Mine was not exactly a lapse of reason. It was more the absence of something routinely automatic, a habit that suddenly wasn’t there when I needed it. Here’s what happened. I was driving my car on the interstate, heading out on a holiday weekend getaway with my wife. A lengthy stretch of construction had funneled traffic down to one lane, and I was first in line behind a truck and trailer that had inexplicably slowed to a crawl through the endless gauntlet of orange barrels. Everyone had reduced their speed, but the vehicle in front of me had taken this to an extreme. Upon our release from the forced single-file formation, I was anxious to use the newly available adjacent lane to get around this rolling roadblock, which was maintaining its snail’s pace. As soon as I stepped on the gas and swung left to initiate my pass, I was startled by the sounds and sensations of impact and the hulking form of an enormous pickup truck right beside me. Its driver was in an even greater hurry than I was to get around the lumbering obstacle and had accelerated hard the moment he had an opening. He seemed to appear out of nowhere, but of course he’d been following me closely the whole time.
Fortunately, no one was hurt and the damage to both vehicles was quite superficial. I was shaken by the collision and the knowledge this could have yielded far worse consequences, but the most disturbing part was realizing I’d failed to check my mirrors before pulling out. Yes, I could rationalize this omission on the basis that the lane I’d have checked had only been reconstituted a few seconds earlier; why check for traffic where none should yet exist? But that’s not how I do things. I scan my mirrors all the time, whether or not I’m planning to change speed or direction, and I definitely, absolutely check behind and around me each and every time I intend to change lanes, including not only mirror checks, but over-the-shoulder head-checks as well to cover any blind spots. This is one of the many ways being a motorcyclist has made me a better car driver; decades of habitual head-checking on bikes has made this practice reflexive in cars, too. I don’t have to think about doing it–it’s just an integral part of the sequence of behaviors set in motion by the thought of changing lanes. So, what went wrong here?
As I drove the rest of the way to my destination, I worked on calming down while also deliberately cranking up my vigilance level. Focusing my attention as tightly as possible on the immediate, concrete tasks of driving helped reduce my physiological arousal and my alarmed, baffled rumination about how to account for this egregious and terribly out-of-character error. I was, obviously, grateful it had happened in a car and not on a bike, although I also wondered if I’d have been maintaining a higher state of alertness in the saddle. Had I simply lapsed into carelessness from sitting in my cage, tediously creeping past mile after mile of traffic barriers? Maybe that was a small contributing factor, but it really didn’t account for the mishap. What had failed was a habit so deeply ingrained that circumstances play virtually no part in the process, like automatically turning on a blinker at an empty intersection. Was I so annoyed about being stuck behind someone poking along that I’d impulsively launched a revenge pass, with safety considerations eclipsed by anger? That explanation didn’t hold water, either. I’d actually felt unperturbed by the slowdown, knowing I was on vacation with no time pressure. Sure, I wanted to get back up to speed, but I wasn’t being aggressive. The only other possibility that came to mind during my remaining hours on the road was deeply troubling: this could be the first manifestation of age-related cognitive decline that might soon make me unfit to operate a motor vehicle. I kept displacing that horrific notion with internal commands to refocus on safe driving practices, but it gnawed at the edge of my consciousness relentlessly.
Despite my strenuous efforts to deflect the dark mood threatening to contaminate my holiday, the idea I might be losing my mind a few short weeks after turning 65 haunted me the rest of the evening and into the night. I was so preoccupied with it I forgot several items on my standard bedtime checklist and had to get back out of bed to take care of them. Now I was really worried I was going downhill. If my brain couldn’t keep up with such basic, repetitive, familiar daily activities, I was in even worse shape than I’d feared!
As upsetting as that last thought was, it ultimately led to my reorientation and recovery. After many sleepless hours, I finally connected some dots that provided an intellectually compelling explanation and some emotional relief. Clearly, I’d messed up my nighttime ritual because I was preoccupied–and not only preoccupied, but also trying not to be. Psychologically, this is a potently disruptive combination, and I could recognize it was a more probable cause of my absent-mindedness than some rapidly advancing neurodegenerative disease. After settling into this insight, I realized the same principle had been in play at the time of my accident.
I’d received some very depressing news earlier in the day, but I’d been determined to block it out of my mind for the weekend. I didn’t want it interfering with the enjoyment my wife and I had been looking forward to on this trip, and there was nothing to be done about it in the near term, anyway. I aimed to delay my grieving until after the holiday. But there’s a fundamental problem with this strategy. Although people can sometimes compartmentalize emotions and ignore them selectively, more often there’s no way to pick and choose. Turning off the unwelcome feeling requires turning off much of the mental apparatus, causing other emotional and cognitive functions to go offline, too. By trying hard to put my sad reaction on hold, I’d unwittingly unplugged an indeterminate number of other normally active circuits. Indeed, looking back on the day’s events, I could recall being dimly–yet persistently–aware of the repressed feelings, which required considerable energy to keep at bay. The attention devoted to that task in the background was attention I no longer had available for use in the foreground, where I needed all my faculties for safe driving.
This was a subtle phenomenon, distinct from the glaringly overt distraction we all experience when a disturbing thought or feeling keeps intruding into conscious awareness. When suppression is successful, we’re relieved of such pointed intrusions. We may or may not have a vague sense of unease, and we may or may not be able to identify the specific content lurking in the shadows. It depends on how complete the suppression is. Regardless, it is an energy-consuming process and our resources are finite. In the service of temporary relief from unwanted awareness, suppression reduces functionality in other areas. Note: I’m using the term “suppression” to refer to a process involving some degree of conscious volition, in contrast to “repression,” which I’d use to denote an automatic, unconscious process that serves a similar purpose. The same conservation-of-energy principle applies in both cases. I’m focusing on suppression here because that’s the version over which we have some control, and it’s what was operative during my lapse.
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After having this epiphany, I allowed more of my sadness to enter direct awareness. In the middle of the night, I wasn’t worried about its impact on my sleeping wife or our holiday activities. While definitely not fun, I could feel a sort of relaxation result from lowering the barricades I’d erected. Eventually, this allowed me to fall asleep. In the bigger picture, I was able to be more present during the rest of my holiday, even as I was simultaneously more aware of my sadness; paradoxically, my joy was also more vivid because more of my whole self was online. While driving home, I felt sharper and was profoundly relieved to find my reflexive mirror- and head-checks were back in place, often auto-initiating before I had a chance to remind myself to implement them. When I say, “I felt sharper,” it’s important to understand I had not felt “un-sharp” leading up to the accident. I could notice the contrast only when my normal frame of mind had returned. This is probably the most dangerous aspect of cognitive shutdown: part of what’s lost is our ability to self-monitor and notice something’s missing. I have to wonder what other lapses might have occurred that day before the one that resulted in a collision. The lack of consequences may have left such instances invisible to me. This also means my lapse wasn’t truly “momentary,” but was instead a continuous state that just became evident in a chance moment of elevated risk.
It’s quite possible many similar episodes over the years have gone unnoticed for the same reason. This definitely wasn’t the first time I’d been upset by something prior to driving, although it was the first to include tangible fallout. Who knows how costly my unknown lapses could have been–and how narrowly I escaped?! The lesson here is two-fold: First, emotional distress can impair our functioning on the road in ways similar to other factors we may more readily accept as debilitating, such as intoxication, hypo- or hyperthermia, dehydration, or blood-sugar dysregulation. There’s the issue of poor judgement, as may easily be seen in road rage, but there can also be failures of attention and routine skill application that aren’t so apparent. Second, efforts to suppress emotional distress can make things worse instead of better, even as we may achieve some relief from acute discomfort. And we may have little or no awareness our faculties are diminished in the bargain. That last part makes this problem more difficult to assess and address. We have to deliberately take inventory, recognizing when we’ve suspended some strong reaction and reconsidering this choice and our resulting fitness–or lack thereof–to operate a motor vehicle.
Being a psychologist may give me an advantage in analyzing this type of thing after the fact, but I’m a human being first, and therefore vulnerable to the same self-deceptions and gaps in awareness as anyone else. I wish I could offer a failsafe method for avoiding the kind of lapse described here, but the best I can do is provide you the second-hand benefit of my first-hand experience, in hopes the concept will stay with you despite your lack of memory-enhancing adrenalin. If you know this can happen, you’ll be more likely to notice when the preconditions are falling into place, and better able to make decisions accordingly. I’ve declined riding opportunities when I knew my mind wasn’t up to speed because of recent events, even when I could also argue riding might help clear my head. It’s a tricky consideration, and I’ve occasionally gone with the second option when I didn’t feel particularly impaired. This lapse in my car has reduced my trust in such optimistic assessments going forward.
Mark Barnes is a clinical psychologist and motojournalist. To read more of his writings, check out his book Why We Ride: A Psychologist Explains the Motorcyclist’s Mind and the Love Affair Between Rider, Bike and Road, currently available in paperback through Amazon and other retailers.
