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Using Mindfulness to End Road Rage
A pleasant commute to work isn’t impossible.
How many times have you been on your commute to work, half asleep, when some asshole suddenly veers into your lane, cutting you off?
What’s your response? Do you hold down your horn for a full 60 seconds? Do you flip the driver the bird, while yelling all the 4-letter expletives that come to mind?
Whatever you do, the whole situation sucks. There’s no denying it. Sure, self-righteous anger can make you feel powerful and superior to others for a time, but if we could live in a world where road rage wasn’t a thing, I don’t think many of us would complain.
But, wait, you say, road rage isn’t my fault. It’s caused by other people — by shitty drivers. There’s nothing I can do about those people. There will always be shitty drivers. Therefore, there’s nothing I can do about my road rage!
If your mood is solely determined by what’s going on around you, then yeah, you’re going to be unhappy. A lot.
The thing is, whether you see the world this way or not is a choice.
What mindfulness teaches us is how we typically react to any situation is conditioned. What this means is that we’ve trained ourselves, or been trained by others, to react angrily to drivers when we perceive them as impeding us…
