Zen And The Art Of Road Rage - by James Moore

Early in my career I was promoted into a role with a company car. Having seldom driven since passing my test, I was incredibly excited to have a car and the associated freedom of mobility. That was until the first time that a driver cut in front of me without warning. I had a sudden sense of shock and fear for what might have happened. I remember the rush of energy surging through my body, my heart pounding in my head and a tremendous sense of relief as I screamed and shook my fist. Expressing my anger certainly released some of the adrenaline rush I was experiencing and this was much better than trying to bottle it up. Right? Well yes, but… as my job then involved ridiculous amounts of driving I was experiencing these types of incident two or three times a day. In a short space of time I was getting really good at generating adrenaline and even better at being angry. I realised I wasn’t enjoying the driving any more and also that there was a serious risk to continuing with my behaviour. 

 

I decided to review my options.  They were:

 

a)       Get another job without the driving

b)       Keep doing what I was doing now

c)       React in a way that was better for me

 

I loved my job so option a) the passive response was a non-starter. And I wanted to have a long career. I did some rough sums and calculated that if I kept responding the way I had been, I’d be doing road rage 600 or more times a year. I didn’t need to check the medical stats to realise that the toll this would have on my health was conflicting with my desires for good health and a long career. So option b) the aggressive response was out too. I didn’t yet know specifically what option c) would be but I knew that the assertive choice was my best shot.

 

Playing around with option c) I became more aware of what I was doing, even as I was doing it in the midst of an incident. As my self-awareness increased I realised that the venting of my frustration was a symptom of the problem but it wasn’t the cause. I had got really good at painting the “what if” scenarios in my mind, creating hyper-real images of colourful, tangled wreckage wrapped around me. But the body does not know the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one. My body had been responding to the films I was playing in my head, all the alternative realities I had created, rather than the reality in front of me.

 

The fact is that none of my worst-case scenarios had occurred. I was okay and hadn’t been physically hurt. Better still, my reflex actions in braking and other evasive action had been really good but I’d been too busy being angry to notice. I decided it was time to start creating some different images and to tell myself better stories. I came up with a simple reaction plan. When I had experienced a near miss in future, I would:

 

1.       Congratulate myself on my responses

2.       Tell myself “I’m OK”

3.       Picture myself arriving at my destination, energised and unruffled.

 

I got mixed results on my first day. There were three incidents of which one I let go and the other two resulted in a fright response – one ending in a hand gesture! So I added another point to the plan:

4.  If I don’t always get it right – I’ll keep practising till I do.

 

The great thing about driving around London in the late eighties was that it offered lots of opportunity to practise! It took about a month of conscious effort and probably around 50 incidents before I started to get good at “letting go”. It then took a couple more months to get to the point that it wasn’t even a conscious response. In the next twenty years I managed to drive over half a million miles, the equivalent of going to the moon and back - and whilst I don’t claim to be perfect, I can only remember a handful of incidents where I didn’t make my preferred choice.

 

By focussing on what you can control in a situation rather that what you can’t, your options begin to open up…