How does music affect your driving?

The most cited work on music and driving comes from Warren Brodsky, who has been studying the relationship since the early 2000s at Ben-Gurion University. His main finding was that drivers listening to high-tempo music (around 120 to 140 beats per minute) drove faster, had more lane deviations and more near-misses than drivers listening to slower music or silence. The effect held even when drivers reported feeling no different. The music was changing the driving without the driver noticing.

For a professional driver, the implication is straightforward. The music that makes the drive feel quicker is often the music that’s making you drive worse. The drum-and-bass bangers that get you through the morning is doing more than waking you up; it’s pushing your physiology toward a state that’s not ideal for traffic.

If you’re tracking music for irritability rather than focus, the tempo question matters more again. Music in the 60 to 80 BPM range tends to settle the autonomic nervous system. Music above 120 BPM tends to push it the other way. Aggressive lyrics (heavy metal, hardcore rap, deathcore, certain styles of punk) have been shown in several studies to correlate with increased driving anger in self-reports. That doesn’t mean the music caused the anger. It means people in an angry state often choose that music, and listening to it doesn’t help them cool down.

Talk radio is more complicated. Talk radio designed to wind people up, such as outrage formats and political opinion shows, predictably winds drivers up. If you’ve finished a one-hour drive feeling more agitated than when you started, the radio choice may be doing more than you think. The voice register matters too. Loud, aggressive talkback hosts trigger a different physiological response than calmer voices. It’s the same content delivered in a different state, and your nervous system listens to the state more than the words.

Podcasts vary the same way. A long-form interview show with a measured tone is a different experience to a debate podcast where two people are shouting over each other. Pick what suits the state you want to arrive in, not the state you’re already in.

Caffeine is the other thing in the cab worth thinking about. The standard adult morning coffee is fine. But by the third or fourth coffee, you’re driving with elevated heart rate, jitteriness and lower irritability threshold. The same physiological state that makes you feel productive at the desk makes you snappier at the wheel. Professional drivers tend to over-rely on caffeine on long shifts. Pacing it matters more than total intake. Drink the first cup early. Don’t drink anything caffeinated in the last three hours of the shift, partly because of sleep that night, but also because of the anger threshold for the rest of the drive.

Hydration sits behind all of this. A dehydrated driver listening to high-BPM music with caffeine in their system is in a worse position than the same driver hydrated, listening to something steady, and three hours past their last coffee. None of these effects are large individually; they compound.

What this comes down to is to take the audio environment seriously. Most drivers spend more time choosing a route than choosing what they listen to on it. Reversing that ratio for a week is a free experiment in driving better. Make a deliberate playlist for the morning. Make another one for the back half of the shift when fatigue starts to bite. Avoid talk radio that you know wins by getting people angry. Keep the volume one notch lower than you’d default to.

The point isn’t to drive in monastic silence. It’s also not saying that you should listen to Enya, power ballads and romantic classical. It’s to know that what’s coming out of the speakers is part of how you’re driving, not separate from it.

You can learn more about this and other techniques for calmer, anger-free driving in our road rage awareness course.