Drowsy Drivers Are Only Seconds From Death

If you fall asleep reading this column, I'll try not to take it personally. There is a good chance you are tired; not bored. You may be short of sleep.

Don’t feel alone. North Americans are significantly deprived of quality and quantity of sleep. Fifty six percent report drowsiness during daytime.

In addition, we are drowsy when we don’t think we are. In a study of a 1,000 people reported no problems with daytime drowsiness, 34 percent were found to be dangerously sleepy. In a study at Stanford University, 80 percent of the students were dangerously sleep deprived.

The average American is getting 6.9 hours of sleep a night. Twenty years ago it was 8 hours and in 1910 it was 9.0 hours. Shift workers average 5 hours of sleep a night. According to findings from a two-year study by the National Commission on Sleep Disorder Research, 47 million Americans have trouble sleeping.

Psychologist Robert Hicks, professor emeritus at San Jose State University used short and long sleepers in his research. He had trouble finding a sample of long sleepers. Researchers in Switzerland reported they had difficulty finding short sleepers.

Consequences. In fact, sleep deprivation may be a by-product of our hard-driving, competitive and time-conscious culture. Among the obvious consequences are industrial and traffic accidents. Among the less obvious consequences is the unseen toll on family and marital relationships because of irritability and depression. Sleep deprivation contributes to drug and alcohol problems when people use these substances to control alertness or drowsiness.

Healthy sleep, along with physical fitness and good nutrition, form the fundamental basis of good health. The way people cope with the increasing demands at work and home is to cut back on their sleep. We act as if sleep loss has no consequences or is unimportant. That is not true.

Sleep and sleep debt. Sleep occurs when neural activity blocks or modifies sensory stimulation to prevent us from being conscious of the world around us. We effectively become blind and deaf.

Different regions of the brain rest during different stages of the sleep cycle. The brain recharges itself during sleep, makes memories and allows the body to fight off infections. If the brain doesn’t get a break, it will soon begin to shut down for periods of microsleep.

"Feeling drowsy during the daytime generally means you have a sleep debt," says Dr. William C. Dement, professor of psychiatry, Stanford University Medical School. He feels that sleep debt accumulates and can't be made up in a single night. Sleeping in on the weekends is a common strategy for coping with sleep loss.

The tendency to fall asleep progressively increases in direct proportion to the increasing size of sleep debt. Sleep debt doesn’t go away or spontaneously decrease. If sleep debt is large, no amount of stimulation will keep us awake. We cannot train the body to do without as much sleep.

Drowsiness and driving. Here are some important research findings about drowsiness and driving.

* According to the National Highway Administration, drowsiness and fatigue cause more than 200,00 traffic accidents each year. Fifty five percent of drowsy driving fatalities occur with drivers under the age of 25.

* Nine percent of wheeled vehicle driving accidents resulting in injury or death during Operations Desert Shield and desert Storm was attributed to driver drowsiness/fatigue.

* Getting less than 6 hours of sleep can affect coordination, reaction time and judgment. People who drive after 17 to 19 hours performed worse than drivers whose blood alcohol levels of .05.

* Rumble strips or other devices that warn, alert, or awaken drivers as they approach the road edge work temporarily awaken drivers but aren’t sufficient to continue alertness if drivers choose to keep driving.

* Accidents are most likely to occur in early to mid-afternoon and in the very early morning hours.

* Automobile accidents rose 4 percent due to sleep loss following a shift to daylight saving time. In France, where there is a two-hour shift in time, the accident rate increased by 10 percent. In studying people's sleep diaries during shifts in daylight savings time, it took two weeks for people's moods and alertness to return to normal. About 4 percent of the population have substantial loss in functioning - the same as the accident rate increase.

Don’t drive drowsy. The foremost authority on sleep disorders, Dr. Dement pleads drivers, both young and old, with the following message about drowsiness and sleep debt.

"Drowsiness is red alert! It is sleep debt that causes drowsiness. Drowsiness is the last step before falling asleep, not the first. Drowsiness means you are seconds away from sleep. Seconds from sleep may mean seconds from death. If you are behind the wheel, just a few seconds of sleep can lead to a catastrophic disaster."

Treat drowsiness as an emergency. Pull over immediately. You are seconds from being "blind and deaf" in a 3,000 pound vehicle that is moving at 70 miles an hour.

Rolling down the window or turning up radio do not help. Pulling off to the side of the road and taking a nap does help. Taking stimulants only postpones the time when the brain goes to sleep whether you want it to or not.

If you are a passenger and see the driver getting drowsy, treat it as an emergency and get the driver to stop. Take control. Don’t put up with denial. People don’t always recognize when they are drowsy. The life you save may be your own.