Getting cut-off from the flows

The quintessential example of the modern day saber-toothed tigers is the person who cut you off in traffic. To understand why the nervous system responds with such intensity to this act, you have to become interested in the needs involved.

Driving involves forcing a mass of metals to travel at velocity. It’s inherently powerful.

Need met: control

Why is the need for control so important when driving?

It may seem obvious, but when you deal with power, control is the only distinction between the powerful and the dangerous.

A majority of the time while you drive, you are in a flow state. You’re thinking about your day, your tasks, and your future. You’re not thinking about your vehicle’s momentum and its proximity to other machines. You’re not thinking about the fact that the other cars are also being controlled by imperfect humans, with the occasional self-driven exception.

What keep us in the flow and able to come to terms with this inherent risk?

Need met: Trust

And then it happens.

The car comes out of nowhere and jams between you and where you would have been in the next moment had you not been cut off from the flows. Your nervous system fires off the chemicals of fight-or-flight. However, in traffic, you’d have to get out of the car to fight and the only option for flight is flipping a bird.

And so there you are. Cut off…

From the flow of traffic.

The flow of thought.

The flow of control.

The flow of trust.

Losing control exposes the reality of the danger you are in while driving. It’s not the act of cutting you off that fuels the sympathetic storm. That’s just the trigger. The intensity of the response comes from the reminder that driving in general has a risk that is only worth taking if you can, for the most part, forget that it’s dangerous.

In reality, you had not forgotten.

You had trust.

And the person that cut you off broke their promise.