Learning to Drive - 10 + Hours

Today was my twelfth hour of learning to drive and I finally feel like I'm starting to get it! 

My first five hours were very slow, I was terrified and I honestly felt like I wasn't in control. I'm a very anxious person, which is why I put off learning for so long, so I'd be driving down the road and see a bird or a parked car and panic. I was very fortunate for my first five hours to have a job that had a changing shift pattern, so it allowed me to have a driving lesson at 10:30am on a Thursday, when the roads were nice and calm and eased me into it. While I never felt in control, there wouldn't be a huge deal of hazards, so I'd only panic once or twice a lesson.

I did then go onto get a new job, which was very lovely, but it then meant that I would have to have my lessons at 3:30pm, it's a lot busier at this time. This caused problems for me, I'd be in my lesson as everyone was starting to finish work, the roads would be so much busier than I was used to and that's when I started having big problems. 

Stopping was a huge issue for me, if I needed to stop because of traffic, give way lines or someone walking out in front of me, I'd slam the breaks on. This wasn't something I'd do intentionally, I'd try to stop properly, but panic would step in and I'd be very heavy footed. Then as I started to work on these problems, I'd put so much effort into gentle braking, but I'd be too gentle and then I'd feel like I was running out of time and...slam the brakes on! My instructor is very lovely though, and took me to a very quiet long straight road, where I just stopped and started over and over again. I actually gained so much from this, I got a better feel of how long it takes the car to stop and how much pressure I actually need to apply, I think if I hadn't spent the time doing this I'd still struggle with this now.

Starting in traffic... this was an even bigger problem for me, the fear and panic I went through was horrible, and my anxieties about this made me get worse and worse each lesson. I actually got very close to giving up learning to drive after a bad lesson got worse when I stalled five times at a roundabout, I had no idea what to do to resolve these problems, I honestly never thought I'd get better. I'd prepaid for 10 lessons so was going to at least continue until they had been used up, so to try and make the most of these lessons I did everything I could to try and get better, I watched videos of people driving, I read tips on the internet and then finally started to read about how a car works and wrote out the processes you go through to do different things. 

Things then started to get easier, understanding the car was the first thing I needed to know to improve, I knew I needed to fully press the clutch to change gear, but never knew why so it never really stuck. I often found myself when I'd pulled over, just taking my foot off the clutch without taking the car out of gear, then I'd be frustrated because I'd made such a small mistake.

I'm still not brilliant or any kind of expert, but I do finally feel like I'm progressing and getting somewhere so thought I would share these tips!

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