As society hurtles forward in an age of instant messaging and one-click shopping, motorists paradoxically find themselves moored between bumpers for hours a day, with a psychic toll that experts are still trying to tally.
Dr. Laura Pinegar, a Long Beach psychologist who treats depression and panic disorders, hears a growing number of complaints about traffic anxiety in her practice.
"If you're stuck in traffic, there's a feeling of being out of control," she said. "You can be at a dead standstill on the freeway, but amped up from the day, thinking, 'I gotta get home. I gotta get the kids. What if I don't get to day care before it closes?' "
In several studies on commuter stress, UC Irvine psychologists Raymond Novaco and Daniel Stokols made a surprising finding. Though they hypothesized that long commutes would be more stressful for hard-charging, Type A personalities than for mellow Type Bs, it turned out that the opposite was true. The reasons: The hard-chargers exercised more control over their lives. They had picked homes they liked and jobs that absorbed them. In traffic, they thought about work. The mellow drivers, on the other hand, thought about being trapped in traffic.
According to one study, women with long-distance commutes who drive alone are in the demographic group that suffers the greatest commuting stress. Pinegar said she has had some success in encouraging drivers to think of their commute as a buffer zone between work and home. "Especially mothers with large families," she said. "They think, 'This is my time to mellow out, maybe listen to the radio, get books on tape.' "
How gridlock makes us feel depends on what we tell ourselves about the experience, says Ronald Nathan, a psychologist in Albany, N.Y., who has treated both perpetrators and victims of road rage.
"Some people say, 'Great, I can kick back and listen to some music,' " Nathan said, but others feel like life is passing them by. "We can start to over-generalize by saying, 'My life is worthless. All I am is somebody who gets into a piece of metal and goes from one place to another.' "
For Leon James, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, a lifetime's academic pursuit began 25 years ago when his wife told him his driving scared her. She pointed out that he switched lanes before he looked, took curves too fast and raged against other drivers.
