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It was a cold and wet Monday morning between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I was driving home from yoga class. A white BMW SUV was in front of me driving about 25 in a 35 mph lane. I started to feel myself tense up and question his intelligence and sanity. I often question these things aloud while driving. But before I got that far, a psychology trick for dealing with bad driving occurred to me. This solution came from popular culture mass media sources.
When my son Jason was a little boy, he had Richard Scarry's book Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. You may have seen it as it's part of our shared pop culture. This book is filled with hundreds of fantastical images of animals driving cars made out of everything from logs to pencils to pickles.
The idea that hit me is that if I thought of every bad driver in front of me as a character from Richard Scarry, like a cartoon grizzly bear driving a log mobile, or a monkey driving a banana car, or a family of pigs driving a convertible bug that would turn my irritation into humor and acceptance. After all, how do you expect a monkey driving a banana car to act? This method also allows you to give irritating drivers wide berth, making it more likely that you will all arrive at your destination unharmed. It also gives new meaning to the term Scarry Driver.
I think we normally get into mindreading where we wonder what's wrong with this person or even feel disrespected by their carelessness. When you use your imagination, you take the stress off of your shoulders and distract yourself with something fun.
This isn't the only psychology trick that we can borrow from mass media's popular culture. If you are a Harry Potter fan, you can imagine that the person cutting in line in front of you is a Slytherin and that you're playing a Harry Potter video game where you avoid getting cursed. Another Harry Potter trick would be to use the "Riddikulus" spell, where you take something that you really fear and use your imagination to change it into something silly and non-threatening. That's really the basis of my Richard Scarry trick. If a driver is scary, think of Richard Scarry.
Finally, on a more serious note, I use meditation strategies, many of which I have learned from my favorite meditation app, 10% Happier, or from books and videos. In meditation, we learn to be the witness. The witness notices that we are responding to a holiday shopper or driver with anger or resentment. The witness can notice the emotion from a distance...a place of detachment. Meditation teaches us that emotions come and go, and we need not be swept away by them and make them seem stronger than we are.
We could all use a few strategies to deal with the extra stress the holidays bring. I hope that one of these psychology tips, inspired by our experiences with shared narratives and health practices, helps you feel a little more grounded this holiday season.
Namaste.
