Do you have ROAD RAGE?

Whether you are calm, nervous or hot-tempered, your emotions affect the way you drive. Strong emotions can interfere with your ability to think and reason, reducing your ability to make decisions. Don’t let your emotions interfere with safe driving. Use good judgment, common sense, courtesy, and safe driving rules to ensure your safety and the safety of others. Rage, impatience, over-confidence; these are all emotions and attitudes that can negatively affect your driving because they can cause you to concentrate on a single event and not your driving task. Here are a few tips on how to deal with aggressive drivers, plus helpful hints to reduce your own stress while driving:

Don’t take it personal.

In our safety driving video, we educate drivers to be polite and courteous, even if the other driver isn’t. Avoid any conflict and eye contact, if possible. If another driver challenges you, take a deep breath and move out of the way! Never underestimate the other driver’s capacity for inflicting bodily harm.

Reduce your own stress.

As stated in previous blogs, we should check our own emotions before getting behind the wheel. Allow plenty of time for a trip and keep reminding yourself that you cannot control traffic, only your reaction to it.

Taking a defensive driving course educates drivers more than how to drive but also how to do so safely. For more tips on aggressive driving and safety tips to avoid them log on to www.DefensiveDriving.com and select any one of our state approved driver safety courses.