How to Deal with Road Rage
When you’re behind the wheel, you can sometimes find it difficult to keep your cool, especially when you’re stuck in traffic and you need to be somewhere in 15 minutes. The fact is, traffic is just the least of our worries. What we need to keep tabs on is our tendency to explode when things aren’t going the way we plan them.
Road rage can be a problem, especially for a lot of people who are always on the brink of exploding. This could mean making things more complicated than they already are.
Road rage puts us at a big disadvantage. When we let our emotions dictate the way we deal with certain situations on the road, we could put ourselves at risk of a lawsuit or, worse, a violent confrontation which could invite even more lawsuits.
Here are a few things you need to do to keep you from getting overwhelmed by road rage.
Listen to soothing music
If you’re used to listening to AC/DC and Metallica during long commutes, you might be doing more to let all that rage well up inside you. You need to dissipate these feelings and to do that you need to listen to music that’s soothing for both the mind and the soul. In fact, according to a scientific study published in the journal Ergonomics, calmness during long commutes is best achieved when drivers suddenly switch the type of music they listen to. So, when you’re listening to heavy metal for a good 30 minutes, you might want to change the genre to classical for the next hour.
Count to 10
This may seem like an all too familiar coping mechanism for many people with anger management issues, but it’s still an effective way to keep you from detonating. Counting to 10 takes your mind off of the situation you’re in. It distracts you from stimuli that are stressing you out. If you can, counting to 100 would be a better way to make sure you get rid of all that anger from your system. Another way to keep your anger in check is to pick a car freshener that’s relaxing to the senses and simply take deep breaths.
Let your lawyer do the talking
Whether you were injured or your car was totaled or both, you still have to keep yourself from raging and challenging the other driver to a fistfight. Violence never resolves anything, so you might as well rely on a good lawyer to fight on your behalf. For this, it helps if you are able to talk with your attorney and ask the best possible course of action to take. You might also want to talk to your current insurance provider and process your claims there. But in case your insurance company has declined to cover your losses, there’s no use getting angry about it. Simply look for another provider such as Allstate Car Insurance which specializes in giving you the best possible product for your vehicle.
There’s a lot of other ways you can deal with road rage. You just need to realize that there’s always a better way to cope with heavy traffic other than screaming and going on a fighting spree.
This is a collaborative article.
The News Wheel is a digital auto magazine providing readers with a fresh perspective on the latest car news. We’re located in the heart of America (Dayton, Ohio) and our goal is to deliver an entertaining and informative perspective on what’s trending in the automotive world. See more articles from The News Wheel.