Tunnel anxiety: Ways to still get to Italy by car

Tunnels, they are very handy inventions to make travel a lot easier, but if you have tunnel anxiety, it doesn't matter. Going to England through the tunnel, or driving through long tunnels to get to Italy is out of the question.

And if your tunnel anxiety is really bad, you don't actually like those tunnels across the highway for nature either.

How does tunnel anxiety happen and what can you do to drive worry-free through mile-long tunnels?

Find out in this article.

Driving anxiety and tunnels

Fear of tunnels is often part of a fear of driving. In a tunnel, all sorts of thoughts about your safety can pop into your head. These can range from the air quality in the tunnel to how little room you feel you have to maneuver if necessary.

The fact that there are entire systems in place to ensure that there is clean air in the tunnel and that the street inside a tunnel is wider than outside it is something you don't think about at all then.

This fear may have arisen from all sorts of factors. Perhaps one of your parents was afraid of driving through tunnels, and you’ve inherited that fear. It often makes more sense for your parents to be afraid of tunnels than it does for a younger generation, because in the past, there were indeed occasional problems in tunnels.

However, since then, safety measures have gotten much better and systems to optimize air quality in tunnels are also much better.

Of course, you may also have once experienced something in a tunnel. For example, someone making a dangerous maneuver that you feel just went right.

Suddenly the realization of how vulnerable you are can come when you can have this on a normal path.

It can also be related to claustrophobia, especially if it’s a very long tunnel. Norway also has many tunnels, and researchers there consider treating tunnel anxiety important so that people can travel comfortably throughout Norway.

Treatment tunnel anxiety

In those studies, it was found that dosed exposure can help overcome tunnel anxiety. In doing so, it was also beneficial for people to know more about the construction of the tunnel and the company that had built it.

As a result, they experienced fewer anxious thoughts about the tunnel while driving and were able to drive better than people who were still on a waiting list to address their fear of tunnels[1].

So if you're going on a car vacation and on your route is a long tunnel, it can be very helpful for yourself to learn about the tunnel, the construction of the tunnel and the company that built it. That knowledge can have a calming effect.

In addition, you can also gradually expose yourself to tunnels. For example, you can watch videos of cars driving through tunnels. There are even studies that use virtual reality glasses. Whereby you get the feeling of being a passenger of someone driving through a tunnel and having some tense moments while driving, so you can better control the feelings it evokes[2].

A hypnotherapist can also help you overcome tunnel anxiety. At the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands, aspiring hypnotherapists learn how to use visualizations to help people with this issue.

For a hypnotherapist, it is also a good way to check how bad a person's anxiety is. For example, you can indicate how bad your tunnel anxiety is on a scale of 1 to 10. This is a good starting point for a therapist because after each exercise, he or she can then double-check how bad the anxiety is when you next think about driving through a tunnel.

Indeed, you will find that the more exercises done, the calmer and better your body feels at the idea of driving through a tunnel.

Hypnotic exercises against tunnel anxiety

Besides visualizations of traveling through a tunnel and helping you control physical fear reactions so they don't make your mental fear reaction worse, a hypnotherapist can also use other techniques to overcome tunnel anxiety.

Using symbols against anxiety

Working with symbols can go a long way toward helping people overcome fears. For example, by assigning colors to feelings of fear and different colors to feelings of bravery or calm , you can help people feel good despite their fear.

For example, you can help people with visualizations in which the color of fear in the body is replaced with the color of "calm" or "tranquility." After all, you do want to drive calmly through a tunnel.

This sounds easier said than done, but if someone manages to visualize themselves driving calmly through a tunnel, you can help others by anchoring that feeling .

You can even give a post-hypnotic suggestion where driving through a tunnel actually evokes calm.

For example

"You will find that when you drive through a tunnel you actually become very calm. That you can properly focus on the road, your speed and the traffic around you. You take the right actions to drive safely through the tunnel and you are calm because you know you are in control. The further you drive into the tunnel, the calmer it becomes. You can even think of the tunnel as a protective cocoon, and when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you continue to feel normal and calm. After all, nothing is happening."

This is just one example; depending on a person’s fear of tunnels, you can provide a different post-hypnotic suggestion.

Regression to find the cause

An important first step is identifying the cause. During the exploratory session, a person can share their own ideas about the cause, but the therapist may also use a regression technique to double-check whether that is truly the cause or if the subconscious might identify a different one.

Depending on the underlying cause, a therapist can choose a technique that helps you overcome your fear of tunnels. This involves working with the memory to correct the belief that causes the fear of tunnels[3].

Some of the techniques the deal with regression are:

1. Fast Phobia
2. Inner child

Fast Phobia

For example, the Fast Phobia technique helps you to be more aware that tense moments with tunnels, or anything else that has caused tunnel anxiety, are over and you can relax. With this technique, a person is made very aware that a particular anxious moment in life is over and is no longer "going on."

This can go a long way toward overcoming fears and helping people move out of a survival mode.

Inner child

Another technique that can be helpful is the “inner child ” approach . This can be particularly useful if the fear has taken hold because one of the parents accidentally passed it on to the child.

When someone is very young, certain impressions can have a lot of influence, because until a child is 7 years old the child assumes everything for "truth." So if you are on a car vacation and you make a joke about tunnels that can collapse, it is much less funny to a child than to an adult.

By performing the inner child technique, the person with tunnel anxiety can make it clear to himself or herself that there is nothing wrong when he or she drives through a tunnel. In fact, you then help him or her talk to the inner child. Perhaps the inner child can even say in his or her mind to the parent "I didn't think that was a funny joke. Ever since then, I've found tunnels just terrifying."

This is because the brain cannot properly assess what is reality and what is not, and therefore these types of fantasy conversations can often do much to express things that would otherwise never be expressed.

This can provide much relief from all kinds of problems.

In addition, the inner child technique helps people become aware that a healed trauma affects the rest of your life and your feelings in the future.

Self-hypnosis against tunnel anxiety

In addition, self-hypnosis can also be very effective against fears[4] —including tunnel anxiety. Self-hypnosis can help you further enhance the effects of standard hypnotherapy or help you maintain those effects over time.

You can then get an audio recording with a hypnotherapist. This can either be a general recording against anxiety or a specific recording that addresses your beliefs that have caused tunnel anxiety.

Helping people with anxiety

Do you want to help people with anxiety? Then knowledge of hypnotherapy is invaluable.

Come join the free online masterclass to get started.

Or sign up right away for one of our events or training programs.

Sources: