Feeling weird when driving

[cattia]

I started worrying about driving on the motorway last year after I had a panic attack. More recently I found that the thought of being on the motorway was making me anxious and as a passenger with my husband driving I started to feel dizzy and disoriented. I then googled like an idiot and read about various vertigo conditions that can cause dizziness associated with driving or traveling in a car. Now since my anxiety has been really bad I have started to get this feeling every time I drive or travel in a car, which I have to do every day to travel to work. I also read that these types of vertigo can cause dizziness when doing things like scrolling down a phone or computer and since reading that I get the same disoriented feeling sometimes when scrolling my phone.
Is it even possible that worrying about this can cause actual symptoms of feeling unsteady and disoriented? It's not a spinning dizziness or anything like that. I want to run to a balance specialist but I know I can't get tested for everything I worry about because it will just make mw worse. How do you ever know whether something is real?

[I Don't Get it!]

I'm not sure if it's the same thing, but when I was anxious I started to feel very nervous and frightened when I had to drive anywhere. I kept thinking a deer was going to jump out in front of me and I became very fearful every time I drove, which is not good because I live in quite a rural area and need to drive.

Like most anxious thoughts, it was getting worse and worse every time I went out. I stopped it by getting into a very relaxed state (i.e. a hypnosis mp3 recording) and visualising myself driving with great confidence and calmness. I had to do that several times, but it worked and I'm now driving confidently again.

The anxiety can cause the weird physical feelings you describe, the disorientation etc. I didn't get that, but I did feel faint or weak at times and my eyes would go a bit blurry.