- Ms. Shruthi Balaji Babar
Most people don’t wake up planning to cause an accident.
They wake up late.
They are tired.
They are thinking about work, money, family, or something that happened five minutes ago.
And they believe they are more capable than they actually are at that moment.
That belief is where the problem begins.
The First Thing to Understand: Driving Uses the Same Brain That Gets Distracted
Driving is not just about hands on the steering wheel. It is about the brain constantly answering questions like:
- How fast is that vehicle approaching?
- Will that person cross or stop?
- Should I slow down now or can I pass?
The brain makes these decisions quietly and continuously. When everything goes well, we don’t notice the effort. But the effort is always there.
Anyone who has driven while very tired knows this feeling: You reach your destination and realise you don’t remember parts of the drive. That is not carelessness. That is attention slipping.
Alcohol and phone use create the same slipping, just faster and more dangerously. The truth is frighteningly simple: the human brain is not designed to do two things at once, nor is it designed to judge its own intoxication.
Alcohol Does Not Make People Reckless. It Makes Them Certain
One common misunderstanding is that alcohol makes people irresponsible. In reality, alcohol mostly does something else: it reduces doubt.
The brain areas responsible for self-checking and caution become quieter. People feel steady even when they are not. Reaction time slows even though confidence rises (Ames et al., 2021).
A situation most people recognise:
Someone tastes food while cooking and realises it needs adjustment.
Now, imagine tasting it after numbing your tongue. You would still decide but your decision would be less reliable.
That is what alcohol does to judgment while driving.
Phone Use Is Not a Small Distraction. It Is a Complete Shift.
We have all been there. You are cruising down a familiar road, the radio is playing low, and suddenly ding. Your phone lights up in the cup holder. It’s just a notification. You tell yourself, "I’ll just glance for a second."
When attention shifts to the phone, the brain is no longer processing the road in real time. What replaces it is delayed awareness. When attention returns, the situation may already have changed.
A very ordinary example:
Think of listening to someone speak while reading a message. You may hear sounds, but later realise you missed the meaning.
On the road, missing meaning costs time.
And time is safety.
One Final Thought
Most people involved in accidents believed they were managing fine right until the moment they weren’t.
As a psychologist who studies human behavior and decision-making, I am rarely interested in what rules people break, but rather why they break them. We don't ignore traffic laws because we are bad people. We ignore them because our brains have a condition called the Optimism Bias. We believe that negative events happen to other people, not us (Weinstein, 1980).
Traffic rules are not just laws written by the government; they are a psychological contract we sign with every other driver on the road. When you get behind the wheel, you are asking everyone else to trust you with their lives.
Your brain is a powerful engine, but it has limits.
Respecting those limits isn't just about avoiding a ticket, rather it's about ensuring that the "it won't happen to me" story doesn't end with "I wish I hadn't done that."
References
Lee, J. H., Choi, S. Y., Kim, S. A., Kim, H. S., & Lee, Y. E. (2024). The correlation between driving risk and visual attention when using smartphones while driving in novice drivers. Medicine, 103(48), e40764. https://doi.org/10.1097/md.0000000000040764
Strayer, D. L., Turrill, J., Cooper, J. M., Coleman, J. R., Medeiros-Ward, N., & Biondi, F. (2015). Assessing cognitive distraction in the automobile. Human Factors, 57(8), 1300–1324. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720815575149
Tinella, L., Caffò, A. O., Lopez, A., Nardulli, F., Grattagliano, I., & Bosco, A. (2021). Reassessing fitness-to-drive in drinker drivers: The role of cognition and personality. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(23), 12828. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182312828
Weinstein N. D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(5), 806–820. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.39.5.806
World Health Organization. (2018). Global status report on road safety 2018. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565684