Speed Secrets: Smile Your Way to Fast
Your facial expression can make a difference to your driving performance.
“Attitudes affect moods - and moods affect what you think - and what you think affects the 'how' of what you do! Feelings of excitement, happiness, and satisfaction improve the belief in one’s own capabilities to successfully make a change.” - Dr. Cecilia Brantley, Adjunct Professor at Argosy University
That’s an interesting quote, isn’t it? I think we all know that our mood, or our state of mind, affects the way we perform at anything. If you’re in a bad mood, how well do you perform your job? If you’re in a good mood, what happens?
So… be in a good mood and you’ll drive better. How’s that for good advice? It’s accurate, but me telling you to be in a good mood is no different than me telling someone who is about to jump out of a plane to skydive for the first time, “Don’t be afraid.” It’s one thing to tell someone how to feel, but a completely different thing for that person to actually feel that way. Hey, if it were that simple, we could rid the world of anti-depressant drugs by just telling people to be happy!
But can we control our mood, and what would happen if we did?
A while ago I read a fascinating book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson. One of the many interesting studies reported in the book showed that when marathon runners smile, their running efficiency improved by two percent. Just by smiling! Of course, smiling near the end of running 26.2 miles is a challenge for even the most elite of marathoners. Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, the 2016 and 2020 Olympic marathon champion, learned to deliberately smile when running as part of the research used in the Breaking2 project (the goal of the project was to run an unofficial marathon in under two hours, which he did at 1:59:40.2).
You might be thinking, “That’s easy! I’m smiling all the time when I’m on track. How could I not be, as it’s the most fun thing I could ever do.” You might be right, you might be smiling. But maybe you’re not. And if your mind and body performed two percent – hey, even one percent! – better because you deliberately smiled while driving, wouldn’t that be a good thing to do?
Here’s something else to consider: I’ve written a lot about the negative impact that holding your breath has on your performance. What if you deliberately practiced “breathe with a smile”? What if you mentally practiced that before ever going to the track? What if you practiced this every day when you’re driving on the street? What if you took part of a few sessions on track to deliberately “breathe with a smile”?
What impact would that have on your driving?
A technique to control your state of mind (mood, emotions) that I’ve used is to replay a past success. That success doesn’t need to be while driving a car, either. If, before you go on track, you recalled something in your past that made you feel great – some time when you performed at your best, something that happened in your life that made you feel successful, an incredibly positive experience - you will be in a better mood. The more details you recall when replaying this experience in your mind, the more you’ll find yourself smiling. If you’re able to put yourself back in that place and time, and experience the feelings you had then, you will have controlled your state of mind.
Replay a past success right now. Take a few minutes to recall something in your life that made you feel fantastic, and imagine all the thoughts and feelings that you had at the time. Breathe. Smile. Enjoy.
Now, head out onto the track. Breathe with a smile.
Very believable. We often hear about the negatives of what cortisol the stress hormone can do to the body, why wouldn't endorphins, and other :feel good: hormones have this effect?
Like a wise man once said, "Happy drivers are fast drivers."