Major anxiety after very negative driving experience
So I passed my test last month and recently got my first car. I have been taking it out for short drives on my own to build confidence, and today I decided to go on one that involved more time on dual carriageways. The drive was going really well, I reached the point that I had decided I would turn around and head back home.
I pulled up in the left lane at a large junction on an A road at a red light and waited until the light turned green. I drove off from the junction, and as I did so I thought I saw a flash of amber light out of the corner of my eye which obviously confused me. As I approached the light that I had followed the green from, I realised that it was slotted - I couldn't see this from the stop line as it was dark and therefore just looked like a normal green light to me when it changed.
Essentially, I am fairly sure I ran a red light by about 2 seconds. The car behind me appeared to follow me through pretty much straight afterwards, and the car to my right seemed to pull away about a second after me (although if I am right about the situation I think they went through on red + amber.)
I feel absolutely awful about this and it has really thrown me off as I could have potentially endangered someone as a result of this if things had happened differently and I didn't even know I'd done it until I'd gone across basically the entire junction. It made me so anxious to even think that it could possibly have happened.
To top it all off, while I was desperately trying to allay my worries by tracing my entire route in Streetview to find the junction and check if the lights were slotted or not, I have discovered that this junction is monitored by what I am almost certain is a red light camera.
This has tipped me completely over the edge with anxiety, which is entirely new to me as I am generally not an anxious person. I hope nothing like this ever happens to me again as long as I drive and the next two weeks are going to be hell. I feel so stupid and don't know what to do if I get points on my licence so early in my driving journey.
I've been looking at all this stuff for 3 hours now and I feel like my chest is going to explode.
I'll try and take the lessons from this and move on, but damn what a harsh introduction to the roads.
Does anyone have any tips for what I can do to calm myself down or ever experienced a similar situation?