My wife, Rena, doesn’t drive, so she gets to ride with a lot of different drivers. She mentions from time to time that her experience of them driving is very different. Often the experience is very stressful. She says that when she rides with me, it’s often much more peaceful. I want to share some tips on stress free driving.
Before I launch into my tips and suggestions, I want to highlight that this isn’t just about driving. This is about relationships in general. I’ve not studied it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there is a strong correlation between the way people drive and the types of struggles they have in their relationships.
So, let me highlight the typical experience a lot of us have driving. We head out to our destination at exactly the minute we need to leave to arrive on-time. We are a little stressed because if any part of our drive isn’t smooth, we’ll be late. We stop at the next light and discover that there is a pedestrian in the crosswalk. Grr! It takes longer for the light to turn green when the crosswalk light is used. Then we finally get to go and someone cuts us off trying to get into the left turn lane. We lay on our horn, and yell, “Idiot!” Finally, after driving smoothly on the freeway for a bit, we exit and stop at the next light. It turns green, but it takes a few minutes for the cars to start moving, so we’re yelling, “Let’s go, people!” Finally we arrive at our destination, about to pop a vein and we’re pretty wound up. Of course, if there’s an accident or heavy traffic, the experience is much worse.
Can you relate to any of that description?
Let me tell you, though, that while it’s that way sometimes for me, this isn’t my typical experience. “How?” you may ask, “Are you driving on different roads? Your town must be different.” Not so. I travel a lot. I’m driving in many different cities. Usually in an unfamiliar location, in an unfamiliar rental car. My drive should be even more stressful than yours. But it’s not. And here’s how:
1. Choose your experience
The first thing to understand is that your driving experiences are not something that is happening to you. Sure, events are taking place, but you create your own experience of those events. Tomorrow, the same events can take place on your commute to work, and you can chose to experience them differently. It really is as simple as that. However, it may not be easy.
One simple technique is to shift how we interpret other’s behavior from, “they did that to me, on purpose,” to “they did that by accident and were probably not even aware I was there.” It also helps to stop attributing the person’s action to their character. Just because they cut you off one time, doesn’t mean that they are an idiot or even necessarily a bad driver. Instead you can see it as they made a poor choice in that moment.
2. Treat people as people
The opposite of treating people as people is to treat them as objects. When we’re in traffic, we usually don’t think of the people in the other cars. We just see cars in our way. So, treating people as objects is often even more pronounced when we drive. But this still happens even when we’re not driving.
When you’re getting on or off an airplane, do you think about the other passengers as having hopes and dreams, and stresses just like you, or do you see them as in the way to your seat or in the way of you making your connecting flight?
This tip is to see other drivers as real people who are also trying to get to their destination on time. If they make poor choices, it’s often because they too are running barely on time or a tad late and are trying avoid more delays.
3. Forgive readily
A hard truth is that the behaviors of other drivers that really piss you off are probably behaviors that you also do. The things in others that irk us the most, are often things that we see in ourself. In truth, we are pissed off at ourselves, but it’s easier to blame that same behavior in others.
To experience stress free driving, we need to forgive other drivers’ behavior because:
- it releases anger in us
- we really are forgiving ourself
4. Expect Trouble
It’s a bit strange, but in driving and in life, we seem to expect everything to be smooth sailing. And by this I mean that we leave no margin for when things don’t go smoothly. We leave the house at the last minute. There’s absolutely no room for any interruptions at all.
If there’s a long light, an accident, extra traffic, or a flat tire, we’re screwed. In addition, we don’t have any margin for things that we want to do. For example, we see someone else with a flat tire and we’d like to help, but work starts in 2 min 35 seconds, and our GPS says we have 2 minutes 20 seconds left to drive.
This tip is to leave room for the unexpected. It really wouldn’t hurt if you left early and arrived 10-15 min early at your destination. This would give you room for the unexpected and leave margin for you to provide a helping hand from time to time. And it would really relieve a lot of driving stress.
Finally I want to say that these tips apply equally to relationships. This isn’t about driving. It’s about how we relate to people. Driving is just one example of how we are relating and interacting with people. So, now you can go back and look at the tips to see how they apply to other relationships as well.
