How to Keep Your Cool
Mind map of how I use Silver (internal & mental) and Steel (external cost benefit) thinking to analyze every day things like driving.
Have you ever felt restless at the grocery store check out, nervous at the doctor’s waiting room, or gotten angry while rushing to your destination? Today’s hyperconnected world with instant deliveries and on-demand entertainment have given us superpowers, but have also turned us into impatient wrecks when things don’t go as expected.
What if I told you you can transform any wait into a calming meditative experience with just a few mental tricks?
Earlier this year, I took a two-week meditation course in Joshua Tree, California. On the way back, I decided to turn a 200-mile stretch along the 2-lane Interstate 5 highway into a meditation challenge to put what I learned to practice. I turned off the music and resolved to stick to only the fast lane at a constant 75mph, slowing only when the traffic ahead slowed.
This was going to be a test of patience, observation, and maintaining my calm because I knew I’d be constantly passed, not to mention aggressively cut off and tailgated, by drivers speeding at more than 80 mph.
Before I get into what happened in this experiment, let me describe how this type of meditation works. Vipassana is an ancient meditation practice that trains us to do two things.
First is to become aware of one’s bodily sensations and reactions, such as breathing, heart rate, and perspiration. This is also known as mindfulness.
Second is remain equanimous (i.e. calm or nonreactive) to such sensations, which allows us to calmly observe our emotions and bodily reactions during stressful and restless situations until the moment and the associated feelings pass - and they always do.
Synonymous to equanimity is non-attachment. This isn’t the cold type of non-attachment that we describe people who are aloof and disconnected. Instead it’s based on the understanding that everything in life changes. The seasons change, countries rise and fall, people come and go, we grow and age, emotions ebb and flow, our ETA increases and decreases based on changing traffic conditions, things rarely go exactly as we plan. At the core of equanimity is accepting the inevitability of this change and not getting caught up with trying to maintain a certain state or pace past its maturity.
The opposite is true when we become agitated and miserable when we get attached to craving an expected outcome and things change. More on this later.
Alright, while you’re supposed to remain still and eyes closed in a quiet place, I figured the same mindfulness and equanimity can be applied to something as mundane as driving.
Why no music? It’s because silence heightens our powers of observation that’s critical to awareness. Why 75mph? It gave me legitimate reason to be in the fast lane, since the speed limit is 70mph, while mitigating the outsized risks going over 80mph. Plus it’s safer because I wouldn’t need to change lanes to bypass the countless giant semi trucks moving at 60mph in the slow lane.
Turning Anger into Compassion
Okay so what happened?
Sure enough, about every 10 minutes or so, I encountered one of three scenarios:
Semi truck merges into my lane to pass another truck in the slow lane, forcing everyone behind to slow
Driver speeds up behind me, changes lanes and passes me immediately
Driver comes up behind me and follows for a while, say 5-10 minutes, then passes only when another driver breaks out to pass me
The first scenario was the easiest to handle, but still triggered some annoyance because I was used to moving at a particular speed and slowing from 75 to 60mph was a very noticeable drop. I realized that my attachment to a particular speed was the source of this impatience, which in turn fuels the road rage felt by many commuters on a daily basis. An important part of this driving meditation practice, then, is to accept that the ebb and flow of traffic is an inevitable part of the driving experience. This acceptance allowed me to remain calm even when things slowed to a crawl in some sections.
Then there are the folks who tailgate or cut me off. Thanks to the heightened awareness, I could literally feel my heart rate increasing, palms getting sweatier, and breathing becoming more jagged. All these biomechanical signals told me that my emotions, especially anger, were swelling up. So I made a conscious effort to focus on my breath, bringing it to normal levels, which calmed the other parts of my body and allowed my mind to observe, rather than react or repress, my internal sensations and reframe my external perspective on the situation.
The power of reframing
One such reframing was that because I remained calm, the person tailgating and cutting me off was actually the one suffering. During Vipassana, I learned that the source of our misery comes from feelings of craving and aversion, that attachment to such feelings causes us much agitation.
In this instance, the tailgater is suffering from his attachment of getting to his destination (i.e. craving) as fast as possible, therefore any delay or obstacle was unacceptable. By aggressively cutting me off, he would only be fueling his own misery, for I wouldn’t be the only obstacle that stands in his way - there are literally hundreds of miles to go with many things slowing him that are outside of his control. By the time he reaches his destination, it is almost guaranteed that he’ll be in a state of agitation, which bleeds into other aspects of life. Worse, this agitation often hides itself under the guise of an ego boost.
This realization made it nearly impossible for me to be angry at those who acted aggressively towards me. Instead, by recognizing the nature of their misery, I could only feel sorry for them. This emotional space then allowed a form of compassion to take place, one that hoped they will get home safely without endangering anyone else.
Now, I’m not saying that everyone who passes me is miserable. When you’re intentionally mindful while driving, you begin to read other cars like the body language of people. The energetic in which drivers pass matters. Those who are smooth and gentle don’t exhibit the same agitation, and therefore probably won’t result in a worse mental state.
Group think & social pressure
Finally, there’s an interesting social observation with those who sneak up behind me, follow for some time, then only pass when another daring driver breaks the pack. When this happens, the “leader” is followed by 3-5 other cars who pass me in a row. This is human group mentality, FOMO (fear of missing out) and peer pressure at work. When there’s an opportunity opened by others, we all tend to adopt the same behavior and break our own pace to follow even if we’re totally fine moving at the current pace and have good reasons to do so.
I definitely felt the same strong pull. It turns out that remaining at a consistent speed is actually an act of independence that’s quite difficult socially. It’s like marching to your beat when everyone around you is moving at a different pace.
The same anxiousness is infectious if you’re waiting in line or in a crowd when everyone starts getting antsy and impatient. But it’s in those exact moments that we need to be extra mindful of our objectives and behavior before jumping through the door after others.
Real World Cost Benefit Analysis
Since I approach problems from multiple perspectives, I was also running a physical cost benefit analysis that weighed the following components:
Costs
Probability: Chance of getting into an accident or getting pulled over by the police for speeding
Magnitude: How much more damage an accident would cause by increased speed
Cost: How is gas efficiency affected by increased speed
Benefits
Estimated time of arrival (ETA): How much time I’d save by speeding
Probability
Let’s start with the costs. According to a 2007 UC Berkeley study, for every 1% increase in speed, the chances of getting into an accident increases by 2%, serious injury by 3% and fatality by 4%. This is an example of a nonlinear relationship where the result doesn’t directly follow the cause, but rather is magnified (a 1+1=3 kinda deal). This means going from 75mph to 85mph, a 15% increase in speed, would lead to +30% chance of accident, +45% serious injury, +60% death.
Magnitude
Then there’s the magnitude of the accident, measured by the impact force if you were to hit an object like light pole or fire hydrant. The equation for Kinetic Energy* is:
KE = 0.5 • m • v2 measured in Joules (J)
where m = mass of object in kg
v = speed of object in m/s
Assuming the average car’s weight is 4,000 pounds (1,800 kg), the Kinetic Energy difference between a vehicle moving at 75mph (980,100J) and 85mph (1,299,600J) is 33%. This means the increase of 15% in speed results in 33% more impact damage. Another nonlinear relationship. As Nassim Taleb, the author of Antifragile, would say, we are Fragile to both the probability and consequences of speeding.
Gas Cost
What about gas costs? This one is less dramatic as one national labs study found a 15% decrease in efficiency going from 70 to 80mph, which assuming an average gas price of $5 per gallon and the 26mpg of my Subaru translates to a $11 expense on a 15 gallon tank, or $7 more expensive for the duration of this 200-mile example. Basically the cost of a veggie Chipotle burrito. Yum.
Finally, there’s getting pulled over by the cops. While I couldn’t find any studies or physics equations on this, anecdotally I’d say you’re far less likely to get in trouble for going 5mph over the speed limit vs 10+mph. I think most drivers would concur.
ETA Benefit
Alright let’s talk benefit. Singular because the faster ETA is the only real benefit I can think of. Speeding from 75 to 85mph would save you ~19 minutes on a 200-mile trip or shave -12% off the ETA.
Is It Worth Speeding?
Whether this ETA benefit is worth the increased risk of a bad crash or getting pulled over is subjective, the math calcs do reveal a clear nonlinearity between these 1st order effects and speeding.
For me, the 2nd order mental effects are much more important. The fact that I could just stay in one lane and practice my equanimity demonstrated the practical real life applications of meditation training. I didn’t expect to be as calm and energized (weird combo right?) as I was when arriving back in the Bay Area after such a long drive. I’m excited to see how becoming more cognizant of my internal emotions while sharpening my external observation skills will be useful in other aspects of my life.
Lastly, this is an example of evaluating a situation using both internal emotional and external objective mindsets to arrive at a better solution. The questions I’m constantly asking myself are how can we win on multiple fronts.
