coping skills to help you handle intrusive thoughts independently.
How Resolvve can help
ERP can help you mitigate the distressing symptoms of driving OCD and help you get back behind the wheel.
Resolvve offers affordable, low-cost therapy with practitioners who have extensive experience treating clients with OCD using ERP. So, when you’re ready to take the next step, you can book a free consultation.
We also have plenty of resources on OCD. If you want to learn more, you can start here:
Please note that this post is written for educational purposes; it is not therapy. If you need to talk to a professional, please book a consultation with a psychotherapist through Resolvve.
