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Last night, automotivating all of 5 minutes late to pick up my daughter, I found myself speeding through the back streets.

I noticed, then calculated the risks and benefits, and slowed down. 

The cost of being 5 minutes late was far outweighed by the potential cost of having an accident, the chances of which increase substantially with speed, especially in small urban streets. 

On the bike in Sydney, every morning I observe, and often dodge, mothers in SUVs, running late to drop their kids off, and seemingly incapable of doing the risk calculations. 

It’s not that they can’t do the calculations. Rather, they don’t do the calculations. 

Their ability to engage the rational part of their minds is essentially stunted by the fight-or-flight mode that they get into. 

The problem is not one of their tendency to rationally miscalculate the odds. 

No, it’s an emotional miscalculation of the importance of the task at hand. 

Or, better still, an emotional miscalculation of the consequences of failure. 

It must be a hangover from prehistoric days when all we did was survive, so the emotional calculations probably weren’t far wrong. Every task was very important. 

Stress plays a strong part in people’s inability to engage the higher and more rational parts of the brain that enable the emotional factors to be assessed more rationally. 

The more stressed, the less able. It’s a non-linear affect that can get out of control. Stress leads to more stress, which further disables the rational circuit breakers.

The only solution is to tackle the stress part, which isn’t easy because it mostly requires that one’s whole lifestyle needs reassessing.

For example, the SUV tank commanders could let their kids walk to the local public school, take a hit on the status front, find some genuine friends instead of school mother acquaintances, take a job for the love of it, ditch their finance sector husbands, and move to a lower cost but more pleasant area which is more fitting to their reduced incomes.

That looks harder than giving up sugar actually. But in life, often the sugar gives up on you first.