The other day I found myself getting incredibly angry whilst driving my car when a learner driver wouldn’t move.  Then I realised – the driver was waiting for someone to cross the road.  ‘What is up with me?’ I thought.  Then it hit me: I was in survivor mode.  My fight or flight response had kicked in – fight in this case – and my stressed state was negatively impacting on my driving.  This realisation made me upset (and a bit remorseful), and interested to think a bit more about what we can do about driver stress, because as parents and carers we’ll be probably carrying stress with us while we’re driving.  When I dug a bit deeper I found that driver stress is caused by an interaction between the traffic and other factors outside the driving (Guilan et al, 1990).  There’s also a lot of evidence on the negative impact of driver stress, specifically, more likelihood to have accidents (Young-Chung et al, 2019).

Conditions that add to driver stress:

• Traffic conditions
• Work stress
• Lack of sleep (Guilan et al, 1990)
• Time of day: drivers typically experience more stress in the evening, and in mid-week (Guilan et al, 1990)
• Long working days (Corcoba Magaña et al, 2021)
• Young Chung et al (2019) use the term ‘mental workload’ and suggest when we’re doing a lot of mental processing this can impact on our driving. If we go by the definition that stress is overtaxing our resources (see my blog on navigating stress) I would like to suggest the following could add to our stress:
  • Travelling with (argumentative) siblings in the car: noise and disturbance can be a key stressor while driving
  • The School run. Here I mean not just the increased volume of traffic or people’s crazy manuoeuvres in order to drop their kids off at school.  I mean kids’ anxiety before school (right down anticipating the noise and chaos of everyone flooding into school) as well as processing the stresses of the day after school.  Where kids are anxious they might want to know how long the journey will take and get agitated when traffic delays knock off the timings. (I think we can reasonably manage some expectations here, but we also accept that a lot of this is out of our control – I’ve taken to trying to leave earlier to get a clearer route).
  • Personal stressors from caring (you need to be here, you’re running through your to do list in your head, then there’s this and that).

How we can mitigate driver stress:

• Plan ahead – can you avoid congested routes even if the alternative route takes longer? Can you have an alternative route in mind, just in case? Also there’s evidence that narrow windy roads increase our stress levels (Young-Chung et al, 2019)
• Avoid peering through windshields (apparently this can be another stressor – Mizell, 1997) have sunglasses, and make sure the windscreen’s clean!
• Plan journey before if you can (there’s some element of control in this).
• A route planner in car so that you know what’s going on (I don’t have in-built sat nav, so I use google maps and a phone holder)
• Plan for sibling spats: I bring headphones, tablets, or distractions to occupy kids in the car (If I can I’ll get snacks), I’ll make sure they’re sat away from each other. If I’m really organised I’ll try and leave stuff in the car in case I forget one day.
• Try to de-stress before you get into the car. This is tricky – I’m often running from one thing to the next – I’ll usually try to call someone for a chat to create a quick transition from ‘work’ to ‘driving’.
• Acceptance: there are some things that may be out of our control, other people may make mistakes (or be inconsiderate!) whilst driving, you might make mistakes.
• Try to ensure that your car is as comfortable as it can be: rolling down windows to enable ventilation, try to make it nice smelling, put on calming music (a caveat here – I let my children choose music for the car (in turns), and sometimes we just have to turn it off, and that is okay too!)

Whilst these things won’t eliminate stress altogether, they could make your journey less stressful.  If you would like some support to manage stress, Care For You Coaching supports parents and carers to support their families. If you’d like to talk, I’m here to listen, book a free (no obligation) initial consultation at: https://careforyoucoaching.co.uk/contact/, We will support you to support your loved ones.