You lead a busy, successful, fulfilling life. You’re living in the fast lane, living life to the full, living la vida buena! But is your high-achieving life taking its toll? Are you, perhaps, just a teeny bit stressed?
If so, please don’t worry, it’s really nothing to feel ashamed or self-conscious about. Stress comes a-creepin’ into the lives of even the best of us.
Yes, even Bankstone News gets stressed from time to time. Like now, for example, when we’re desperately trying to think of some more words and sentences and stuff to type into the office word processing machine and somehow bulk out yet another edition of the fabulous e-zine you’re reading right now.
So, stress is nothing to feel anxious and upset about. But if you are feeling a tad stressy, the very last thing you should do is drive a car. Stressed people, it has been scientifically established, are forever making terrible decisions, driving into things, and generally causing on-road carnage of every conceivable kind.
If stress is getting to you, here’s what you should do. Toss aside those temptatious car keys and do something safer and more convivial instead. Something like going down the pub or… Well, going down the pub always works for Bankstone News. In fact, we’d be there now if we weren’t still a couple of hundred words short of an acceptable weekly word count.
So how does Bankstone News know so much about the science of stress, you’re probably wondering. Well, mostly it’s just natural wisdom and genius and so on, but also we recently read a press release from somebody called TTTC Group which says that one in three UK drivers get stressed when driving and then they, make irrational decisions, have more accidents, and suffer uncontrollably violent outbursts of psychopathic road rage.
In fact, even if you’re not stressed when you get into your car, the very act of driving can get you that way. Things like other drivers, traffic conditions, the weather, idiots talking nonsense on the radio, even your own passengers can make you stressed and irritable.
Or maybe you’re late for an appointment, suggests TTTTC Group’s Adrian “Hi-de” Hide, and then you get “exasperated” at other people’s terrible driving. That’s the kind of thing, Ade suggests, that’s sure to “pile on the anxiety” and provoke you into making stupid rushed decisions and generally driving like an imbecile.
What you need to do, he argues, is, politely but firmly, bid goodbye to Mr Stress the moment you dump your rump in the driver’s-seat and strap on your seatbelt.
Ade is on a mission to “educate” the motoring masses. Switch off your mobile phone, he urges, stay away from other vehicles, and equip yourself with a “protective safety bubble” that will keep your safe from hazards and give you more time to yourself. Above all, Ade stresses, you need to “re-focus your mind” so that you think only about ‘the road’ and not about things like your family.
A bit like those Scientologists who lurk on Tottenham Court Road offering FREE stress tests, his company, The TUC Group, offers “phychometric risk assessment tools” that can identify what’s wrong with drivers and help employers re-programme their employees so they won’t be driving badly on company time and/or in company vehicles.
Or something.
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