Can Driving Be Fun? How Driving Benefits Your Mental Health

Hey, it’s Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and this week’s video is going to be all about driving, of all things. Why would I talk about driving? Well, is driving a pretty regular part of your life? Is the commute to and from work just like a regular drain on your energy, or is it something that lifts you up and makes you feel great? It’s heaven or hell, isn’t it? Lots of people love driving, and for a lot of people, it’s mental anguish. Maybe in this video, we can explore some of the qualities of driving that make it so enjoyable and beneficial for lots of people, and there’s probably a bunch of learning that we can take to other parts of our lives, whether it’s work-related or other activities or just plain old fun. So let’s stay tuned and learn about the mental health benefits of driving.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Hey, do you remember all the stress that you went through as you were learning to drive? Parallel parking and shoulder checks and all the kind of stuff that you had to think about and you were so worried about because, well, “Am I able to get my license or not?” And then the moment you got your license and you were permitted to go and drive independently and freely, it was just this huge thrill, this rush. Well, that’s because as young people, we were learning and being facilitated into a step of independence that felt so powerful, so rich. And that’s one of the most basic reasons why driving can be so fun. It just gives you your own independence to get where you want to be when you want to be there and frees you up to see the world. So that’s reason number one why driving is so often so very rewarding, and the second reason is kind of related. It’s this idea of psychological richness that we’ve talked about in previous videos, and maybe David will make a link to psychological witness richness, which is all about this idea of making novel memories, having novel experiences. And so we can go out and just plain old explore and see stuff that we haven’t seen before and get far beyond what our regular walking life would allow us to have, and we’re relatively growing ease. We can get out and see places we’ve never seen, we can get far away, and if we do it with other people, we can make wonderful memories. It’s why there’s so much loaded emotionally into the term road trip because just going on a road trip is often this deeply rich experience we do with other people, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few road trips with people I love this past few weeks, and it’s been a blast. Thirdly, and this might surprise you, that driving has a lot of cognitive health benefits. Now we’re not entirely sure all what’s going on here, but it’s a little bit like a meditative task. It’s a very complex, cognitively demanding task, but with enough practice like I’ve had over many, many, many years, we can do all these cognitive demanding tasks, focusing on the road, not speeding, not going through red lights, and all that kind of stuff, and still have our minds freed up for other interesting problem-solving, personal reflection types of exercises. And so that’s a wonderful thing, it’s like a meditative task, not quite the same but similar. Oh, look out now, see I’ve got traffic and I get distracted for a moment, which is good, it’s that cognitive task that says it’s just I’m challenging enough that I have to be engaged in the task that I’m doing and yet I can also often be in some other mental place. Beautiful, it’s good for us, it reduces the chance of dementia, there’s some suggestions of that, and indeed, it allows sometimes that spontaneous wisdom to surface so that we’re busy driving and then some solution to some problem we’ve been thinking about just magically appears. Wonderful, it’s that healthy kind of distraction. Now, in addition, there’s just all this quality time alone that we have, and I have found that especially true when I was driving for work years ago. I was in charge of three offices on Vancouver Island, and I spent a lot of hours driving from office to office, and you know, sometimes I try to do it on paid company time, but a lot of it was on my personal time, and I wanted to get rich experiences as a result of all these hours I had in the car. I didn’t want it to be just dead time, so I listened to podcasts and had books read to me over and over and over again, and in some very real ways, I feel like my life was improved and made better by that experience. It was a period for actual genuine personal growth. Now, I also was the fifth and final reason why driving can be beneficial. I have two sons, they’re young men, and for some crazy reason, both of them got into racing, racing cars, and I happened to have 350 horsepower under the hood of this rather small sports car that I’m in, and I think that their love for racing got me back into the idea that speed is thrilling. It’s exhilarating, it’s this adrenaline rush, and so driving can simply be fun, and you know, if you’re reasonably modest and careful and you know only you push the pedal to the metal in order to get to 70 miles an hour as fast as you can and then stay at the speed limit, probably you’ll stay out of trouble, and in the meantime, you’ll have some pretty good fun with some amazing technology. Now, forget all the environmental reasons and all kinds of other reasons why we maybe shouldn’t be doing that way, but the reality is driving is an everyday reality for a great, great many, and so we might as well find ways that we can enjoy it as best we can, and I would suggest to you that you might be able to use some of these things that we’ve talked about and just consciously be aware of them the next time you’re out in the car and see if you can improve your driving experience, and if you already love driving, you might even get better yet. Maybe David will conclude this video with a little list of these five things that make driving good for us. Hey, if you like this kind of content, share it with your friends and family, click the like button, that’s what you’re supposed to do. Bye for now.