Although you might start your day with high levels of energy and a winning attitude, you probably feel far less motivated and enthusiastic by the time you make it to work. With more people driving long distances to get to their jobs, countless studies are revealing a strong connection between lengthy commutes and diminished health. Traveling 10 miles or more to reach your workplace could be harming your mental and physical well-being in more ways than you know. 

High Blood Pressure and Elevated Cortisol Levels

Road rage is all too real. It’s easy to get angry with slow, aggressive, or poorly skilled drivers when you’d rather be doing anything else than battling traffic. Even if you aren’t tailgating others, constantly blaring your horn, or tossing around swear words like a furious sailor, you may be experiencing or expressing angry emotions in other ways that lead to elevated blood pressure.

Moving your way through commute traffic without swiping other cars or being swiped by them is challenging. Drivers who share the road with thousands of other drivers must be on constant alert. When commuting in metropolitan areas and on freeways, you’re virtually assured of encountering:

• Large, swift-moving delivery trucks
• Inconsiderate drivers
• Drivers who are texting or talking on their phones
• People who are operating their vehicles while applying makeup or eating
• Harried motorists who regularly ignore basic road rules

Commuting is both dangerous and frustrating at once. Not only can it make your blood pressure rise, but it can also lead to elevated cortisol levels. Cortisol is one of the “fight or flight” chemicals that the body produces when perceiving stress and danger. Although a little bit of cortisol at the right moment can work for you, too much can:

• Increase your risk of stroke
• Make weight loss difficult
• Promote excess fat storage at the mid-section
• Create problems with chronic depression
• Lower your life expectancy

For these and other reasons, even though you might be skilled in avoiding accidents while commuting, this doesn’t mean that your daily drives aren’t taking a serious toll on your health.

“Super Commuters” Face a High Risk of Accidents

A “super commuter” is anyone who works in a downtown or metropolitan area but lives outside of the city. These individuals typically drive between 10 and 50 miles to get to work and then repeat their travels to get back home. When traffic is bad, someone with a super commute can spend between two to three hours on the freeway and city streets each day. 

These trips require them to share the road with countless other vehicles, including large commercial trucks, city buses, school buses, and other auto types. With more people fighting to get where they need to go at once, the risks of having an accident and eventually needing a personal injury lawyer are incredibly high.

Commuting Often Leads to Eating on the Go and Less Exercise

If the stress and demands of your workday don’t wear you down, your drive home certainly will. This is all the more true if you’re a super commuter with lots of miles to cover and an hour or so of bumper-to-bumper traffic to move through. Most people hardly feel like cooking after their evening commute, and many find it all too easy to simply pass through one of the numerous drive-through restaurants that line their routes home. 

If you drive to and from work and spend much of your day sitting at your desk, you probably aren’t getting adequate amounts of physical activity. Add to this the high-fat, high-sodium fare that fast food places serve, and many commuters are overweight, fatigued, and all-around unhealthy. Worse still, this is an easy rut to get stuck in, and one that proves extremely hard to break out of.

Increased Exposure to Environmental Pollutants

In addition to the stress that your commute causes, you also have to think about the toxins that you’re breathing in. With thousands of cars traveling on the roadways, most commuters are exposed to incredibly high amounts of exhaust fumes. This is all the more true on days when people are driving with their windows down or using their climate control systems. 

To minimize your exposure to environmental pollutants, you might want to try keeping your windows closed, and keeping your air conditioner or heater set on “recirculate.”

Getting to and from work isn’t just a hassle. In addition to being a frustrating, stressful inconvenience, these trips could be both diminishing your health and lowering your life expectancy. To limit the impact of your daily commute, you can always consider alternative forms of transit or try leaving before traffic is at its heaviest.

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