“Mindful living is an art. You do not have to be a monk or living in a monastery to practice mindfulness. You can practice it anytime, while driving your car or doing housework. Driving in mindfulness will make the time in your car joyful, and it will also help you avoid accidents. You can use the red traffic light as a signal of mindfulness, reminding you to stop and enjoy your breathing.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh
Driving a car is the most dangerous thing that most people do. That danger is increased many fold if the individual is not paying attention or is distracted. Over 3,000 deaths and 400,000 injuries per year have been attributed to distracted driving. There are no lack of ways to distract yourself while driving including texting, using a cell phone, eating and drinking, talking to passengers, grooming, reading, including maps, using a navigation system, watching a video, and adjusting a radio, cd player, or mp3 player. Any and all of which could prove fatal.
Mindfulness is the antidote to distracted driving. Mindfulness is being aware in the present moment of everything that is going on around you. This is exactly what you should be doing while driving. Unfortunately there is very little research on the topic. It is known that mindfulness predicts less texting while driving. But, much more research is needed to investigate if mindfulness could be used as a preventative measure against distracted driving.
In today’s Research News article “Assessing dangerous driving behavior during driving inattention: Psychometric adaptation and validation of the Attention-Related Driving Errors Scale in China”
Qu and colleagues investigate, among other things, the relationship of mindfulness with driving. They found that high mindfulness predicted low attention-related driving errors, cognitive errors, dangerous driving, emotional driving, aggressive driving, risky driving, and even drunk driving. In other words mindfulness was found to be predictive of good safe driving habits.
Mindfulness training strengthens attention, which is obviously critical to safe driving. It also increases emotion regulation, making the driver less susceptible to reacting in a dangerous or inappropriate way to the emotions that often accompany driving. Finally, mindfulness decreases stress, making the driver better able to think clearly during difficult driving situations.
So, practice mindfulness and be a better safer driver.
“Texting while driving increases the risk of accident 23.2 times over unimpaired driving.” ~Virginia Tech Transportation Institute
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies