I learned just how wrong I was on the day late last August that Hurricane Irene was due to make its second US landfall and hammer the Northeast. Residents of Eastern Long Island had been advised to evacuate, so I was driving my girls, ages 11 and 14, and myself from our beach house back home to New York City, where presumably we would be safer. Except for the looming threat of the biggest storm to hit the area in 73 years, it started off as a garden-variety summer Saturday. I woke early but refreshed after 8 hours of sleep and went off to take my usual 45-minute exercise class. My friend Ann and her two girls were visiting us at the beach house, and after breakfast we all did some back-to-school shopping. Then we helped my husband, Steve, carry in the outdoor furniture, packed our bags, and took off in our two separate cars. (Steve stayed behind to deal with the potential for fallen trees and a flooded basement.) Fifteen minutes into our drive, our little caravan stopped for lunch. Hurricane, schmurricane: Stomachs were grumbling and pizza called! Sated on slices and soda, we got back on the road at about 2 o’clock. The day was warm, in the low 80s, and a light rain had just started. I left the windows rolled up against the drizzle but judged it not hot enough to turn on the air conditioner. My daughters popped in their earbuds. The car was cozy and quiet except for the low drone of the radio, tuned to hurricane talk. The Long Island Expressway is about as dreary a highway as you could ever have the misfortune to drive: hill-less, curve-less, and charmless, lined with office parks and usually traffic-clogged. About an hour into the trip, I began to feel drowsy in the way that many drivers know. Ironically, most nights at home, I have to set the stage for sleep, plumping my pillow just so, arranging the blankets, deciding on happy thoughts to drift off to so anxious ones don’t pop into my head and keep me awake. This tiredness just washed right over me—I didn’t have to help it along. In the past, when I felt drowsy while driving, I opened the windows, blasted music, even slapped myself in the face. On one or two occasions I pulled over to take a brief nap. This time it all happened so fast that I hadn’t gotten around to any of that. [pagebreak] The next thing I knew, my daughters were screaming. My eyes flew open to the sight and sickening sensation of my SUV slamming into a white van in front of me. I knew immediately that I had fallen asleep and that my reflexes and decisions in the next seconds would mean the difference between life and death. Ann was on the road just behind me, and she later told me how she watched, helpless and horrified, as the scene unfolded. As if fused to the white van’s rear bumper, my car hurtled down the highway along with it, fishtailing off to one side, then the other. Within seconds, my car broke free from the van and headed off perpendicular to traffic, straight at the cement barricade that divides westbound traffic from east. We were still moving fast, and the tires screeched as I frantically jerked the wheel to the right, left, right. Amazingly, no one hit us as we careered from lane to lane (Ann said other drivers took evasive actions), and, thankfully, my car didn’t flip before I was able to regain control of it. I hadn’t dared breathe for the last 30 seconds, and now I gulped air and tightened my grip on the wheel to steady my hands. The driver of the white van pulled over in the right-hand shoulder, and somehow I managed to summon the nerve to change lanes and get behind him. When I got out of my car, I broke down. “I fell asleep! I can’t believe I fell asleep!” I remember wailing. I was traumatized and mortified all at once. My daughters were scared and crying but unhurt, and the driver of the van (a great guy who, seeing how shaken I was, tried to comfort me with a hug) was fine too. I have never been so thankful as when I realized that my car, not his, sustained all the damage. Still, I had come within a hair of killing my kids, myself, and God knows how many other people. How could I have done this? Was I a bad driver? A bad mother? I needed to understand what had happened to me that day, and I’ve since learned that my crime, as it were, was that I didn’t recognize how powerful a force sleepiness is. It’s so potent that none of my usual tricks (loud music, cold air) could have been trusted to work. “When your brain is sleepy, it can be very insistent,” says Thomas J. Balkin, PhD, director of the behavioral biology program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and a leading expert on sleep and fatigue. “When you’ve reached the stage where you are fighting sleep, the effect of any attempt to rouse yourself can be very short-lived.” Even a shot of adrenaline—for example, the kind you feel when you drift out of your lane onto the rumble strips, as the vibration and noise scare you awake—won’t help you for long. “Yes, that shock makes you feel suddenly optimally alert,” Dr. Balkin says. “You think there is no way you could fall asleep now, but that alertness lasts only about 30 seconds.” Not only can’t you force yourself awake, you can’t really assess how sleepy you are. “Sleepiness affects the part of the brain responsible for judgment and self-awareness,” says Dr. Balkin—and as awareness drifts away, we do not, obviously, realize this is happening. “If you’re driving, you may know you feel tired, but you do not know that you are falling asleep,” he says. “It’s completely insidious.” You can also fall asleep very briefly and wake up without even being aware that you nodded off. These “microsleeps” may last for just a few seconds—enough time for something awful to happen if you’re behind the wheel of a fast-moving 2-ton vehicle. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that micro-sleeps occur when certain brain cells go briefly off-line in a tired but still-awake brain. In other words, you don’t have to be fully asleep to behave as if you are. (That’s not all. See what else happens when you don’t get enough sleep.) [pagebreak] The only thing to do when you first feel drowsy while driving is to pull over immediately. If there is another driver in the car, hand over the keys. If not, get yourself a cup of coffee or another highly caffeinated beverage. Drink it, then let yourself take a 15-minute nap. The order sounds counterintuitive, but it takes about 30 minutes for the caffeine to work its way through the digestive tract and into your bloodstream, at which point it will rouse you from your slumber. Researchers at Loughborough University in England found that combining caffeine and a nap was better at increasing alertness than either alone. They also found that just “taking a break” that did not involve caffeine or napping—even if it included exercise—was completely ineffective. Still, the question remains: Why did I get so sleepy in the first place, in the middle of the afternoon, after 8 hours of sleep? It turns out that the circumstances of my day created a kind of perfect storm. According to Dr. Balkin, how much sleep you get on a regular basis—not what you got the night before—is a better indicator of your ability to stay alert during activities such as boring, monotonous drives. The fact is, I average only 6 hours of sleep a night. Our brains have a “sleep bank,” Dr. Balkin says—every day we make deposits into it and withdrawals from it, and although there is some variability between people, studies show that those of us who average only 6 hours are generally sleepier (as measured by reaction-time tests) all day long than those who average 7 or 8, even if they claim (as I would have) to feel totally rested. My 2 hours of extra sleep the night before certainly added to my account, but not nearly enough to compensate for my overall sleep debt. Nor was I aware that the time of day, the warm temperature in the car, and the fact that I had just eaten lunch all added risk. While most drivers worry about night trips, the afternoon has a sleep sweet spot too, thanks to the circadian rhythm, the body clock that rules all of us. Generally speaking, we experience increasing alertness during the course of the day until evening, when arousal begins to dip in order to promote sleep. The only other time of day that our circadian rhythm dips is midday, usually around 2 or 3 o’clock. Not coincidentally, a 2010 study by the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety found that as many drivers reported falling asleep at the wheel in the afternoon hours as who reported falling asleep late at night. Warmth tends to spur underlying sleepiness, Dr. Balkin adds, and feeling sleepy after a meal is a universal experience in adults, because of chemical and hormonal changes that happen during digestion. I’ve told my story many times, and not once to someone who couldn’t relate. Quite a few people admit to having had similar near-miss experiences. According to a National Sleep Foundation Sleep in America poll, 60% of adult drivers say they have driven a vehicle while feeling drowsy in the past year, and more than a third have fallen asleep at the wheel. The AAA study found that 7% of all serious crashes, and 16.5% of fatal ones, involved driver fatigue. Nevertheless, while most people are aware of the dangers of driving while intoxicated, drowsy driving still doesn’t quite set off the same alarm bells. Let my story be the siren in your head. The next time you feel sleepy at the wheel of your car, do what I should have done and pull over immediately. Whatever you do, don’t think you are mightier than your body’s need to shut your eyes. That’s what I thought, and though I learned my lesson the hard way, I know that only luck kept it from being a far harder lesson still. Stay Awake, Stay AliveIn addition to being well rested, to avoid a fall-asleep crash you should:Book in the proper drive time. Don’t make a long trip without a break—for example, by driving overnight to get a jump on the weekend.Use the buddy system. Avoid driving alone for long distances. Have a buddy who can take a turn behind the wheel and spot you if you show signs of fatigue.Avoid alcohol and medications that cause drowsiness as a side effect (which we’ve previously warned you about, here). More from Prevention: 7 Caffeine-Free Energy Boosters
