How to Make Driving Less Exhausting

Driving wears you down in a way that doesn’t always register until later. You may not notice it during your daily commute, but by the end of the week, you might be more tired than your workload accounts for – and the driving is usually a bigger contributor than people realize. The combination of constant low-grade attention, decision-making, and physical stillness in one position is altogether tiring, even when the drive feels routine.

The good news is that most of the fatigue is fixable. Here’s a more detailed look at what helps.

Plan Ahead and Build in Buffer Time

If you feel like you’re running late, you’re already stressing behind the wheel. Once that starts, everything escalates: you’re checking the clock, taking lane changes you wouldn’t normally take, getting frustrated at slower drivers, and arriving with your nervous system already wound up. None of that is sustainable as a regular pattern.

The fix is to leave earlier than you think you need to. Ten or fifteen minutes of buffer time changes your driving experience. Traffic delays won’t feel like emergencies, you can stop for gas if you need to, and if something does go wrong, you have a little bit more time to deal with it.

For longer trips or anything time-sensitive, plan the route the night before rather than the morning of. Check for road closures, construction, or weather that could affect the drive. A few minutes of prep saves a lot of in-car decision-making, which is a low-level stress that can compound over a long drive.

For airport runs, business travel, or any drive where you’d rather not be the person driving at all, a chauffeur service takes the entire problem off your plate. If you’re flying out at 5am or you need to be sharp for a meeting on the other end, it can make a lot of sense to have someone else handle the driving.

Get Comfortable Before Hitting the Road

The cabin of your car is your environment for however long the drive takes. If it’s cluttered, too hot, too cold, or full of small irritations, you’ll feel it over the course of an hour, even if you can’t pinpoint why.

A few specific things that help:

• Clean the car regularly, especially the windshield (inside and out) and the dashboard. Glare from a dirty windshield is a hidden source of eye strain.
• Adjust the temperature before you start driving rather than fiddling with it once you’re moving.
• Set your seat properly. Most people drive with their seat slightly wrong: too close, too reclined, or with the headrest at the wrong height. A properly adjusted seat significantly reduces back fatigue on longer drives.
• Keep water in the car. Mild dehydration produces a fatigue response that feels a lot like the tiredness people blame on driving itself.

Audio is important too. Aggressive music or talk radio at high volume triggers a low-level adrenaline response that can become tiring over time. Podcasts, audiobooks, or playlists you’ve curated for driving tend to work better than whatever’s on broadcast radio.

Take Care of Your Car

Driving a car that you don’t fully trust is mentally exhausting. A weird noise, a vibration in the steering wheel, or a tire that you think is getting low pressure can live in the back of your head the entire time you’re driving. You don’t realize how much energy that takes until you fix the issue and notice how much lighter the drive feels.

Basic vehicle maintenance that pays for itself in reduced driving fatigue:

• Check tire pressure monthly. Underinflated tires affect handling, fuel economy, and how the car feels at highway speed.
• Replace wiper blades when they start to streak. Poor visibility in the rain is a major source of stress, and wipers are cheap.
• Keep your headlights aligned and your bulbs working. Driving at night with weak headlights forces you to lean forward and squint, which is fatiguing within twenty minutes.
• Pay attention to brake feel. If the pedal goes lower than it used to, get it checked.
• Get the alignment done if the car pulls to one side. Constantly correcting the steering is exhausting on long drives.

Cut Distractions Before You Start the Engine

People underestimate how much mental energy distractions consume. Glancing at your phone, changing music, eating, or trying to read directions on the fly all force your brain to switch contexts repeatedly. Context-switching is one of the most tiring things the brain does, and doing it while also operating a vehicle is doubly draining.

The solution is to handle as much as possible before you start driving:

• Set up your navigation before you leave, not at red lights along the way.
• Pick your audio in advance. Make a playlist or put on a podcast so you’re not browsing while you drive.
• Put your phone where you can’t reach it easily. AAA’s data on distracted driving consistently shows phone use as a major contributor to driver distraction.
• Eat before or after you drive, not during. If you have to eat on the road, pick food that doesn’t require attention (or two hands).

Use Cruise Control on Longer Drives

For drives over an hour on the highway, cruise control significantly reduces fatigue. Constantly modulating the accelerator pedal is a small physical effort that adds up over time, and the cognitive load of maintaining a consistent speed manually is more than most people realize. Modern adaptive cruise control systems, which adjust speed based on the car in front of you, take this even further and are worth using whenever traffic allows.

A caveat: cruise control on winding roads, in heavy traffic, or in poor weather is a bad idea. Save it for stretches of the highway where conditions are stable.

Manage Glare and Eye Strain

Eye strain is a silent contributor to driving fatigue. The combination of bright sunlight, oncoming headlights, dashboard screen glare, and the constant focusing and refocusing of your eyes while scanning the road tires you out fast.

A few small fixes:

• Keep a good pair of polarized sunglasses in the car at all times. Polarized lenses cut glare from the road and, importantly, other cars’ windshields.
• Dim your dashboard at night. Most modern cars have a dashboard brightness control, and many drivers leave it at full brightness, which makes night driving harder than it needs to be.
• Clean the inside of your windshield regularly. The film that builds up over time scatters light from oncoming headlights, making it a major source of nighttime glare.
• Get your eyes checked annually if you drive a lot. Mild prescription changes can affect night driving long before they affect anything else.

Take Breaks on Long Drives

The general guideline is to stop for at least 15 minutes every two hours on a long drive. Most people don’t do this, and the result is that fatigue accumulates faster than it would otherwise. Even a short stop to stretch, walk around the gas station, and drink some water resets your body in measurable ways.

If you find yourself yawning repeatedly, drifting in your lane, or missing exits, those are signs you’ve already pushed past the point where a break would have helped. Pull over at the next safe opportunity. Caffeine helps temporarily but isn’t a substitute for rest. On long-haul drives, a 20-minute nap at a rest area is more effective than another cup of coffee.

Improve Your Posture

How you sit in the car affects how tired you are when you get out. Common posture mistakes include slumping, leaning to one side, gripping the wheel too tightly, and locking your shoulders. Over a long drive, these create real muscle fatigue, often in the lower back, neck, and shoulders.

A few adjustments that help:

• Sit with your back fully against the seat and your hips as far back as they go.
• Adjust the steering wheel so your arms have a slight bend at the elbow, not fully extended.
• Hold the wheel lightly. Most drivers grip much harder than they need to.
• Roll your shoulders back occasionally. Drivers tend to creep forward over the course of a drive.

Watch Your Schedule

The least obvious factor is when you drive. Driving while underslept is a meaningful safety issue and a major contributor to fatigue. Driving in the late afternoon, when most people’s circadian rhythms dip, is harder than driving in the morning. If you have flexibility in when you make a long drive, picking the right time of day is one of the easiest ways to make the trip less draining.

For commutes you can’t reschedule, the best compensation is sleep on the other end. Drivers who get seven to eight hours of sleep consistently report less commute fatigue than those running on six or fewer hours, regardless of route or traffic conditions.

The cumulative point across all of this: driving fatigue isn’t inevitable. It’s the sum of a lot of small factors, most of which are within your control. Fix the easy ones first, and the harder ones become more obvious, and within a few weeks, the drives that used to leave you drained will feel like a normal part of the day instead of the thing that wrecks it.

About the Author

Mike is a writer who researches and shares actionable advice around travel lifestyle, finance, and personal growth. He loves any trip where he can explore the great outdoors, and believes everyone should be able to experience travel for personal development and fulfillment. Read his other articles on Frayed Passport here.

Featured image by Toni Tan on Unsplash