North Carolina Car Crash Prevention: Eliminating Distracting Thoughts
When most pundits, policy analysts, and driving instructors talk about ways to eliminate North Carolina car accidents – to reduce their severity or impact on drivers and passengers – they focus on commonsense precautions, such as these:
• Avoid speaking on your cell phone or text messaging while driving;
• Avoid driving with pets loose in your car;
• Avoid driving during certain dangerous times of day (Friday and Saturday nights, e.g. and holidays like Memorial Day or the Super Bowl);
• Avoid driving while under the influence of drugs or alcohol;
• Avoid driving while overly fatigued;
• Avoid rubbernecking;
• Reduce the amount of driving time that you do on a typical day; etc
Many of these tips are common sense, and many are likely grounded in good – or at least reasonably good – scientific analysis.
However, North Carolina car crash prevention experts are probably neglecting a very important idea. Clearly, drivers who are distracted have a higher risk of accidents. So why not consider the possibility that eliminating as many distractions as possible – including distracting thoughts, themselves! – might lower accident risk?
Most of us drive on automatic pilot. Yes, we ostensibly pay attention to the road. But we also do things like think about emails we have to write, imagine conversations with our spouses, and even mull over topics we hear on the radio. What if, instead of allowing our thoughts to ramble on like that, pointlessly, we instead purposefully spent energy and time and attention attending to the driving itself?
In other words, what if we put extra effort into perceiving the road, watching for danger, being attuned to our own habits (both good and bad) etc? Would this kind of extra mindful driving be more protective against North Carolina car accidents than normal, standard “safe” driving that’s nevertheless often inhibited by distracting thoughts?
Obviously, there probably are not a lot of good scientific studies that examine the value and merits of this hypothesis. However, given everything that science has shown us about the dangers of distracted driving, the suggestion that stripping away thought distractions would lead to safer driving is far from absurd.
On a less theoretical note, if you need help with a specific question regarding a claim, connect with a thoughtful, compassionate, experienced North Carolina car accident law firm.
More Web Resources;
The dangers of distracted driving
Mindful driving
