I’d say kind of… you definitely have to keep your attention and wits about you on the road, but if you’re relying on anxiety and unease to help you drive, you’re probably actually doing a bit worse than optimal safety—too quick to assume that something bad will happen, likely to overcorrect and possibly cause a crash.
Adding onto this, an important difference between “anxiety” and “heightened attentiveness” is that anxiety has a lot to do with not knowing what to do. If you have a lot of experience driving cars and losing traction, and life or death scenarios, then when it happens you know what to do and just focus on doing it. If you’re full of anxiety, it’s likely that you don’t actually have any good responses ready if the tires do lose traction, and beyond not having a good response to enact you can’t even focus on performing the best response you do have because your attention is also being tugged towards “I don’t have a good way to respond and this is a problem!”.
I don’t have a driving license so this isn’t a situation I’d have personal experience with, but I imagine that it would be useful to have some degree of unsafeness to focus your attention more strongly on the driving.
Is “driving a car (especially in bad road conditions)” a situation in which some degree of feeling unsafe is useful?
I’d say kind of… you definitely have to keep your attention and wits about you on the road, but if you’re relying on anxiety and unease to help you drive, you’re probably actually doing a bit worse than optimal safety—too quick to assume that something bad will happen, likely to overcorrect and possibly cause a crash.
Adding onto this, an important difference between “anxiety” and “heightened attentiveness” is that anxiety has a lot to do with not knowing what to do. If you have a lot of experience driving cars and losing traction, and life or death scenarios, then when it happens you know what to do and just focus on doing it. If you’re full of anxiety, it’s likely that you don’t actually have any good responses ready if the tires do lose traction, and beyond not having a good response to enact you can’t even focus on performing the best response you do have because your attention is also being tugged towards “I don’t have a good way to respond and this is a problem!”.
I don’t have a driving license so this isn’t a situation I’d have personal experience with, but I imagine that it would be useful to have some degree of unsafeness to focus your attention more strongly on the driving.