Hypnosis for the Fear of Driving (Amaxophobia)
You have your licence. It has been in your wallet for years, and the car is outside the house. The journey takes up the evening before all the same: you check the route, you look for a way around the motorway, you work out when to leave. Come the morning, you find a reason to put it off, or you ask someone to come with you.
When you do drive, it is hands tight on the wheel, shallow breathing, your heart going at the entrance to the tunnel or the bridge, and one thought that counts: where is the next exit.
Or perhaps you are not the one driving. You are in the passenger seat, braking with your right foot on a floor mat, closing your eyes on the bends, and saying nothing to the person at the wheel.
People around you think you are making too much of it, and tell you that you just need to get back to it. It is not that simple, and you know it already: it is not willingness that is missing.
Two precautions specific to this subject.
Never listen to a hypnosis or relaxation recording while driving, nor as a passenger if you will be taking the wheel afterwards. These recordings are made to draw attention away from the outside world, which is exactly what you do not want at the wheel. In France, wearing any sound-emitting device in the ear is in fact forbidden to drivers under the highway code, whatever is being listened to. Self-hypnosis exercises are practised stationary with the engine off, or at home.
If your fear is fed by real physical symptoms, dizziness, vision problems, drowsiness at the wheel or a known health condition, the first step is medical advice. In Quebec it is you, the licence holder, whom the Highway Safety Code requires to declare to the SAAQ any change in your health that could impair your driving, within thirty days; the assessment itself belongs to a professional qualified to make it.
What is Amaxophobia?
Amaxophobia is the fear of driving or of being in a vehicle. The word belongs to everyday vocabulary rather than to the scientific literature, which speaks of driving phobia or of specific phobia, situational type. That is the family it belongs to: intense fears triggered by a particular situation, out of proportion to the actual danger of that situation, which lead people to actively avoid it or to endure it with considerable distress.
We deliberately avoid the word "irrational", widely used on this subject. It passes judgement on the person, and it is often inaccurate: after an accident, or when you have not driven for ten years, the fear has a perfectly understandable origin. This is not a quirk on our part either, the classifications have travelled the same road: the criterion that asked the person to recognise their own fear as excessive or unreasonable has been removed, in favour of wording that describes the fear rather than the one who feels it.
Several situations go by this name, and they are not worked on the same way
- The phobia of driving, centred on the act itself, sometimes limited to certain contexts: the motorway, the dark, winter, tunnels, bridges, driving alone.
- The fear of being a passenger, often tied to not being in control of what happens, and rarely talked about. That is the case described below.
- The fear of being trapped rather than of driving. What separates the two is not the setting but the content of the fear: the danger of the road on one side, the fear of the attack itself on the other. And the question really arises when the fear spreads to other situations where you feel trapped: public transport, queues, enclosed places. The approach is then not the same, and this is worth identifying early. See Hypnosis for Stress and Anxiety.
- The aftermath of an accident. Flashbacks, intrusive images, startle reactions, avoidance: those signs are ones a psychologist will know how to place, and it is not for us to do so. What can be said is that avoidance after an accident is the rule rather than the exception, a 2025 review finding that a quarter of people involved in a crash avoid vehicles altogether for several months. The recognised approaches to post-traumatic stress are specific and well documented, and hypnosis does not replace them.
- Lack of practice. Not every apprehension at the wheel comes down to fear. Someone who has not driven for fifteen years, or who has never been on a motorway, may above all lack experience. A few hours with an instructor will settle it quickly.
This page is the satellite of our general page on fears and phobias: it keeps the driving context, the fear of being a passenger and the question of fitness to drive.
See a doctor if your fear comes with real and repeated physical sensations: dizziness, faintness, vision problems, drowsiness, palpitations. These deserve to be assessed, all the more so because they can themselves affect driving.
Mention the medications you take as well: some affect alertness, and that assessment belongs exclusively to the doctor who prescribed them.
And a proportionate fear is not a phobia. If you dread driving because your eyesight has declined, because you are fighting sleep at the wheel or because a medication makes you drowsy, your fear is an accurate signal. Working on it as a phobia would amount to disconnecting an alarm that is doing its job. That is exactly why we start by ruling out medical causes.
The impact of the Fear of Driving on daily life
What costs the most, in this fear, is the gradual narrowing. The territory shrinks: first the motorway, then driving at night, then unfamiliar journeys, then anything beyond the neighbourhood. Each avoidance brings relief in the moment and makes the next one more likely, which is the central mechanism of phobias. The good news is that it works in both directions, and everything else on this page rests on that reversibility.
Work is affected, when a role involves travel, when an opportunity is turned down, or when you have to invent a reason not to take the company car.
Family logistics rest on other people, with the dependence and the guilt that come with it. In rural areas or in the suburbs, with no public transport, the effect on independence is considerable.
Social life narrows: the invitation that is too far away, the weekend declined, the holiday organised around the journey.
And there is the shame, very present on this subject. People do not talk about it, because they assume nobody will understand, and because holding a licence makes it hard to explain.
And there is what is talked about even less: self-medication. A drink before setting off, a tablet taken for the road, a little cannabis to take the edge off. It is understandable and it is the worst of arrangements, because it adds to the wheel the one factor that genuinely increases the risk. If that is where you are, tell a doctor: it is a situation that can be looked after, and looked after better than the fear itself.
The recognised approaches outside Hypnosis
The point of entry is your doctor if physical sensations are involved, or if the anxiety reaches well beyond the wheel.
- Graded exposure therapy, usually within cognitive and behavioural therapy. It is the reference approach for specific phobias, and its principle is simple: to approach the feared situation gradually, in steps chosen with you, until the reaction subsides.
- A driving instructor, particularly those who offer refresher lessons for anxious drivers. It is the most concrete resource, and the most underused. An honest qualification: these courses improve driving performance and the sense of competence, but no systematic review shows that they reduce the number of crashes, so they excuse nobody from caution.
- Driving simulators, available at some schools. They allow you to work on the motorway, the bridge, night driving or ice without putting anyone at risk, including when you have no car.
- Specialist psychological support, essential if the fear follows an accident.
- Support for panic disorder, when the fear is about the attack rather than about driving.
- Medical advice on current medication, when alertness is in question.
Hypnosis places itself alongside these approaches, particularly in preparing and supporting real-life exposure.
Video available in French
Video transcript
Bonjour, je m'appelle Patricia, je suis hypnothérapeute et aujourd'hui je voulais évoquer avec vous les potentielles craintes à monter dans un véhicule. En effet, vous avez peut être une expérience choquante, voire un accident ou peut être avez vous vu des vidéos qui vous ont troublé, voire bloqué et qui vous empêchent aujourd'hui de monter dans un véhicule en toute sérénité. Cela engendre peut être chez vous la perte de contrôle, peut être une claustrophobie, une anxiété, un manque de confiance, la peur de la vitesse ou tout simplement la peur de ne pas contrôler le véhicule.
Sachez qu'avec les outils de programmation neurolinguistique ou d'hypnose, il est complètement possible de se libérer de ces craintes, de ces peurs. Et aussi, cela peut vous permettre d'oser en parler avec le conducteur. Oser parler de vos craintes, oser parler de vos inquiétudes et puis surtout vous en libérer totalement de sorte à vivre des trajets en toute sérénité et en toute confiance. Si vous le souhaitez, je suis donc hypnothérapeute à Saint Gilles dans le Gard et à Montpellier.
Je consulte avec le collectif Solutions Hypnose et je me ferai un vrai plaisir de vous accompagner dans un mieux être, dans un mieux être pour faire de vos trajets des trajets agréables et sereins. A très bientôt. Au revoir.
Hypnotherapy is a complementary form of support and does not replace medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns about your health, please consult a physician first.
Hypnosis for the Fear of Driving: aims and benefits
Let us start with what hypnosis does not do.
It does not teach you to drive and replaces no hours at the wheel. It does not look after post-traumatic stress. And it is no substitute for medical advice where physical symptoms are involved.
What an accompaniment aims at
- Preparing the exposure and making it possible. This is the most useful contribution: going through the coming steps in imagination, in detail and repeatedly, so that the first time in real life is not quite the first time.
- Reducing anticipation, which is often worse than the journey itself and which eats up the whole evening before.
- Setting up a resource you can call on, an anchor usable while stationary before setting off, or in a motorway services.
- Working on the physical sensations and on the fear of panic, when that is what feeds the loop.
- Setting down a difficult memory connected with the road, where one exists and where it does not call for specialist support.
- Restoring confidence, including the confidence worn down by years of avoiding. See Hypnosis for Confidence and Self-Esteem.
If panic rises while you are driving, the priority is no longer the fear, it is safety.
Ease off the accelerator gradually, without braking sharply, and hold your lane: a sudden movement is more dangerous than the sensation you are feeling.
Put your hazard lights on, take the first exit or the first services, and stop there. On a motorway, the hard shoulder is a last resort, not a convenience.
Wait until it subsides before setting off again, and do not hesitate to call someone. A panic attack always passes, even when it feels like the opposite.
Why you will still have to get back behind the wheel
A phobia is kept alive by avoidance. Each time you give up on a journey, the immediate relief confirms to the alarm system that it was right to go off. Conversely, each time you go through the situation and the expected catastrophe does not happen, your brain records a second piece of information that competes with the first.
The old association is not erased for all that, and this is worth knowing: it is why the fear can come back after a long break. It simply stops being the only information available. An apprehension that returns after six months without driving is therefore not a failure, it is how memory normally works.
As long as the situation stays avoided, the fear has few chances to be proved wrong. That is why a gradual return to driving is part of the aim, and serves to measure the result. The preparatory work, for its part, can perfectly well be done in imagination or on a simulator.
In other words, the aim of a session is never "to stop being afraid". It is: what is the next step, and what would let you take it this week.
What the research says
On specific phobias, graded exposure is the reference treatment. The Canadian clinical practice guidelines on anxiety disorders, published in 2014, describe it as the treatment of choice and as the foundation of care, and they name driving phobia among the situational phobias. One qualification few pages make: real-life exposure does better than exposure in imagination or in virtual reality immediately after the work, but that gap is no longer found at follow-up assessments. This is what makes the simulator defensible as an intermediate step.
On hypnosis, we need to be precise. No controlled trial bears on the fear of driving: as of 20 September 2026, the ClinicalTrials.gov registry lists no study registered on this subject, and the only indexed publication crossing hypnosis with driving phobia is a single case report, published in 2013, covering one person. A detail that matters: in that case, hypnosis accompanied fourteen real driving sessions.
What is documented lies elsewhere. On anxiety in general, a meta-analysis published in 2019 in the *International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis*, covering fifteen studies and seventeen trials, reports a greater reduction among people supported with hypnosis than in control groups. The most interesting point for you is this: the authors find better results when hypnosis accompanies other interventions than when it is used on its own. Two qualifications to keep in mind: this is anxiety in general and not phobias, and only seven of the seventeen trials include follow-up.
That is precisely the place we claim on this subject: support for the exposure, not an alternative to it.
An example of accompaniment
*An illustrative example. The name is changed and the path described belongs only to the person who lived it.*
Monique came about her fear of driving. The first conversation brought out something else: driving herself made her anxious, but what she could no longer bear was being a passenger, and in particular being driven by her husband, as she had been for decades. On every journey she closed her eyes, tensed every muscle, and arrived exhausted. She had never dared ask him to slow down or leave more room, for fear of offending him, and he thought he was doing her a kindness by taking the wheel for her.
The work therefore bore on two things. On the sensations in the car, with an exercise to use before getting in. And on how to put a request to her husband, which had nothing to do with driving and a great deal to do with forty years of habit. That second strand meets what our page on Hypnosis for Assertiveness at Work describes.
> "I told him in the end. He had never noticed a thing, and he thought it was perfectly reasonable. I could have said it twenty years ago." > Monique, name changed
She still drives little, and describes journeys as a passenger that are markedly less punishing. Every situation is different, and Monique's path says nothing about what you will experience.
How a Hypnosis session on this subject unfolds
The conversation. What exactly sets the fear off, in which situations, since when, and what you avoid today. We will also want to know whether there has been an accident, whether physical symptoms are involved, and whether you drive enough for the question to be one of fear rather than of practice. Depending on the answers, we will point you towards a doctor, a psychologist or an instructor before starting.
The aim. Framed together, as concrete steps rather than a state to reach. For example: driving from home to the supermarket on your own on Saturday, or taking the motorway for one junction.
The induction. A natural state of focused attention you already know without naming it. You stay conscious, you hear everything, you can speak and you can stop whenever you wish.
The work. On this subject it consists mainly of going through the next step mentally, in detail and at your pace, until it becomes familiar. To that are added an anchor usable before setting off, work on the physical sensations, and sometimes the revisiting of a road memory that has stayed in the way.
The return and the exercise. A conversation about what you experienced, a self-hypnosis exercise to take away, and above all a step to take before the next session. It is that step that does the work; the session prepares it.
Several practitioners in the network are also trained in NLP, some of whose tools work well on this kind of fear. The number of sessions is settled at the first conversation.
Book an appointment
The first conversation serves to work out whether hypnosis is the right resource for your situation, and sometimes it is not the right one yet: if you have not driven for fifteen years, a few hours with an instructor will do more than any session, and we will tell you so. If physical symptoms are involved, it is a doctor you need to see first. And if your fear goes back to an accident, a psychologist trained in those approaches comes before us.
In person, our practitioners see English-speaking clients in Quebec, in Montreal, Sherbrooke and Gatineau, and in France in Paris and Lille. By video, wherever you are in the world: on this subject the work rests largely on an exercise to repeat at home and on a step to take between two appointments, which is supported just as well at a distance. Here is how it works.
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Frequently asked questions about Hypnosis for the Fear of Driving (Amaxophobia)
Yes, and that is the part that counts. As long as the situation stays avoided, the fear has few chances to be proved wrong. Hypnosis serves to prepare the steps and make them workable, not to spare you them. You do choose the pace and the size of the steps, and the preparatory work can be done in imagination or on a simulator.
Not every apprehension at the wheel comes down to fear. Driving is a skill that needs keeping up, and fifteen years without practice explains a great deal of the apprehension. Start with a few hours with an instructor: that will settle it quickly. If the fear persists despite the practice, hypnosis then makes sense.
No, never, and this matters. Hypnosis and relaxation recordings are made to draw attention away from the outside world, which is exactly what you do not want at the wheel. In France, wearing any sound-emitting device in the ear is in any case forbidden to drivers under article R412-6-1 of the highway code. These exercises are listened to at home, or stationary with the engine off. The same goes if you are a passenger and will be taking the wheel afterwards.
No, and the confusion is common because the phrase highway hypnosis is widespread. That phenomenon is driving becoming automatic on a long monotonous journey, with alertness dropping. It belongs to driver fatigue and it is countered by taking breaks. It has nothing to do with the state of focused attention of a session, which is practised sitting down, in safety, and never while driving.
No. The hypnotic state is a state of focused attention, not sleep and not being placed under someone's influence. You stay conscious, you hear everything, and you keep the ability to refuse a suggestion, to speak or to stop the session.
Hypnosis as we practise it is a non-medicinal accompaniment that sits alongside your medical care without interfering with it: simply tell us what you are taking. The effect of a medication on alertness and on fitness to drive, however, is a strictly medical question. In France, the medicines concerned carry a three-level pictogram on the box, the highest of which reads "Warning, danger: do not drive". Any decision about your treatment belongs exclusively to the doctor who prescribed it.
Psychotherapy is a regulated framework, practised by professionals whose title is protected, and it can cover the whole of psychological functioning and established disorders. For a specific phobia, exposure therapy delivered by a psychologist is the reference approach. Hypnosis is a more circumscribed accompaniment, and it combines well with it.
Only partly. After an accident, some people are left with intrusive images, startle reactions and nightmares, and avoid anything that recalls the event. Classifications group these under the name post-traumatic stress disorder, and there are documented approaches for it. If you recognise yourself in that description, it is a doctor or a psychologist who can establish it, and they are who you should see first. Hypnosis can come afterwards, alongside their work.
That distinction changes the path. What separates the two is not the setting but the content of the fear: the danger of the road on one side, the fear of the attack itself on the other. And the question really arises when the fear spreads to other situations where you feel trapped, such as public transport, queues or enclosed places. Say so at the first conversation: the work will not be the same, and medical or psychological advice is often indicated.
This is common and it often improves with supervised practice. Our page Hypnosis and Coaching for Teens and Young Adults describes what we can offer younger people.
The number of sessions is settled at the first conversation. On this subject it depends above all on the pace at which you take the steps between appointments, more than on the number of appointments.
Sources and references
Specific phobias and their management
- Canadian clinical practice guidelines for the management of anxiety, posttraumatic stress and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Katzman, M. A. et al. (2014). BMC Psychiatry, 14(Suppl 1), S1. The Canadian guidelines, freely available. They set exposure as the treatment of choice, name driving phobia among the situational phobias, and document the removal of the "excessive or unreasonable" criterion.
- Specific phobia. Gouvernement du Québec: "Anxiety disorder experts generally recommend cognitive behavioural therapy."
- Maximizing exposure therapy: an inhibitory learning approach. Craske, M. G. et al. (2014). Behaviour Research and Therapy, 58, 10-23. The text that established that the learned association is not erased, but joined by a competing one.
After an accident
- Post-traumatic stress disorder. NICE, guideline NG116, published in 2018 and reviewed in 2026.
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Resulting from Road Traffic Accidents: A Systematic Literature Review. Trajchevska, M., & Jones, C. M. (2025). International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 22(7), 985: "25% of survivors avoiding vehicle use for up to four months".
Driving, health and medication
- Code de la sécurité routière, RLRQ c. C-24.2. Section 95: the licence holder must inform the SAAQ of any change within thirty days. In French.
- Order of 8 August 2008 on the pictogram displayed on the packaging of certain medicines. The three levels and their exact wording, in French.
- Article R412-6-1 of the French highway code. Prohibition on wearing any sound-emitting device in the ear while driving, in French.
On hypnosis
- The Efficacy of Hypnosis as a Treatment for Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis. Valentine, K. E., Milling, L. S., Clark, L. J., & Moriarty, C. L. (2019). International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 67(3), 336-363. Fifteen studies, seventeen trials.
And the neighbouring articles
- If the fear is about the attack rather than about driving, see Hypnosis for Stress and Anxiety.
- If it is your teenager who has just passed their test, see Hypnosis and Coaching for Teens.
Hypnosis as practised by the members of Solutions Hypnose is a complementary support approach. It is neither a medical act, nor a diagnosis, nor psychotherapy in the regulatory sense, and it in no way replaces a consultation, follow-up or treatment prescribed by a health professional.
Our practitioners do not assess and do not treat mental disorders or illnesses. They never ask for an ongoing treatment to be stopped or changed: that decision rests exclusively with your doctor.
No result can be guaranteed. The testimonials and examples presented on this page describe individual experiences and do not predict what you will experience.
In case of significant distress, unexplained physical symptoms or suicidal thoughts, contact a doctor, emergency services or a helpline without delay.
Page written by Patricia Jouannet
hypnotherapist and NLP coach
partner at Solutions Hypnose.
English version reviewed by David Veilleux