Listen to the interview here: 

According to Dr Randall, mindfulness in general implies being fully present in the here-and-now, noticing what your senses are telling you about your body and things around you.

“What do you see, smell, hear, or feel? For instance, how fast are you breathing; what emotions are you experiencing?”

She explains mindfulness techniques can be very helpful for calming emotions and managing stress, and can also heighten awareness of the action of driving and of the road conditions and surrounding road users and objects.

“The familiar ‘trick’ of counting how many lampposts you pass after the car in front has passed them, or trying to estimate how many car lengths back you are from that car, are mindfulness tactics which also help people be conscious of safety and avoiding crash risks.”

Dr Randall, however, warns that the kinds of mindfulness techniques NOT to practice whilst driving are obviously those which cause you to close your eyes or focus your attention on something else – visualisation and relaxation techniques may involve these sorts of things.

She further explains that ‘autopilot’ mode involves being able to do tasks without consciously thinking about them, and experienced drivers actually spend quite a lot of time in this mode.

“If you think back to your very first few driving lessons, nothing was on autopilot and everything involved intense concentration and effort to bring together all the splinter skills which go into operating a motor vehicle.”

Dr Randall stresses that for experienced drivers on very familiar routes, the autopilot may be activated so much of the time that they have few conscious memories of the trip afterwards, and that is not necessarily good from a road safety perspective.

“Your system is under-challenged or under-stimulated and that can make you less responsive than you really need to be, given how unexpected things can happen even on familiar journeys – like a tyre blowout, a child or animal running into the road, someone stopping suddenly in front of you.”

She suggests that should you find your mental attention drifting, or you realise you’re getting caught up in daydreaming, to bring yourself back to the here-and-now – to switch your mental abilities fully back on – you can do some narrative driving where you tell yourself the story of what you’re doing, what you’re noticing around you, what judgements you’re making about safety issues. 

“Speaking aloud can be very helpful, or you can talk quietly in your head. If you have passengers – especially child passengers – let them know what you’re doing and why and it will instil in them a sense of how important it is to stay really conscious when operating a vehicle.”

Dr Randall further notes that your autopilot mode driving is only as good as your actual driving skills, attitudes and insights allow it to be.

“If you have bad driving habits like harsh cornering, braking or accelerating, or tend to keep too close a following distance from the car in front, you’ll engage in those when in autopilot and be blissfully unaware of them, whereas when you drive with more conscious attention you may at least notice the consequences of your bad habits a bit more.”

She also suggests that to check if you’re zoning out to a dangerous extent, periodically ask yourself what colour vehicles are nearby, what landmarks you just passed, what lies 12 seconds ahead of you on the road, what the prevailing speed of the traffic seems to be, and so on.

“If you realise you haven’t been paying attention and aren’t aware of these things, bring in some narrative driving for a while to re-engage your mental driving gear.”

Dr Randall concludes by saying that spending time on the roads is probably the most dangerous activity most of us do on a regular basis, but humans tend to underestimate risks when it comes to highly familiar tasks and situations and overestimate risks associated with things we do much less often.

“So, while you and I are much more likely to die in a road crash than in a plane crash, we may be much more afraid of a plane crash and follow a bunch of precautions – or be pleased that the airline we chose follows strict safety procedures – whereas we are much more laid-back and casual when it comes to road safety.”

She quotes Swedish philosopher, Elvebakk, who speaks about how we need to be ‘highly constructed human beings’ to enter the road traffic system safely, especially if we’re going to be operating big, heavy, dangerous vehicles which could hit and injure or kill other road users.

“That means that not only do we need to be properly trained to understand crash risks, we also need to be alert and awake to those risks when we encounter them.”

Tune in to OFM, at 13:45 on Mondays to hear about road safety with Dr Randall.

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